Okay, so I have a question maybe somone can answer, I have no clue. It is said that:
The Pentagon estimates it is costing $3.9 billion a month to keep the roughly 150,000 troops now in Iraq, where they make up 90 percent of the peacekeeping forces
How is this different from what it costs to keep the same soldiers stateside? They get paid the same, with the exception of maybe some hazardous duty pay, equipment upkeep still has to be done stateside, they spend un-godly amounts of money transporting unit equipment for field training excercises which is about 50% of stateside time. So is the $3.9 billion on top of what it would cost to keep these units stateside?
If we're building facilities (instead of living in tents and using field showers, etc.) that could account for a lot of it. When we went into Bosnia they projected expenditures for the one year we were supposed to be there at $1.5 billion. After ten months of deployment we'd already spent $4 billion. A large part of this was spent by the Army, knowing the one year limit on our deployment was nonsense, which built and resurfaced roads, built recreation centers, etc. In any event, my guess is that some of this money is being spent on facilities the Army plans to be in for a number of years.