the cost of deploying a line soldier for a year is on the order of $1 million. granted, that includes transporting to and from theater of operations twice, food, water, fuel, ammo, special pays, and amortization of the public works projects paid for by the unit, etc, etc. Really, Karzai and company skim a decent chunk of that cash, and there's a major accounting oops by dividing the costs of nation building among the individual troops, but in light of that, 1.2 mil per soldier in the unit isn't too terribly 'out there'. As far as what they're paying the majority of them, assuming a specialist (pay grade e-4) with three years in, that's 2123/mo U.S. figure that the combat pay is $250/mo, isolation pay is about $125/mo, if he's married, there's a $250/mo family separation allowance and allowance for housing. put everything together, and that's about $2500/mo for the single spec-4's, and on average, about $3600/mo for the married ones. $30k/year/single soldier, about $45k/year for a married one, everything else is overhead or an accounting trick. An LTC would make probably close to triple what a single soldier makes for a deployment, but it's still a hell of a lot of work and it won't make you wealthy.

it depends on where you're at. I've heard of ambulance rides in NE OK running around $1500 for a ride...

Petersburg would be a good candidate. the only reason it doesn't is because there were, notionally, directions of approach that could conceivably take a wagon train of supplies. Then again, it does look a bit like we had Wile E. Coyote doing a lot of the planning there...

You've obviously never seen the aftermath of an IED or an Explosively-Formed Projectile... there are no pleasant ways to die on a modern battlefield (or any other battlefield, for that matter).

you failed to mention one detail about the duration of the muslim conquest of afghanistan: time. Nuristan ["Land of the Light of God"] was known as Takfiristan ["Land of the Infidel Barbarians"] until about 1912, when the conversions finally took root there...

for a lot of people, yes. truth be told, the openness of our society dictates that we have a pretty large degree of vulnerability to that sort of thing. I think the bigger problem is that people engage in the 'man on the moon' fallacy: "we can put a man on the moon, but we can't piece together a conspiracy put together by a bunch of cave-dwelling religious fanatics from the other side of the world before a catastrophe?"

Having been there relatively recently (2008), I'll go ahead and point out that there is absolutely ZERO short-term profit from the Afghans. Zilch for infrastructure, farming beyond subsistance (besides ditch-weed and poppies, and frankly, if I had to live like that for my entire life, I'd probably smoke something more stimulating than tobacco myself), and at least thirty years between mineral surveying and viable large-scale extraction efforts for the interesting metals in the mountains that did such a lovely job making my head hurt when i did commo support for my platoon. And just for grins, remember that most of America's battery production, where the Li-ion sources will be most heavily used, was offshored decades ago...
seems to me that this is just a protracted response to 9/11

no one will notice the difference, until they, you know, try to do the things that they've been hired to do, most likely. I don't think that they have macs alongside linux boxen just for grins... and in any case, those machines may not be his to do with as he pleases, to begin with, since he's talking about shuttling data for clients, not merely client sites...

No, they get freaking rich off of welfare recipients...

you'll also note that Iceland modeled its financial markets off of the US...

that's 60 years of vitriolic indoctrination for you. we're also told that we have democracy and a truly free market, if you want to get into the myths that most of the adults in this country espouse...

sorry, but linguistically and culturally, all of the Icelanders that I've ever known consider themselves Scandinavian, and you're begging for an argument by grouping them separately. Granted, it's nowhere near the response that my younger sister's second grade teacher got from dad when she claimed that Iceland was part of North America, but still... As far as linguistics go, Icelandic is four vowel mutations from most major dialects of the Viking language (y to u, y to ú, and vice versa). That, by the way, is identical to an old form of Norwegian. Throw in a little more than 700 years of it being passed back and forth between Denmark and Norway which took from 1877 to 1944 to terminate, and I think they have a solid argument in favor of Scandinavian status on their hands.

And where do Greenlanders fit in?

Anyway, just my 2 krónur...

You know, if Clifford Stoll is eating Ramen at this point, I think it's because he wants to... I also have to wonder if everybody here is really this ignorant of who the man is...