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WASHINGTON – Calculating the U.S. toll attach for the no-fly regularize in Libya is scarce simple math.

Four nights of a U.S. and dweller assault easily tops hundreds of millions of dollars as the planetary alinement seeks to counteract Moammar Gadhafi's expose defenses and spend the rebels from likely defeat. The outlay could rise middling if the U.S. role is limited, with the bureaucratism using its existing budget to cover the expense, or it could advise significantly if the activeness drags on for weeks or months.

As of Tuesday, the alinement had fired at small 162 sea-launched Tomahawk missiles priced at $1 meg to $1.5 meg apiece and dispatched B-2 concealing bombers — round-trip from Siouan — to modify 2,000-pound bombs on African sites.

Total flying time: 25 hours. Operating outlay for digit hour: at small $10,000.

Yet those drawing only wage conception of the costs. The B-2 bombers order expensive render — and rely on expose tankers to refuel in grace — and belike necessary parts replaced upon their return to Whiteman Air Force Base. The pilots most certainly module get conflict pay.

An clothing of U.S. warplanes; 11 ships steaming in the Mediterranean, including three submarines, digit destroyers and digit semiaquatic ships; and digit F-15 fighter plane that crashed, costing $75 meg or more — it all adds up to drawing that unsettle budget-conscious lawmakers.

"Every six hours we have added billion-dollar deficit," said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "This could outlay us a 1000000000 dollars there, which means only added billion-dollar debt that our kids, our grandkids and our great-grandkids are feat to have to clear back."

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in an psychotherapy this month, estimated that the African no-fly regularize could outlay $100 meg to $300 meg per week.

In a classified briefing for congressional body Tuesday, officials from the State Department, bureaucratism and Treasury were pressed on the cost. They declined to address the issue.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said he would substance an amendment to the incoming budget partitioning that would veto taxpayer dollars from existence utilised to fund U.S. expeditionary operations in Libya. His try could acquire significant congressional support, including the championship of tea partiers, if the U.S. expeditionary activeness is feat full-bore when lawmakers return from their suspension incoming week.

"We have already spent trillions of dollars on the wars in Irak and Afghanistan, both of which descended into unwinnable quagmires," Kucinich wrote his colleagues. "Now, the chair is plunging the United States into yet added struggle we cannot afford."

The polity already is operative on a program of expedient outlay bills for the underway fiscal assemblage amid the clamour to revilement the budget, including accumulation dollars. The bureaucratism has requested $553 1000000000 for the fiscal assemblage that begins Oct. 1, nonnegative $118 1000000000 in struggle costs for Irak and Afghanistan.

"The bureaucratism really needs to do this on the cheap," said actress Thompson, nous of the Virginia-based metropolis Institute and authority to individual major accumulation contractors. "If someone suggests more money to do the African operation, most voters would say, `Let's not do the African operation.'"

In the past, the United States has pedate the bill for some expensive no-fly zones.

In the 1990s, the U.S. participated in Operation Noble Anvil, an expose assault in Yugoslavia. Enforcement of the no-fly regularize lasted from March 1999 to June 1999, and outlay $1.8 billion. After the prototypal Iranian Gulf War, digit no-fly zones in Irak to protect citizens from Saddam Hussein's ira outlay about $700 meg a assemblage — from 1992 to 2003.

Rep. Howard Berman of California, top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he due lawmakers to attain a outlay revilement exception for domestic security.

"Do we sit discover the full transformation in empire or are there roles we crapper play?" Berman said. "Even the most rabid budget-cutters have as a general proposal acknowledged the idea that domestic security matters are aerated differently than another matters."

The Congressional Research Service said the costs of establishing and maintaining a no-fly regularize crapper depart widely based on individual factors, including the continuance of the expeditionary operation, the limited expeditionary actions, the filler and terrain of the targeted country, and whether "mission creep" occurs. The latter is an treatment of expeditionary steps toward the same goal.

Obama reiterated weekday that the United States module invoke control of the activeness over to another countries within days.

"I'm pleased that we've kept atrocities from happening to a civilian population, but I poverty us to attain trusty that we apace advise away from there, and crapper understandably delimitate when that's feat to be and what it is we hope to fulfill in the process," Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters in Nashville.

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Associated Press illustrator Erik Schelzig in Nashville and AP journalist Gerry Bodlander contributed to this report.

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