Some interesting numbers on the cost of individual soldiers' gear

Yesterday I heard a pretty wild comparison between the costs of the personal gear that a soldier would wear into combat on 10 SEP 01, during the Iraq Surge, and today in Afghanistan. How significant would you expect the difference to be? I figured maybe a couple thousand dollars, but nothing so significant as what the guy telling the story actually claimed. He said that a pre-GWOT infantryman in an old k-pot, Vietnam-era flak vest, ALICE gear and so on (not including weapons and ammunition) was wearing $370-odd worth of gear. That sounded a little bit low to me, but ok.

Over the last several years, personal gear has changed pretty significantly, getting more sophisticated, lighter, more protective, and thus (obviously) more expensive. Schmedlap (and pretty much anybody else who has served, but particularly Schmedlap because he's got this whole gear-weight-calculator thing) can probably do a much better job of providing specifics on this transition, so I'm not even going to try. So back to the point: a surge-era infantryman in Iraq supposedly wore ~$14,000 worth of personal equipment.

And now infantrymen serving in Afghanistan have added another $3K worth of stuff, apparently, and are wearing $17,000 worth of stuff.



Isn't this a pretty shocking transformation over such a short period of time? I suppose it tells you something about the sophistication of personal protective gear, about the devolution of communications equipment and electronics down to the squad and team level, about the relatively recent proliferation of night-vision devices to every individual, and so on, but I just can't help but draq any more complicated conclusions than "dude, that's a lot." None of which is to suggest that it isn't worth it, obviously, but rather to express my surprise that our guys were so under-equipped on 9/10.

In an only very loosely related bit of news, I also heard it mentioned that an addition of 10,000 troops to overall end-strength costs roughly $1 billion, for whatever that's worth these days. Obviously we're talking about more than personal gear here: training, pay, medical care, other benefits, and so on.

Like I say, there are people much better equipped to go into the details of this little factoid than I am, but I thought it was kind of interesting.

(NOTE: If I didn't suck so bad at the internet or want to save time, I would do a little more research and find some pictures that showed the gear more comprehensively and in more detail. Instead you've got a picture of some 1st ID soldiers from KFOR in October 2001, some 2nd ID guys in Iraq at an unknown date, and another recent one of some guys from the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan.)