| $1 Million Per Soldier | |
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| Topic Started: Mar 1 2012, 05:18 AM (297 Views) | |
| Zechariah | Mar 1 2012, 05:18 AM Post #1 |
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Zechariah
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Something is Wrong when a U.S. Soldier Costs $1 Million a Year COMMENTARY | According to CNN, the Pentagon comptroller said during a congressional budget meeting that it cost "about $850,000 per soldier" per year in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments reached a more expensive conclusion: $1.2 million per soldier per year. The estimate is supposed to increase for 2012. The Pentagon comptroller, Department of Defense undersecretary Robert Hale, said higher weapons operating costs were "a good part that's probably 50 percent of the budget" when explaining the $850,000 per-soldier statistic. Something is wrong when the U.S. is spending around $1 million per soldier per year to fight in Afghanistan. It's more wrong when we're getting "probably" and "a good part" and other ambiguous terminology. While I'm struggling to pay my rent on a public school teacher's salary, I want to know why the Department of Defense lacks hard-and-fast figures on its overseas spending. I want to know who allowed military spending to swell to the point that enough was being spent per individual soldier to pay 21 Americans at home a comfortable $40,500 annual salary. Weapons operating costs? Are they firing shells of pure gold? Platinum bayonets? Are Humvees suddenly being made by Rolls-Royce? Hearkening back to the wars of generations past, how would generals like Pershing, Patton, MacArthur and even Westmoreland view a figure like $850,000 per man per year? When the nation still struggles to pull its way out of a recessionary pit, why are we spending like this? The recent riots over the Quran burnings at Bagram Air Base, explained by ABC News, show our billions of dollars have not helped us secure and solidify the notoriously unstable nation of Afghanistan. If we've been unable to turn Afghanistan around in over a decade worth of active intervention, why do we continue to burn through taxpayer dollars like they grow on trees? One million dollars per soldier has not given us anything resembling a true victory in Afghanistan. It's time to go back to the drawing board. It's time to decide whether we want higher unemployment and an inefficient military or whether we want an effective balance; a nation where we're willing to help the poor and unemployed and forego gold-plated bullets. http://news.yahoo.com/something-wrong-u-soldier-costs-1-million-183400589.html |
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| kennyinbmore | Mar 1 2012, 07:36 AM Post #2 |
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Maintaining the best trained, best equipped military in the world has never been cheap |
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| n.W.o. | Mar 1 2012, 11:08 AM Post #3 |
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I agree with Kenny. Especially if you have a special force op over in a foreign country. However, anyone who works for the government or has had to buy something for their command for logistics knows that a 2 dollar wrench at Home Depot costs about 20 damn bucks sometimes for us. Imagine that. Everyone knows there's a little bit of the money going somewhere else. |
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| Black Republican | Mar 1 2012, 02:13 PM Post #4 |
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That's crazy and that's why Ron Paul kept saying that military spending is breaking America. |
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| Negrodamus | Mar 1 2012, 02:32 PM Post #5 |
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But he is the only republican that wants to downsize the military. All of the other republicans want to keep going to war with the arabs. |
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