Putting A Price Tag On More Troops

A piece in today's L.A. Times tries to determine how much escalating in Afghanistan will cost. Ackerman summarizes:

[According to a memo from the Pentagon’s own comptroller], a 40,000-troop increase would cost an additional $30 to $35 billion annually. That’s on top of current war costs which, as the piece reports, are rather hard to determine with precision. But if we take the memo’s reported calculation of at $750,000 per soldier/sailor/airman/marine annually, then we’re looking at an existing cost of $51 billion before an escalation.