I do have a source, be Gates announced this last year and all and I haven't found it again yet.Starglider wrote: Do you have a source for that figure? I'd be interested to see how it breaks down. That's $250K per infantryman per year, which is about a factor of two above what my uneducated guess would be even if you include training, basing (on US soil) and support staff. Are you including the cost of unavoidable equipment replacements, or indirect costs such as having to maintain a larger airlift/sealift capacity?
The simple costs of active duty manpower are indeed around 120,000 dollars a head. But manpower does not give you a motorized military unit ready for combat or useful for anything at all. Each dollar spend on manpower is easily matched by one dollars for every dollar in operations, maintenance, depending housing and healthcare and construction. This isn’t counting procurement of major items like trucks and helicopters either, just the soldier’s personal kit and the cost of operating equipment you already have for training.
You’re easily looking at 5 billion dollars a year to upkeep a modern mechanized division, which is perfectly in line with 80,000 men, about four divisions worth, costing 20 billion a year. The Army already spends over 100 billion in its regular budget for unit upkeep, and that figure would actually be much higher (by as much as 50%) except that huge amounts of additional money are spent in the War Supplemental Spending Bills. That buys many things soldiers would not have needed without war, but also many things they would need anyway but which are being supplied to the combat zone and thus counted separately. War supplemental funding has also paid for some of the equipment these extra soldiers will operate, but much of that equipment like the MRAP swarm has no peacetime purpose and will be taken out of service anyway.
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