Air Force said to seek $50 bln emergency funds

The U.S. Air Force is asking the Pentagon's leadership for a staggering $50 billion in emergency funding for fiscal 2007 -- an amount equal to nearly half its annual budget, defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute said on Tuesday.

Another source familiar with the Air Force plans said the extra funds would help pay to transport growing numbers of U.S. soldiers being killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Spokeswoman Maj. Morshe Araujo gave no details on the new request, saying it would be completed only next week. She said the service had already mapped out an expected supplemental funding request of $50 billion for fiscal 2008.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will decide on the supplemental funding requests on November 15, according to the England memo, reported by Inside Defense last week.

Link Here

MindPilot
Did you see the 60 Minutes story about the medical units in Iraq?

After looking at those flying hospitals--airborne ICUs in many cases with surgery being performed in-flight--I'm going to guess that $100K per wounded soldier is a REAL conservative figure.

One doctor when asked how much would be spent on a wounded individual before they returned stateside, didn't really have a firm answer, but suggested when pressed that a million was a conservative estimate.

And not all of those being evacuated and treated by our military are members of our military--a lot are Iraqis.

60 MINUTES; Iraq: The Uncounted

"The Pentagon, I think, is afraid that they're going to lose public support for this war, the way they lost public support for Vietnam back in the 1960s."John Pike, GlobalSecurity.org