[eartick]

I’ll take a SWAG at $100 Million per thousand people per year - roughly the cost of 25 miles of permanent border wall. If you send a thousand people, they have to sleep, so only about half are working at any given time, and some proportion are in support roles rather pulling shifts, so effectively you would probably field a 24x7 guard/reaction force of about 300.

Are you not paying them already? BS numbers. Return to MSNBC

[BeauBo]

Are you not paying them already? BS numbers.

Where will they live? How will they be fed? Vehicles fueled? Clothes washed? Port-o-potties in the field?

You seem to suffer from some BS assumptions of magic free lunches, and seem to have no experience in actually managing anything of this sort - but are quite sure of your assumptions nonetheless. I assumed about $250/person/day for the average of the total of all of the contracted support and personal payments that would be necessary - not much more than per diem for normal TDY travel. Field conditions are going to require additional contracted services - likely a heap more in rural areas, which is the great bulk of the border.

Forget about those kinds of low costs if you want mechanized units to ship, operate and maintain their tactical vehicles - it requires the so called “iron mountain” of repair parts and dedicated maintenance units. If they don’t bring their own vehicles, they will have to rent vehicles - cheaper, but not cheap.

Outside of town, responsible leaders are not going to stick the troops in tents for a year at a time with no gym, no sex, and no entertainment. They are not robots, they are not chain gang prisoners, they are real people. Retention rates will plummet, breaking units. They will likely require Containerized Housing Units (CHUs) with flush toilets, showers, electricity, sewage, beds and closets. It will require essentially building small towns, like we do when deployed. Look at LOGCAP costs for base camps, and we are off the charts of my lowball planning figures.

If you propose to put troops along the whole border, they would have to be overwhelmingly National Guard and Reservists called to active duty - who are not currently being paid. Actual costs will almost certainly far exceed my modest planning factor. Over $1,000/person/day is probably more realistic (but likely inadequate) for mechanized units, far from their home base in undeveloped conditions (the great bulk of the border).

Since we are calling BS, and there is no longer a need to be polite about it, the suggestion of stationing troops all along the almost 2,000 mile border is flat out ridiculous in the real world. Sober up and get a clue.