>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.
Body armor+optics is good, man.
You have a point about the other shit they make soldiers march around with.
people tend to get upset when their son/father/brother/husband/etc dies
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.
>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".
I just joined the army and I have a small child at home. Am I moronic?
>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.
it looks ok on xbox at least
Just try not to become dehumanized or too fricked up
Your kid won't want a fricked up dad
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.
If you amortize the cost of equipment over all the soldiers who will use it, we probably don't spend $1,000 per solider.
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.
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.
that was you? I got a helmet with a broken nod mount i got in serious trouble for it
lol jk
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
did a little googling it is apprently 112k a soilder how about dat?
A Prisoner is USA 60k a year
I recently saw an ad to be a prison guard. They're paying 6 figures because no one wants to do it.
Its a horrible job
like worse ptsd than soldiers bad
We had a prison guard that posted here a couple years ago. He said it was like daycare for lying murderous adults.
>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
>human life is cheap
A seething Russian typed this post
Not necessarily. A chink or an Indian could have written it. I heard an extremely similar sentiment from a rich kid Indian student once.
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.
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.
>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
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
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
Imagine OP's face when he finds out how much this single helmet costs.
See Russia in Ukraine to get an idea why your opinion is shit.
>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)
>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/.
a sub-$1k build is kinda garbage
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
>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