The financial cost of war is often little more than an afterthought, but President Obama’s decision to take several months to announce his decision on the Afghanistan escalation has allowed people to ask, what will this cost?
The answer seems to be: depends who you ask. The Pentagon is estimating around $500,000 per soldier, per year. The White House estimates that it’ll actually cost about twice that much.
The matter is contentious, but officials in both camps say the price “could change “over time, and in matters military that almost always means “could go up.”
Considering the hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, these numbers may not seem like much. But with 30,000-40,000 troops each costing so much and all staying for an unknown number of years, it will rapidly add up to a bill that the Obama Administration, whose military budgets going forward foresaw a significant drop in the cost of overseas adventures, hadn’t prepared for.
Nikita Krushchev predicted it back in the 1950s: "We don't have to worry about the United States. They will spend themselves out of existence." And Sun Tsu – author of The Art of War – correctly observed: "There is no instance of a country having benefitted from prolonged warfare." More troops to Afghanistan will result in the US moving ever closer to total economic collapse. We should withdraw ALL of our troops. It seems that we refuse to learn the lessons of the Vietnam War – being too arrogant and stupid! NO one has ever won a war in Afghanistan – and – we have NOT even defined what 'winning' in Afghanistan means?
Sir, you are 100% correct.
The value of the dollar is dropping like a lead balloon. Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed. Millions of Americans are losing their homes. Tens of millions of Americans cannot afford basic health care and depend on food stamps to keep them from starving to death. And yet, our arrogant, greedy and power-hungry political-military-FED-Wall Street complex; our homegrown cabal of liars, thieves and murderers; refuse to relent one inch. Their enormous and profligate military spending, to maintain their worldwide empire of bases and to sustain their never-ending wars of global imperalism, will eventually lead to the total bankruptcy and impoverishment of the entire American nation. It is time for the American people to grow up, wise up and rise up and take back the federal government. If the American people fail to do this, the crooked bastards who are running our country will eventually destroy us all.
USN vets say:
OUT NOW.