The US wounded since 2001 until October is 4434 (Link can also find the numbers for those doing the fighting for the talkers back home, by country). 35000 might be your hope, but fortunately not true
Um, Nitro..... U.S wounded in Iraq alone is 30,182 wounded and 4,280 killed. Put the two numbers together, and you get 34,462 casualties (that's wounded + killed)
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm
The 4,434 number you quoted sounds suspiciously like the Afghanistan wounded total, which is officially 4,471 wounded and 844 killed, and -if- you add casualties from Afghanistan and Iraq, present total is 39,777 U.S killed and wounded.
I really like your VA figures for PTSD. According to your figures about 1 in 10 men and women in the military suffer from PTSD (that's assuming the entire US Army, Marines, and Air force participate in combat...they don't). In Iraq their are 142,000 and 31, 000 in Afghanistan. Since you like Wikipedia .
Yes, presently at this exact moment there are 142,000 servicemembers in Iraq and by the end of 2009 there will be 68,000 in Afghanistan. But, U.S troops have been deployed to Iraq longer than the duration of all WW2 and troops have been deployed to Afghanistan longer than your involvement in Vietnam.
Surely you don't need me to split hairs and get into the sheer number of bodies are needed (Albeit many of them the same ones on recurring tours) to keep the deployed force at strength for such a long time as people rotate in and out of country?
Well, I guess you do. It works out to be 1.6 million bodies deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
Of those 1.6 million deployments, several studies conducted estimate that the number of mental-health injuries comprise approximately 300,000 returning servicemen, a far higher number than the 100,000 I quoted. Take a look-see here.... the primary organization behind this study was the RAND corporation, CLEARLY they and the various health organizations they worked with to corroborate their findings are all liberal front groups right?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24183188
There is no separate fund for military contractors, which have been in use long before Rumsfeld BTW.
No arguments, military contractors have been around for a long time. However, they're usage under rumsfeld quite literally skyrocketed to never before seen proportions. Since you're such an expert, Nitro, about the military, why don't you recount to me the speech Rumsfeld gave to the Pentagon on Sept. 10, 2001?
Let me do it for you. He basically stated that the number 1 enemy facing the U.S military was the U.S military itself. The military bureaucracy, he stated, was so massively cumbersome and ineffective that he was essentially going to privatize every single function of the military that he could, with the exception of course of the front line combat troops.
Now you know very well that for every uniformed man in combat, you need several in the rear (I was always told a ratio of 10:1 or 6:1 depending) doing everything from maintaining vehicles, cooking food, shuffling paperwork and a thousand other tasks. What Rumsfeld did was tap into a massive amount of the rear-echelon stuff and put it in the hands of the private sector.
You want to know a funny statistic?
During GW 1, there was 1 contractor for ever 100 soldier
At the start of 2003, the beginning of GW 2, the ratio was one contractor to 10 soldiers.
By 2006 the ratio was 1 contractor per 3 soldiers
By 2007 the ratio was 1 contractor per 1.4 soldiers
Keep in mind these are all purely "defence and defence related" contractors, all getting paid a lot more than what a counterpart U.S serviceman is getting. A report from the GAO in 2006 stated that of all the defence contractors in the country, approximately 48,000 were armed security services, essentially hired guns like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, Custer Battles and so forth.
Then of course you had the ever famous Halliburton which took on dozens of the army's traditional functions like repairing and maintaining vehicles and radios.
I could go on and on. Entire books have been written on the subject.... "Blackwater" by Jeremy Scahill is a good one you should read, but suffice it to say that "this man's army" sure aint what it used to be and has had many of it's traditional roles outsourced entirely, all being paid for by top taxpayer dollar!
I especially really appreciate how the pie chart shows those liberal entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) strangling the GDP by almost half.
Indeed. I think that social security and medicare in the U.S should be abolished entirely. While you're at it, why don't you get rid of the public education system too? I mean, it's not like the U.S has a bunch of retirees that are depending on any of these programs. Let's let granny smith freeze to death and lower the surplus population!
And that fellow who gave 15 or 20 years of service at Ford or Chrysler and just lost his job, how dare the slacker expect a handout, let him pull himself up by his bootstraps!
