It wasn’t just a question of money. From the American introduction to The Bear Went Over The Mountain, a collection of essays that was part of the syllabus in the Soviet General Staff Academy at Frunze:
the inability of the Soviet military to win the war decisively
condemned it to suffer a slow bloodletting, in a process that
exposed the very weaknesses of the military as well as the Soviet
political structure and society itself. The employment of a draft army
with full periodic rotation of troops back to the Soviet Union permitted
the travails and frustrations of war and the self doubts of the common
soldier to be shared by the Soviet population as a whole. The
problems so apparent in the wartime army soon became a microcosm
for the latent problems afflicting Soviet society in general. The
messages of doubt were military, political, ethnic, and social. In the
end they were corrosive and destructive. As evidence, one needs
only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the
pervasiveness of the problem. Soviet dead and missing in
Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of
the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. And the
dead tell no tales at home. Far more telling were the 469,685 casualties,
fully 73 percent of the overall force, who ultimately returned
home to the Soviet Union. Even more appalling were the numbers
of troops who fell victim to disease (415,932), of which 115,308 suffered
from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever.
Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures
say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding
troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and
modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and
the Soviet population, in general, had to be immense.