For Sale, Cheap: The Things You Need to Invade a Nation

Seven nights a week at precisely 19:30 hours, U.S. Army Major General Thomas Richardson gets on the phone with U.S. commanders across Iraq and grills them about the military’s final mission there: getting out. How many bulletproof vests, helmets, and firearms are still left in the country? How many packaged spaghetti dinners are stockpiled on the remaining Army bases? Who will take possession of the stacks of worn-out keyboards, radios, fire extinguishers, batteries, computer cables, desk chairs, and toiletries in need of new homes?

As the Army’s logistics chief for the Iraq drawdown, it’s Richardson’s job to tally all the equipment and supplies the Pentagon has shipped to Iraq over eight years of war, and to make sure none is inadvertently left behind on Dec. 31, the day the U.S. officially clears out. When he took the assignment in September 2010, the Army had identified just over 2 million items at 92 bases that had to be sent back to the U.S., moved to Afghanistan, sold, given away, or destroyed. He estimated it would take about 20,000 truckloads to get all of it. “In the Army we count everything,” says Richardson, who is based at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, where the U.S. military is staging the withdrawal.