CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait — On the very long and expensive list of materials that the American military had to ship to Iraq since 2003 — many of which it is now shipping out again — one might not have expected to find sand.

Yet there it is.

This might seem strange for a country that is 10 parts sand to 1 part water, 1 part oil and 0.1 parts electricity. Counterintuitive. Absurd, even.

However, American commanders overseeing the drawdown of forces and equipment currently under way from Iraq confirm that Iraqi sand was deemed inadequate for the blast walls that have become perhaps the defining visual feature of post-invasion Baghdad and other cities, stretching for mile upon mile around government ministries, airports, military bases and other important buildings.

So, at no little cost, boatloads of more resilient desert had to be floated in from other countries — namely the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. And not just for blast walls.

“When you start to ask why does it cost what it cost for this war, you are like: ‘Hey, when we build a wall in the United States it only costs you about $1,500 dollars, why are you paying $3,500 or $5,000?’ ” said Maj. Gen. Phillip E. McGhee, director of resource management for the U.S. Third Army during an interview at Camp Arifjan last month. “And so we were going, ‘Well, that’s a great question.'”

“And then you look to see that based on the specs that we have for blast walls, it takes a particular grain and quality of sand. That sand is not in Iraq, so you have to bring the sand in. So that sand actually has to get on barges down in U.A.E., down in Qatar, has to come all the way up here, gets processed through there. You can either do one of two things, you can make the concrete, or you can just bring the sand up into Iraq.”

It’s the same story on bottled water for troops in Afghanistan, he pointed out, because of the lack of capacity to bottle water locally. The water has to be shipped into Pakistan via the port of Karachi and then spends 17 days on the road to Afghanistan. “We pay 45 cents for a bottle of water in Iraq,” he said. “We pay $2.50 for that same bottle of water in Afghanistan.”

That water was also imported to Iraq – the Land of the Two Rivers – after the 2003 invasion is old news to anyone who has seen the crates of Kuwaiti and Saudi mineral water in Iraqi shops.

Even gasoline had to be imported to the nation sitting atop some of the world’s biggest oil reserves, because of the perilous state of security, and Iraq’s oil industry in the years immediately following the war.

But sand?

General McGhee provides the engineering rationale: “This isn’t a wall that you would just put on an interstate some place. These are blast walls, so they have to be reinforced steel. They are real specific about what type of concrete, and the strength of the concrete. And the sand that is up there did not meet the specs for those blast walls, so you have to find the sand elsewhere.”

His colleague Brig. Gen. John O’Connor, the Third Army’s director of logistics, said the problem went beyond vertical concrete slabs.

“The same goes for laying in airstrips, the same goes for laying down roads,” he said. “It has to meet certain standards.

“Our engineers, they go in and do all of the tests, they sample the soil and the sand in order to make a certain composition, so that it will sustain the weight and requirements of whatever it is that we have to do, whether it is put a wall up to protect a soldier in his living quarters, to laying a runway down for an aircraft to land on, or to traverse using vehicles. There are certain regulations that say it has to meet a requirement of protection.”

Whatever the cost of manufacturing the blast walls in the first place, the planners say there is now little point in moving them to Afghanistan or elsewhere, because of the prohibitive transportation costs.

A 15-ton blast wall, said General McGhee, costs around $3,500 to build. But to move it elsewhere in the region “could cost us, transportation-wise, about $15,000,” making it probably more cost-effective to leave it in place and buy another one elsewhere. The same goes for shipping containers, he said.

“Depending what port you move that same container out of, it could cost you $3,000 or it could cost you $15,000,” he said.

“Everyday we have to make a determination of what port you are going to move it out of, and by the way, do you move it out by air? Air is going to be much more expensive to do.

“That would depend on where the war fighter needs it, and when he needs that piece of equipment. If it can be 30 days, then we will probably go ahead and put it up either by rail or by truck, and then put it up by ship and get it up there. If it has got to be there in the next 24-48 hours, then it is going to have to go by air. But when you do that you really quadruple the amount of cost to get that piece of equipment in there.”