Veterans Benefits and Services: $3 Billion
Orszag also offered a rough estimate of the cost of keeping 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq from 2010 to 2017 – an additional $570 billion – or of stationing 75,000 U.S. soldiers there between 2013 and 2017 – $1.06 trillion. He ended by pegging the monthly “burn rate” for DoD’s wars at $11 billion.
All of which suggests two intermediate revisions to current practices of DoD:
First, that the Defense Department enforce, with the same or even more stringent oversight that it expends on ensuring individual soldiers meet their contractual obligations, the contractual obligations of companies that sign on to provide equipment and services to the Defense Department.
Second, that Congress extend immediately the latitude currently granted to Service Secretaries to cancel putative debts owed to federal government by wounded and fallen soldiers.
But the real, long-term answer is to stop creating more wounded and more fallen soldiers by stopping the wars that create more veterans.
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