The $775,000-a-Year GI
December 31st, 2008Via: CounterPunch:
Kosiak estimates that by 2018, the total spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with related spending on veterans’ health care and other matters, could reach $1.7 trillion. The 88-page report, which includes 182 footnotes, provides an exhaustive look at the cost of Bush’s foreign adventures. It also provides a more modest estimate of the cost of those adventures than that provided by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who have famously estimated the costs of the war on terrorism at over $3 trillion.
But the truly astounding number in Kosiak’s report comes on page 38, where he estimates that the total cost of sending a single soldier to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan is about $775,000 per year. Kosiak came up with that number by using data published in March by the Congressional Budget Office. He writes that the $775,000 per year figure “is some three times more than CBO projected in 2002, based on the cost of recent past wars, and about 70 percent more than its estimate from 2005.” Kosiak says that the soaring cost of keeping soldiers in the war zones is due to inflation, changes in force levels, and the increases in funding requested by the Department of Defense.
Kosiak’s estimate of the daily cost of deployment is particularly important given Obama’s plans to send an additional 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan, a move that could bolster the U.S. presence there to about 52,000. And some analysts are projecting that the U.S. could need more than 100,000 troops to stabilize the vast country.
But at a cost of more than $2,100 per day per soldier, a military expansion of that magnitude will be incredibly costly. And it’s not at all clear that the U.S. can afford such an increase at a time when the U.S. treasury – and the U.S. economy – are in such parlous condition. Further, it’s essential to remember how quickly the costs of Bush’s “global war on terrorism” are increasing. In 2005, the Congressional Research Service put the cost of keeping one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan at about $275,000 per year. By early 2006, the cost of keeping one soldier on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan had jumped to about $400,000 per year. Now Kosiak is estimating that actual cost of keeping a soldier deployed is nearly twice the estimate that the CRS published just two years ago.
A surge in inflation (which is almost certainly coming, thanks to the U.S. government’s huge fiscal deficit and the plans for yet-bigger deficits) will likely send Kosiak’s $775,000-per-year estimate even higher. Thus, by 2011 or so, the cost of keeping a soldier deployed in a war zone might top $1 million per year.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
$1.7 trillion? That’s just the beginning. I see so much discussion of “bubbles”, and “what’s the next bubble that will rescue the economy?”. Well, Dick Cheney knows, and he helped move us very far in that direction these last 8 years. Of course I’m talking about the military bubble. One more good “terrorist attack”, and they’ll have all the political power, labor, and resources they want to make the military bubble the “bubble to end all bubbles”. And being a (de facto) dictatorship (at that point), they can make it last until we run out of oil and bodies to fuel it. And that could take a while. And be ugly. And millions of well-conditioned Americans will find their life’s purpose (which might have been lacking in their dead-end cubicle jobs) in giving everything they can to the war machine.
On the positive side, maybe the earth is just cleansing itself, and this is how it’s going to play out. Sure does look like it’s going to get worse before it gets better, tho.