Pentagon spends $2 million per trainee in Syria

America's military, Pentagon, has spent about $384 million for training Syrians to battle ISIS forces in Syria. This amounts to about $2 million per trainee fighter. These figures have been obtained by USA Today during interviews conducts by the news outlet.

This training program was supposed to train up to 3000 Syrians from the New Syrian Forces this year for which $500 million had been allocated by Pentagon. About 5000 fighters where to be trained every subsequent year to fight ISIS in Syria. However, the program for this year was suspended after only spending about 3/4 of the proposed budget for the year due to poor results yielded by the program. The Pentagon disputes the $2 million per fighter figure and puts the cost to be about $30,000 per trainee.

Pentagon Training Program Expenditure in Syria

According to USA Today, about $281 million were allocated for buying ammunition and weapons, $62 million for mobility, $47 million for services, $46 million for construction and $12 million for communication, building of training facilities and basic infrastructure maintenance.

Due to the ineffectiveness of the training program and the fact that it produced very few battle hardened fighters - about only 200 fighters, Pentagon has now shifted its focus to providing arms and ammunition to only vetted leaders of these fighters who have proven themselves to fight ISIS.

Armed Services Committee member Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., has strongly disagreed with the Pentagon for not abandoning this training program earlier. He said, "As we've discovered, the Syria train and equip process was ill-thought-out and spectacularly wasteful. Congress should demand periodic reports by the military when it becomes clear it is not meeting its goals. It borders on malfeasance that so much money was spent before the plug was pulled."

Posted by James Fried on Thursday November 05 2015, 11:17 PM EDT. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under World. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0