That is a very basic look at the costs of a soldier, that misses things likeSunTzuWarmaster wrote:I blame cheapness, a typical function of modern military/warfare.
Real soldiers are cheap. A soldier costs about $1245/month, and taxes (buhuahahaha!) knock that back down to $1000. Really, you can pay a guy $12000/year, rent him a gun, buy him a uniform and make him sleep in a tent (also rented to him), and feed him (what, another 2K?). The cost to proxy-fly a plane or the sheer amount of material for a droid will cost more than this.
A) That dude has to eat, which means a logistics exercise has to be created
B) That dude probably gets a lift in an APC, which means another dude to drive him around, another dude to be feed, a dude to fix the APC, and yet another dude to feed that guy.
C) That dude would then ideally know how to shoot his gun when he gets somewhere. That requires training individually, at the section level, at the platoon level, at the company level, at the battalion level and at the regiment level.
Training and equipment costs for Private Smuck in Iraq are about 2 million dollars US, plus deployment pay (which is much higher than you estimate), plus secondary costs (health and education, the VA is a BIG organisation), plus a very extensive support infrastructure.