![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It Turns Out Armies Cost Money
Oct. 31st, 2011 01:34 pmIn other news that you might have missed, what with Gaddafi getting killed, Turkey getting hit by an earthquake, Kenya invading Somalia, and everything else that's happened this month, Michel Martelly, current president of the battered nation of Haiti, is considering rebuilding Haiti's military.
Haiti hasn't had a military since their last military went spectacularly insane some time ago, but they have two problems: they have a lot of veterans from that era who are owed a pension, and they have a lot of people without jobs. Martelly clearly thinks that he can kill two birds with one stone, and is budgeting US $95 million for the project (Fr), $15 million for pensions, $30 million for the joint civil service, and about $50 million over two years for paying for this new 3500 man force.
The first thought a lot of people have when seeing this is that $50 million is a lot of money, especially for Haiti where manpower is dirt cheap. I mean, in a country where a lot of the populace lives on $1 a day, it seems like you could spend a lot less on what is basically hiring 3500 men to go drive back and forth along a border in jeeps, and still have a lot left over to pay people to do something useful, like try to put the capital back together. I mean, if I just stick to the basics and avoid any frills, even I, who knows nothing about anything involved, could plan a military budget better then this, couldn't I?
No, but I can fail spectacularly in the process.
( This Stuff Is Surprisingly Expensive )
Haiti hasn't had a military since their last military went spectacularly insane some time ago, but they have two problems: they have a lot of veterans from that era who are owed a pension, and they have a lot of people without jobs. Martelly clearly thinks that he can kill two birds with one stone, and is budgeting US $95 million for the project (Fr), $15 million for pensions, $30 million for the joint civil service, and about $50 million over two years for paying for this new 3500 man force.
The first thought a lot of people have when seeing this is that $50 million is a lot of money, especially for Haiti where manpower is dirt cheap. I mean, in a country where a lot of the populace lives on $1 a day, it seems like you could spend a lot less on what is basically hiring 3500 men to go drive back and forth along a border in jeeps, and still have a lot left over to pay people to do something useful, like try to put the capital back together. I mean, if I just stick to the basics and avoid any frills, even I, who knows nothing about anything involved, could plan a military budget better then this, couldn't I?
No, but I can fail spectacularly in the process.
( This Stuff Is Surprisingly Expensive )