Troop increase to cost over $11 billion per year

Bob Gates’s first major move as secretary of defense was not one we expected: a major expansion of the American military. With Condi Rice and Peter Pace somberly looking on, Gates announced that the Pentagon hopes to add 92,000 soldiers and Marines permanently to U.S. end-strength. That’s a lot bigger than previous estimates coming out of the military, where the going figure was that 7,000 troops is the most the Army can add each year.

I asked Winslow Wheeler, a defense budgeting wizard at the Center for Defense Information, what 92,000 additional troops means in dollar terms. He told me that the Pentagon’s rule of thumb is $1.2 billion a year for every 10,000 troops. By my calculations, that means Gates’s increase would cost at least $11 billion annually. But the $1.2 billion is probably low, says Wheeler, and in any case it doesn’t include the costs of war. Wheeler said the new units won’t be deployable for another 3 years or so, however, so perhaps that will be a moot point by 2010 Of course, all of this depends on congressional approval and, subsequently, the ability to attract recruits at a time when joining the military may well mean heading to the Iraq meat grinder.