As I noted in an earlier thread, I support the administration when it makes a decision regarding national security. I anticipate a lot of nonsensical (read: political) push-back on the decision that the President will announce tonight. I realize that the bulk of it has been leaked almost in its entirety, leaving only the official public announcement to be handled, but I suppose there is always a chance that the official pronouncement could differ slightly from what the apparent leaks have told us.

My understanding is that General McChrystal put forth a plan and all that he needed was for the President to authorize the resources - namely the troop request. The request, if I understand it correctly, was around 40,000. Apparently the President will authorize 34,000. There are other competing variables outside the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan that need to go into the decision, so I am not overly troubled that the administration concluded that less than the number requested will suffice. I have only one reservation.

Some deceptively simple math has been thrown about. Tom Barnett writes in World Politics Review that...

"It costs the United States $1 million a year to keep a soldier inside a theater of operations such as Afghanistan. The math is easy enough: For every thousand troops, the price comes out to $1 billion a year."

Easy enough? Or oversimplified? That reasoning would have earned Mr. Barnett a failing grade in the managerial accounting class that I took in business school. Fixed costs will almost surely rise due to expansion of facilities built to accommodate more units, but the difference between 30K troops and 40K troops (or any other differences within that vicinity) is almost surely not equal to 10K troops x $1M/troop. The reason is that there are fixed costs and variable costs. The cost of one additional Soldier is not $1 million. It cannot be. That is absurd on its face. The fixed costs will also vary according to how troops are dispersed (ex. expand FOBs, pack FOBs tighter, build new FOBs and/or COPs, etc). I hope there is more driving this decision than an accounting estimate.