Would you listen to yourself. You have just admitted that is everything. Some Humvee that got blown up in a roadside bomb twenty years ago, you just counted it. 46 of those airplanes were flown by Afghan pilots to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as they fled the country, you are counting them. The helicopter full of Seals that got blown out of the sky by an RPG more than a decade ago, you counted it.
In recent days, there have been numerous infographics purporting to show the amount of U.S.-provided equipment captured by the Taliban, the most widely shared of which came from an article in The Times. Some of the graphics openly disclose that the figures listed are estimates, but The Times’s figure does not. Rather, it gives exact numbers for each of 19 different pieces of military equipment. The problem is, these numbers are inaccurate. As with funding, they appear to conflate the total number of each piece of equipment that the U.S. provided to Afghanistan over the past 20 years with what the Taliban have now. This is clearly incorrect.
How much U.S. stuff does the Taliban now have? And, can the Taliban actually use it?
www.lawfareblog.com
And then the part about the spare parts, why would you have such little respect for the US Military? Iran's F-14 Tomcats are a clear example of what happens when sophisticated US military equipment is "captured" by the enemy. But these planes were purchased, complete with spare parts. 80 planes, but only 79 made it to Iran. They were ordered and paid for in 1974, delivered three at a time over the course of the next two years. Like in Afghanistan, as Iran fell 27 of those Tomcats were flown out of the country by pilots. That leaves 52. Of those, it took three years to get a dozen in the air, and finding qualified pilots was so difficult that Iran released most of them from prison and forced them into service. Today, some forty years later, they have about 40 operable Tomcats. But this is Iran, with some highly educated expert engineers. Not like the Taliban, who have no aerospace engineers that I know of and are woefully incompetent. And it took them literally decades, and some black market purchases that resulted in some Americans getting jail time, to get that number flight ready. Today, Iran is the only nation in the world flying Tomcats. But there is one right down the road from me. But that is another story.
And no, there are not plenty of well trained people to maintain that equipment. The Taliban are some backward ass dipshits. However, if they were able to use that equipment it would be to attack terrorists groups like ISIS-K that are attempting to overthrown them, which is what Trump accepted that they were going to do. So what is the problem? This entire thing is indicative of Republican's obsession with "winning" at the expense of patriotism. And I will say again, it is completely disrespectful to the US military. We lost this war. We never, ever, should have went in the first place. Alexander the Great's army refused to go any further when they got to that hellhole. And even after a very famous, and impassioned speech by the greatest military leader of all time, they still refused. To bad that wisdom was lost to our leaders.
Yes, some equipment was left behind. But the likelihood that that weaponry is used against Americans is slim to none, and slim left town. Unless, and only unless, we are foolish enough to walk ourselves right back in to that cesspool. If that happens, then perhaps we deserve it.