A friend of mine was talking with a civilian who works for the Department of the Army. He says that the Army's pension situation looks exactly like GM's.

Personnel is expensive. Weapons are cheap.

And given that people have reacted to virtually no casualties in Iraq as if it had been a catastrophe we may as well move towards an entirelu non-human military.

Rodger. We're not fighting with pitchforks.

Disagree. Casualties seem on the high side considering we are not there with any hostile intent towards the indigenous population. The most onerous demand being made is that they have elections. For that we lose over two thousand troops and hundreds of billions of dollars. I think we should give this more thought in the future. (yes i supported the original invasion and occupation)

High-tech for purposes of occupying a country hasn't proven itself in Iraq. Remote controlled roadside bombs seem beyond our present technology.

Remote controlled roadside bombs are supplemented with abundant supplies of cannon fodder. A society that offers its members no higher aspiration than dying for it is barren beyond belief.

H: In both lives and treasure, Iraq is the least costly invasion and occupation in history.

David -

But not so cheap when measured by permanent disabilities. The down-side of excellent field medicine.

David

Not when compared to the Spanish-American War. What did we lose? A few Mules?

Seriously, each war is sui generis so basically I'm making a value judgement only about the potential gains from the continuing the occupation of Iraq balanced against the effort we are making.

The initial invasion was met with trivial opposition, which by the way doesn't prove one way or the other that Iran, Syria, North Korea couldn't muster a sufficient resistance to make even Regime Change costly in lives for us.

H: Combat deaths in the Spanish American War were 385, but because of bad nutrition, etc., total deaths were about 2500 over the course of less than half a year.

h - Our deaths in Iraq are not coming at the hands of the indigenous population. The terrorist insurgency is driven by Iran and Syria, and aimed at deterring further regime change operations by us. Judging by your comment, the enemy strategy is working.

In the Army, you get a full pension after 20 years. Of course it's going to be expensive, but they fully deserve it. The Veterans Department budget could exceed the Defense Department budget in a few decades.

The veteran pension situation is nothing like GM, because the "productive work force" for those pensions is the entire working population of the USA. So the workers greatly outnumber the pensioners.

P.S. Besides, there are entire federal departments I'd fire before cutting military pensions. That's the price of a good military and even libertarians agree that a good military is a fundamental function of government. It's one of the few things the federal government spends money on about which I have not the slightest qualm.

AOG. Couldn't agree more. The retiring military are entitled to their pensions and our everlasting thanks.

"Judging by your comment, the enemy strategy is working"

Well yes, I try not to engage in romantic wishful thinking when deciding what is the proper policy for the US. I did not say we should admit defeat, nor that Iraq will not eventually roughly approximate a liveable democratic society. I'm merely saying that 2 thousand lives and hundreds of billions of dollars is not "chopped liver", which is the way I interpreted OJ's original comment.

Why isn't it chopped liver?

Two reasons

1) The financial resources devoted to the operation far exceed that which was indicated before the invasion, thus will make future predictions by this and other administrations less trustworthy.

2) Two thousand (and counting) lives have had a significant negative impact on the number and quality of recruiting to military. (regarding quality, standards have been lowered dramatically to keep the numbers up)

Those two results make less likely that future US administrations will have the flexibility to change troublesome regimes.

To the contrary, it's been so cheap and bloodless, with such tremendous return, that it's even more likely we'll do it more often in the future. We may well stick more to decapitation strikes than to large scale invasions, but that's how we should have done Iraq in the first place. Maintenance of a large scale human military forced its use long after we knew it was a terrible way to proceed.

The real parallel to Iraq is the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902) where we lost 4,234 dead, primarily to disease. We committed around 110,000 troops during the campaign. Given the increase in US population over 100 years, fatalities in Iraq would have to reach 12,000 to equal those in the PI, which may rank as the the most obscure major event in American history.