As the United States gears up for a seemingly inevitable strike on Syria, defense experts warn that a military action will cost American taxpayers billions of dollars at an era of austerity and contracting budgets.\n<\/p>\n
The most likely scenario for a strike on Syria, as multiple senior US officials have indicated, would be to launch cruise missiles from US Navy destroyers cruising in the eastern Mediterranean.\n<\/p>\n
Each of those sophisticated missiles, which fly as far as 1,000 miles, evade radar and explode within feet of their targets, costs about $1.1 million, according to the US Navy.\n<\/p>\n
“The ships, missiles and salaries are already paid for,” Gordon Adams, a professor at American University and a former Defense official in the Clinton administration, told the USA Today.\n<\/p>\n
“There may be an incremental cost in the tens of millions for operating the ships outside their routine operating schedule,” he added.\n<\/p>\n
But those costs would spiral quickly, and the Pentagon would have to ask Congress for more money to carry out follow-up strikes.\n<\/p>\n
Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated in a letter to the Senate in July that a military intervention deep inside Syria would require hundreds of warplanes, ships and submarines and that “the costs would be in the billions.”\n<\/p>\n
The top military officer said that the US would have to pay at least $500 million a year to train and assist the foreign-backed militants fighting against the Syrian government, but warned that the costs could soar rapidly depending on the scale of the operations.\n<\/p>\n
Dempsey said that establishing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria would cost at least $500 million to begin with and would cost a whopping $1 billion per month to maintain.\n<\/p>\n
Securing chemical weapons sites that the US claims the Syrian government has would cost more than $1 billion a month, according to the top general.\n<\/p>\n
Washington has accused the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of carrying out a chemical weapons attack on militant strongholds in the suburbs of Damascus on August 21. The Syrian government has rejected the allegations.\n<\/p>\n
On Saturday, President Barack Obama, who had previously said a chemical attack was a \u00c5\u201cred line\u201d, announced that he had decided Washington should launch military strikes against Syria. The president, however, said that he would seek congressional approval for an attack.\n<\/p>\n
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