Why exactly do we spend anything more than 1,000 dollars on a kit for a solider?

>Money is no object, Unless you plan to spend it.
Why exactly do we spend anything more than 1,000 dollars on a kit for a solider? Human life is cheap. We are multiplying every day meaning

A draft isn't exactly just going to target one demographic it would target everyone, men and women.

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Body armor+optics is good, man.
    You have a point about the other shit they make soldiers march around with.

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    people tend to get upset when their son/father/brother/husband/etc dies

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      You need them to live so they can consoom and pay taxes idiot

      it costs a lot of money to train a soldier and you want to protect your investment. Failure to do otherwise gets you Russia tier combat performance.

      Pretty much these. Life is cheap if you're press-ganging child soldiers in the African countryside or something, but in Western countries you're taking people who have been invested in for 2 decades by the state and their community to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars at least, giving them specialist training on top of that, and taking the risk that they die or get crippled instead of contributing to society for decades. So it's entirely justified to splurge on them.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >people tend to get upset when their son/father/brother/husband/etc dies

      My dad was a US Army colonel at the height of the Iraq War and he actually got in trouble with his superiors for pretty blacklisting anyone who had small children or a wife who was pregnant from going on deployment. He would have them (regardless of whether they wanted it or no) transferred out of his battalion to a stateside unit just prior to shipping out and replace them with men he deemed more "expendable" (usually the unmarried). His reasoning was simply "pregnant widows look worse in the newspapers than a dead virgin".

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        I just joined the army and I have a small child at home. Am I moronic?

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >I just joined the army and I have a small child at home. Am I moronic?
          No, you can die even easier these days in civilian McJobs for nothing and be forgotten. At least if you ever die in the U.S. military, your family gets a payout of $500,000 and plenty of benefits for life.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            it looks ok on xbox at least

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Just try not to become dehumanized or too fricked up
          Your kid won't want a fricked up dad

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    You need them to live so they can consoom and pay taxes idiot

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    it costs a lot of money to train a soldier and you want to protect your investment. Failure to do otherwise gets you Russia tier combat performance.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    If you amortize the cost of equipment over all the soldiers who will use it, we probably don't spend $1,000 per solider.

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Just a set of armor with plates probably costs more than $1000.
    My friend broke a plate when he was in the army. They billed him for it. Forgot how much, but im thinking it was like $800ish.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      you know the helmet attachment used to mount night vision goggles? i broke that in boot camp and glued it together and no one noticed.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        that was you? I got a helmet with a broken nod mount i got in serious trouble for it

        lol jk

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    i thought it was 17k a soilder these days just on the equipment minus the training

    I think each troop costs 35k or something

    if you think about it army's are expensive and they do nothing when there's no war

    imagine housing training and feeding a whole lot of men

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      https://i.imgur.com/NCQS5g7.jpg

      >Money is no object, Unless you plan to spend it.
      Why exactly do we spend anything more than 1,000 dollars on a kit for a solider? Human life is cheap. We are multiplying every day meaning

      A draft isn't exactly just going to target one demographic it would target everyone, men and women.

      did a little googling it is apprently 112k a soilder how about dat?

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        A Prisoner is USA 60k a year

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          I recently saw an ad to be a prison guard. They're paying 6 figures because no one wants to do it.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            Its a horrible job
            like worse ptsd than soldiers bad

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              We had a prison guard that posted here a couple years ago. He said it was like daycare for lying murderous adults.

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Human life is cheap.
    russian hands typed this

    it should go without saying that when it takes at least 16 years to get a fighting man
    even the most expendable fighter shouldnt be spent so freely

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >human life is cheap
    A seething Russian typed this post

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Not necessarily. A chink or an Indian could have written it. I heard an extremely similar sentiment from a rich kid Indian student once.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Do the Chinese really think that still? Seems like they're allergic to actually going to war, and prefer to use their numbers just to saber-rattle with.

  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    people dont like seeing body bags. they can turn a blind eye to a one legged homeless guy but death statistics sober em up pretty quick.

    also its expensive already, between training, feeding, shipping them over somewhere, paying them, its a hell of alot more than a thousand bucks. i think its closer to 1 million a year (deployed overseas) so damn right you are gonna spend some pocket change to make sure one 8cent bullet doesnt take out your million dollar investment.

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Human life is cheap. We are multiplying every day
    Wrong
    Many huge wars throughout history had catastrophic after effects on the population of a country, many which took hundreds of years to recover from, if they ever recovered at all
    Many countries were just weakened by fighting each other endlessly only for them both to be conquered by a third party

    West Asia never recovered from the massive wars they had and just ended up getting conquered by Arabs
    WWI and II had devastating effects on Europe, and could potentially lead to the entire collapse of the continent long term

  12. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Increasing survivability is absolutely core to planning and procurement. 35K~ish in training and equipment per soldier will cost billions per year, but compared to the opportunity cost of losing all the GDP that they would have contributed to the nation over their whole lives, it’s worth it.

    Every soldier lost is lost economic potential during peacetime

  13. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    did you know that people on the spectrum of autism find it more difficult to empathize? a bit unrelated but i thought you guys might find it interesting.

  14. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Human life is cheap.

    Training someone to not be an outright liability on a modern battlefield, however, is really fricking expensive.

    And not doing it means you end up like Russia.

  15. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    An M16 alone costs around $700 per rifle
    PASGT gear (which the US doesn't even use anymore but I'll use it anyway since I know the price) costs $250 for the helmet and $350 for the vest. Meaning that just to equip an infantryman with the basic shit needed for sentry duty (a rifle, a vest, and a helmet), we've already exceeded the $1,000 budget by around $300.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >When a solider turns in their gear the Army just throws it in the trash and buys a new set.
      /k/ really is the lowest IQ board.

  16. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Imagine OP's face when he finds out how much this single helmet costs.

  17. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    See Russia in Ukraine to get an idea why your opinion is shit.

  18. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Life is cheap
    Human life is kind of like shares. They're worth what people believe they are worth. We've spent the better part of a century telling ourselves that human lives are valuable, and therefore human life has value. The fact that there are billions of us is irrelevant if we believe each person is indispensable (or at least that life should not be discarded so frivolously)

  19. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >make sure your troops are poorly trained and equipped so that as many of them die as possible
    Holy shit, I didn't know Sun Tzu, the Master of War, browsed /k/.

  20. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    a sub-$1k build is kinda garbage

  21. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    That image is moronic. A battle rifle firing across French and German countrysides is of course going to hit better than a easy to jam assault rifle in a fricking jungle, up against 5 ft tall men in trees and underground.

    The could barely see shit, the amount of napalm dropped on southern forces was embarrassing.

    They were also on military issued meth and whatever other drug they could get their hands on since none of them wanted to be there, unlike ww2.

    From what I can tell also is the level of foliage on the pacific islands wasn’t as bad as Vietnam.

  22. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    It's a force multiplier. It turns out things like body armor, night vision, optics, and comms are a worthwhile investment because they dramatically increase the effectiveness of a given soldier.

  23. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Human life is cheap.
    From a resource abundance stand point yes, but individual human beings are more than the basic matter that they're made of.

  24. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    So they look good at recruiting drives and appeal to all the stupid poor fashion conscious teen wanabees who believe that the way someone dresses is the way they really are (well trained, knowledgable, skilled, etc).

  25. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Post-ww2 there was also a shift away from mass armies you saw in ww2. The very existence of nukes meant that the age of "mobilize the entire country" warfare "our existence is threatened" tier fighting was out of the window since nukes would be flying far before that.
    It's a return to the kabinettskrieg from the 18th century. Small forces tangle while international diplomacy does just as much. And at that point, it's worth it to invest in better troops instead of more troops.
    This made things like Reagan's star wars more acceptable, since the idea was that high tech armies would offset less manpower.

  26. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Because training a soldier and the opportunity costs of removing him from the workforce to support the military after he did his contract are substantially more expensive than that. Add to that a shrinking pool of possible candidates and the political consequences of burning through your manpower supply, it should be relatively clear why you would want to spend more money on your troops.

  27. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Human life is cheap
    Cannon fodder is cheap. This is not an RTS where you spam marines until you overwhelm your opponent. Taking losses in modern warfare has a huge toll:
    Also:

    - army morale is shattered
    - loss of political/societal will to continue when you take huge losses
    - loss of investment (training soldiers is expensive)
    This is not WWII era anymore, information flows freely and both grunts and citizens back home can see on their phones how the your army is wasting human life, and that tends to piss people off.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >This is not WWII era anymore, information flows freely and both grunts and citizens back home can see on their phones how the your army is wasting human life, and that tends to piss people off.
      Doesn't seem to work on the russian society

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