Since it's largely a war of ideas we are fighting... why so much money?
Are we overspending like Soviets now?
Troops, including all the called up Reservists, have to be paid. Fuel costs money, contractors to feed the troops and provide other support costs money. Ammunition costs money.
The Army is badly underfunded, and if anything the other services, are in worse shape. It shows more with the Army, because they are the most committed right now. Air Force can just slash bases and units, as can the Navy, since neither are much on the point of the spear, again, right now.
The Air Force is planning to cut 40,000 slots, while the Army can't pay its stateside utility bills. Nor can they pay the little Korean ladies to clean the latrines more than once a week. (It gets pretty deep in there by the end of that week, let me tell you. No towels, sometimes no TP (in part because that's been used to dry hands).
It's the classic "dropping a half million dollar missile on a tent worth less than a McDonalds Happy Meal" problem. Our super high tech versus super low tech warfighting style is unbelievably expensive.
It throws the normal supply system out of whack. It throws all of our systems out of whack, and there's no money to fix it until it becomes mission critical to do so. Now, we're out of 'mission critical fix it funds' as well, so General Schoomaker has to take a stand. I'm glad he is, because the costs of this war are going to come back and bite us in the rear if we don't address them soon.
So what are the 160,000 troops in Afganistan and Iraq doing? Thinking up new ideas?