Thursday, December 20, 2007

The 5 million dollar man

The Defense department budget for this coming year is about 500 billion dollars. Congress passed a 400 and something billion defense budget and then just put in another 70 billion for Iraq operations in yesterday's giant continuing resolution. Call it $500 billion overall, give or take a few tens of billions.
For all this money, the country is putting 100,000 infantry men into Iraq. So, for 500 billion, we are paying for a very small active army. Divide $500 billion by 100,000 soldiers and it works out to $5 million per soldier sent into combat. You can hire baseball stars for that kinda money. Too bad the troops don't get much of it.

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