Afghanistan Math - Part 1

Let's spend a couple of days doing Afghanistan math before discussing the President's speech from last night. The President wants to sent another 30,000 U.S. troops to that country in an effort to reverse the recent setbacks against the Taliban. This increase inspired me to investigate where we have the highest deployment of American troops around the world and to use the new number the Obama administration is throwing around, namely that it costs us about a million dollars a year per soldier deployed to Afghanistan.


According to a December 2, 2009 article that appeared on http://www.upi.com/, a website that has compiled these numbers from Defense Department sources, the following are big homes to U.S. troops:

• Italy - 9,474 U.S. service personnel are in country
• Britain - 9,367 U.S. service personnel are in country
• South Korea - 30,983 U.S. service personnel are in country
• Japan - 33,248 U.S. service personnel are in country
• Germany - 53.906 U.S. service personnel are in country

If we add up just these deployed soldiers in just these five countries and multiply the total by Obama's million dollars per deployed soldier per year, we get 137,032 soldiers costing us $137 billion a year to maintain. If we get conservative and assume that these deployments do not cost as much as those serving in a battle zone and reduce the annual per soldier costs by say 30%, we still get a very high cost estimate of almost $96 billion a year. Add in those countries that have less troops deployed than the big five above and you can safely estimate that the deployment of U.S troops overseas, outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, is costing the country and the taxpayers well over $100 billion a year, more than enough to theoretically pay for Obama's health care reform proposal.

If that is not bad enough, consider the following countries that have not sent troops to Afghanistan:

• Japan - second largest economy in the world
• China - third largest economy in the world (and growing quickly)
• Russia - eighth largest economy in the world
• Brazil - tenth largest economy in the world (and growing quickly)
• India - twelfth largest economy in the world (and growing quickly)
• South Korea - fifteenth largest economy in the world

My point is that as we a nation take on the burden, in both money and blood, of fighting this major terrorism fight, many of our biggest economic competitors are contributing nothing to this fight and are able to continue to build up their economic strength while we are in Afghanistan. We try to help the world to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year spent on deployed U.S. service personnel, but those that would challenge us economically in the world's markets get a free pass.

That is why Step 30 in "Love My Country. Loathe My Government" is so important to implement as soon as possible. Step 30 would bring back all nonessential deployed military personnel immediately to save money, allow us to regroup and refocus our economy, and remove us from taking on tasks the rest of the world is more than willing to let us take on at our expense. We do not need tens of thousand of troops stationed in South Korea, Japan, Germany and elsewhere. These deployments are from a different time and a different world. Let's take care of ourselves for a change and make the rest of the world step up to the challenges civilized nations face around the world when it comes to fighting terrorism.

Tomorrow we will look at the contributions that NATO and other countries are making to the fight in Afghanistan and see who is and who is not pulling their weight.

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