Bush is trying to get $100B in additional emergency funds for both wars. That would bring the total of war specific funds to $473B. Combining that with, oh, half, of the Pentagon budget ($443B) multiplied by 3 years. That comes out to, let me see now, just over a trillion. Which would put the amount spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to just over $7 million dollars per soldier. And since front line troopers get about $20k - $30k (plus combat pay) a year only $90k of that $7M is actually paid to the soldier over those three years.
Not that the number of $7M alone isn't astonishing. But what I find even more amazing is that now the Pentagon is saying that they can't manage to put another 40,000 soldiers in Iraq. The overhead of paying the contractors and the gouging of the military industrial complex is now effecting our ability to make strategic deployment decisions in the best national interest of this country.
When I heard about the the Pentagon's double down strategy, I shook my head. Early estimates put the number of troops required to secure Iraq after the war at a half million. So doubling to 280,000 wouldn't do the job. But then I found out that double down really just meant an additional 20-40,000 troops. And that, is just a pathetic PR move that will change nothing on the ground (other than the US body count) and merely delay our inevitable withdrawl.
Posted by jherr at December 14, 2006 08:36 AMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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