Originally Posted by Malorn
Bringing home the military won't change the debt situation at all. Military costs are relatively constant.
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No they aren't. You really have no clue what you're talking about. I'm not going to get into the numbers because I don't know them off the top of my head, but a single Army brigade in garrison at home spends a lot less money than it does deployed in a combat zone. This is a common sense fact, how you overlooked it I don't know. Military costs in combat zones are far more costly than military costs in garrison. In garrison you don't shoot thousands of bullets a day. In garrison you don't lose troops to IEDs and gun battles. In garrison you don't lose vehicles whether due to repair or "catastrophic kills" (meaning destroyed).
Conservative estimates for this war's costs are at about 2 trillion just for the war in Iraq. Afghanistan and Iraq total estimates are sitting at about 3.2 to 3.4 trillion. Let's not forget the massive interest costs that we're also accruing because you do realize, don't you, that we're fighting this war on borrowed money? So yeah, let's just round down to 3 trillion.
What's our national debt again?
Break it down, MC Hammer. First we have to ship EVERYTHING overseas - so, we use expensive fuel to get our vehicles to the railhead and/or port authority. Then those vehicles that are carrying our vehicles, which are now using more fuel to haul the load than what they normally use, are using fuel to get to their destination. Then we move all our crap onto boats and planes. Those boats and planes consume fuel to get the cargo where it needs to go. Then we have to move the troops. So that's fuel we spend getting them from point A to point B. All of that is fuel we didn't have to spend. The cost of fuel, as you know, is ridiculous. Guess who consumes most of the fuel in America? DING DING, the military.
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a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion. The Obama administration uses this estimate in calculating the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan.
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The Marines in Afghanistan, for example, reportedly run through some 800,000 gallons of fuel a day.
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As of 2009. Who knows what it is now? Source:
LINK
Now let's talk about combat losses and live ammo spent in combat zones. Every soldier wounded is a soldier into whom hundreds of thousands of dollars PER TROOP have been spent for training. That's an irrecoverable loss if that soldier is medically discharged or medically retired. We pay money for that soldier in disability, so that's a "gift that keeps on giving". Fully one trillion of that cost I mentioned is going to go towards veterans disabilities for combat troops through 2050. Let's not even count the cost of one dead soldier, from the money lost on his training to training his replacement to the care of his body and his funeral costs and paying out his SGLI to his next of kin to paying the medical expenses that occur from the time he gets hit to the time he's buried. Every wounded soldier, every dead soldier is a cost we could have avoided.
Every live round we fire is a live round we didn't fire back at garrison and likely would never have fired except during ranges. Every vehicle which is damaged or destroyed is a vehicle that wouldn't have been damaged or destroyed back in garrison because let's face it, the locals down in Hinesville Georgia don't shoot at 3d ID troops or plant IEDs on the tank trails out at Training Area C. Every vehicle we own costs a lot of money. They cost a lot of money to buy and a lot of money to maintain, and a lot of money to repair and a lot of money to replace. If they hadn't been in a combat zone, then they wouldn't have been damaged, wounded, killed or destroyed. That doesn't even factor in the millions of rounds that are fired from weapons systems, from bullets to cruise missiles. We're talking tens of billions of dollars per year in vehicle repair costs alone, and as of 2006 - five years ago - over 40% of the Army's gear alone had been overseas.
Let's not even count the cost of training new soldiers to replace soldiers who've decided to ETS or retire simply because they've spent years in combat zones. Deployment after deployment takes its toll, and some guys have done six combat tours already. Those are soldiers we cannot ever replace.
Originally Posted by Malorn
The reason we are in a debt situation is because we keep spending more and more and the cost of entitlement programs, unlike the military, is non-linear and costs us more each year as a percentage of GDP than the year before it. No amount of taxation on the rich will change that. Only reform of the programs and the way our government spends money will change that.
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We're in debt because we spend more than we bring in. Cutting costs isn't going to resolve the problem on its own. Increasing revenue is going to be a big help. Just like in the real world lives of Average Joe Snuffy, who if he wants a better lifestyle needs to either rob a bank and not get caught, or get a better job to make more money.
2011-09-22, 08:59 PM
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