A piece in today's L.A. Times tries to determine how much escalating in Afghanistan will cost. Ackerman summarizes:
[According to a memo from the Pentagon’s own comptroller], a 40,000-troop increase would cost an additional $30 to $35 billion annually. That’s on top of current war costs — which, as the piece reports, are rather hard to determine with precision. But if we take the memo’s reported calculation of at $750,000 per soldier/sailor/airman/marine annually, then we’re looking at an existing cost of $51 billion before an escalation.
The Dish 