It Turns Out Armies Cost Money
In other news that you might have missed, what with Gaddafi getting killed, Turkey getting hit by an earthquake, Kenya invading Somalia, and everything else that's happened this month, Michel Martelly, current president of the battered nation of Haiti, is considering rebuilding Haiti's military.
Haiti hasn't had a military since their last military went spectacularly insane some time ago, but they have two problems: they have a lot of veterans from that era who are owed a pension, and they have a lot of people without jobs. Martelly clearly thinks that he can kill two birds with one stone, and is budgeting US $95 million for the project (Fr), $15 million for pensions, $30 million for the joint civil service, and about $50 million over two years for paying for this new 3500 man force.
The first thought a lot of people have when seeing this is that $50 million is a lot of money, especially for Haiti where manpower is dirt cheap. I mean, in a country where a lot of the populace lives on $1 a day, it seems like you could spend a lot less on what is basically hiring 3500 men to go drive back and forth along a border in jeeps, and still have a lot left over to pay people to do something useful, like try to put the capital back together. I mean, if I just stick to the basics and avoid any frills, even I, who knows nothing about anything involved, could plan a military budget better then this, couldn't I?
No, but I can fail spectacularly in the process.
The Budget
Martelly's budget dedicates USD $50 million to "building a new force" over the course of what basically amounts to two years. We can reduce that to a $25 million annual budget. We can then subdivide costs into three basic categories, annual personnel costs, annual operations costs, and procurement and maintenance costs. And then make wild-ass guesses for all of them.
People
The first thing that a military needs is people. We know how many people, 3500 of them. What we don't know is how much they'll be paid. People complaining about sweatshops claims that Haitians make about $1 a day for a six day workweek, or about $300 a year. Other estimates claim that $2 a day/$600 a year is more standard (or perhaps was more standard before the earthquake). Let's assume that we want our soldiers to be happy (and their officers to), and so we budget $1000 a year for each of them on average. Furthermore, let's assume that this fund does not include that amount taken to feed them (and any other temporary expenses), which we might set at $500 a year (this is just a guess), bringing the total cost for 3500 soldiers up to $5.25 million/year.
But soldiers can't exist in a vacuum. For every soldier you need some administrative support to make sure bills get paid, equipment gets counted, and, hopefully, they get some money in their paychecks. Let's guess that for 3500 soldiers in a third world country you need 1000 civilian administrators and support personnel (this may seem like a lot, but it may not be, the US DoD has between 700,000 and 800,000 civilians who support 1.4 million active and 1.1 million reserve soldiers). Let's pay them reasonably well, but not pay for their room and board (although give them a five-day instead of a six-day work week), so another $1000 a year, bringing their costs up to $1 million.
And then to create an army we have to bring in a lot of technical support people. Mature militaries pass their technical skill from one generation to the next through constant training, but you can't do that when you're starting out. Let's make a guess that we need two hundred tech personnel, say fifty doctors (who will train their own nurses and medics), fifty IT personnel (who will train people to use radios, computers, and anything else they have on hand), and a hundred mechanics (who will work on mechanical repair, as well as train others to do the same). Now, we can't afford foreign workers really, but we need technically competent people, and those people can command high wages. Let us guess (for no real reason except that it's over the GDP per capita of the neighboring Dominican Republic) that each of these people requires an average wage of $10,000/year. That means that our tech support will cost us $2 million/year.
Overall, that brings out total cost for personnel up to $8.25 million, or basically a third of our total $25 million dollar budget. Not a promising start.
Operations
What do soldiers do? Well, in a country like Haiti, presumably they patrol the border. Haiti has one border, which is 224 miles or so, with the Dominican Republic (a country with which they sometimes feud). Organizationally, Martelly plans to divide his soldiers into battalions of 255 men (an odd number, but whatever). This means that you could maybe expect to have four battalion (1000 soldiers) on maneuvers at any one time, say two patrolling the border (as opposed to those who just stand at border crossings), and two on training maneuvers (if we're lucky).
Each moving group probably travels in commercial vehicles that hold five people (since we're cheap), or 200 vehicles. Because the terrain is rough, each vehicle probably only gets about fifteen mpg at best, and since they're driving up to eight hours a day (say at average 20mph in rough terrain), they would use a bit over ten gallons per day. Let's round that up to 15 due to the rough terrain. That's 3000 gallons per day for all 200 vehicles, and at a cost of $5/gallon (let's include the cost to import and distribute it, while excluding taxes), $15,000 a day, or $5.5 million a year. And that's just on gas.
And now we come to building and facility maintenance (equipment maintenance is somewhere else). Everyone whose ever run a building knows that this costs a lot of money? How much money? Well, let's assume it comes out to about $1000 per soldiers. That's rather expensive, but I want to make sure to overbudget in the morass that is the Haitian construction industry. There's another $3.5 million.
And now we come to a final problem. Modern armies run on electricity, but that's one thing Haiti doesn't have a lot of. Bases out on the border will have even less, unless they bring it in themselves. Assuming they can find diesel generators for themselves at 0.4 Liters/kWh efficiency, if each soldier uses an average of 1 kWh/day (enough to keep a 60W light bulb on for 16 hours and 40 minutes), then 3500 soldiers use 1.28 MWh of electricity per year, or 500,000 liters of fuel. Just to account for the fact that this is barely enough to run anything, let's do some juggling, guess that we can buy diesel for $1 a liter, but that we actually need about double that amount (1,000,000 liters). That gets us to another $1 million a year.
So, counting only three basic boxes, our operational costs come to $10 million a year, and 65% of that estimate is fuel. And that's making a lot of wild guesses along the way. Doubtless there are huge chunks of money that I've just missed, or don't know enough to include.
Procurement and Equipment Maintenance
So far, we've spent $18.25 million of our $25 million budget. Let's say I've undercounted (by about 10%), and really we've spent $20 million (give us a buffer for what I have forgotten). That gives us $5 million a year for two years, or $10 million to buy all those little toys that we get to show off at parades.
First, we need equipment for individual soldiers. Each soldier should probably be assumed to get a uniform a year, due to wear and tear and such. Because we're a small third world military, we can forego the dress uniform and just use a field uniform. Since camo uniforms are basically international, let's guess that we're paying US prices, and say about $70 for the coat and pants, and probably about $30 more for various accessories. Let's add a $50 pair of cheap boots (I hope that somewhere on Haiti you can get cheap footwear), and another $50 for the mess kit, compass, hat, and various other pieces of kit that will undoubtedly be broken every year. That comes up to $200 a year (I make wild guesses suspiciously round), but that's a cost that comes up every year, and runs to $700,000 for the whole force.
Oh wait, I forgot something, weapons. Unlike Afghanistan, not everyone can be expected to provide their own AK-47. How much does an AK-47 cost? Well, in the 2001-05 period, the Small Arms Survey claimed that they cost about $250 a piece on Haiti. That seems sort of expensive, so we're going to do a bit of bargain shopping. It turns out that they only cost about $180 in that same period on Cuba. Also the same on Grenada. Let's guess about $200 for a Kalashnikov variant in reasonable condition. So there's another $700,000, but for an equipment purchase.
Now we get to squad-level purchases. Usually the size of a squad is based on how many people you need to accomplish a specific set of tasks. In our case, it's going to be based on how many people we can squeeze into the cars we buy. Now, what we want are readily available off-road vehicles, SUVs probably, where the international market for spare parts (and more vehicles) is robust. We agree to take a hit to mobility by buying vehicles that aren't that off-road, and look through the vehicle catalogs. There are a lot of 4x4 SUVs with a five person carrying capacity on the market, going for about $30,000. Okay, so one vehicle for every five people, plus reserve vehicles, would be about 1000 SUVs, which would be about...
$30 million? That's not only too much, that's completely out of our budget range. Okay, so much for organic equipment. Obviously not every squad can have their own car. We'll have to implement a motor pool, where only those units currently on deployment or training (1000 soldiers, or 200 vehicles) will have vehicles. So with only 200 SUVs, and maybe 50 spares for replacements and emergencies, that leaves us with a cost of...$7.5 million? Well, there's the rest of our budget.
Why the hell does this cost so much? What do these SUVs come with? Power door locks? Power windows? Automatic transmission? Satellite radio? Voice-activated controls? WTF? How do real militaries justify paying for all of this? Oh wait, because real militaries buy HMMWVs, MRAPs, and other vehicles that cost over $100k a pop. So, assume we can negotiate with a factory somewhere and get the super-stripped down version of these vehicles. Maybe get a deal in bulk. What does that get us down to? About $20,000 maybe? So $5 million, just on SUVs. Wonderful.
Of course, we're not quite done yet. Our vehicles have to have one more modification, figure $100 a vehicle to install a CB radio or something. It's not very good, but it will let us have some communications. Plus we might want one in more of our base facilities, and backups. Figure 500 units total. Hopefully just $50,000.
And now we're down to our bases. Let's say we build three of them on the border, and two inland. Guessing at land costs from completely inaccurate sources, let's imagine that we can buy 50-100 acres our in the back country in Haiti (away from the coast) for, say, $100,000, so we spend $500,000 just on the land for our facilities. Now we have to pay for what goes on it.
What goes on it? Too much to count. Let's just say it'll eat up any money we have left. Don't believe me? Well, we said we would have diesel generators (that's about $100,000 a generator, used). And we have lots of vehicles, so we'll have to have a shop for them, with tools to work on them with. And how about gasoline? Are we going to have gasoline pumps or do we refill our vehicles with loose gas cans and a funnel and accept the risk of a catastrophic explosion? How about communications? We can't afford a real radio system, so we'll have to put together a HAM radio or something for each base, with extra wattage to talk to the rest of the country. What about toilets? What about water? Water purifiers? Sewage lines? Septic tanks? Or are we just going for the old "buckets upstream, toilets downstream" approach? What happens at night? Are we going to have any lights in this place?
And that's not all. Now that we've bought all this fancy equipment we've got to maintain it. A good rule of thumb I use is that the cost for a piece of equipment is 10% or the original cost per year for parts (we already pay for labor), and 10% a year towards replacement, or 20%. This may seem a bit extreme, but remember that we're driving our SUVs 70,000 or more miles a year. We'll be lucky to get away with just that, even if it does budget for replacing them every ten years. So, we bought $5.75 million dollars worth of bulk equipment, which leaves us with an annual reoccuring expense of about $1.15 million. Per year. Every year. For as long as you want to keep it.
So, altogether we spent basically $7 million, and we haven't even built our bases yet (we did account for maintaining them though). That gives us $3 million to build five facilities, and then buy all the other miscellaneous goods, medical supplies, paint, technical supplies, computers for the administrators, flashlights, power cords, rope, trail-blazing and trail-making tools, chains, shovels, individual radios, binoculars, cameras, hell, even blankets for when we're out of radio range and have to use smoke signals. Which won't work because we didn't budget anything for matches.
And that doesn't count expensive things we left out, like tow trucks (because you can't run 100 SUVs through rough terrain for 75,000 miles a year without having an accident, or X-ray machines, because when you have a broken bone sometimes you really want one, or GPS border demarcation, because it's really, really embarrassing (not to mention expensive) to accidentally invade your neighbors.
What Did We Get?
And so our $50 million investment bought us 500 soldiers at any one time on the border, and another 500 ready for emergencies, traveling in decent vehicles, but possessed of only one pair of boots at a time (probably), one BDU-style uniform (not very waterproof), one AK-47 (without ammunition, because we didn't budget for that), who live in huts made out of corrugated metal (blew the construction funds on proper sewage), but at least are reasonably well paid by local standards, and well maintained. As far as third-world armies go, this one is probably happier then most, but still as expensive as hell.
What We Should Learn
First, militaries are expensive. For countries like Haiti, they're almost a luxury item. There's a reason people say that defense spending doesn't help the economy much, because it doesn't. You end up paying a tremendous amount of money for consumables like fuel, and for building large structures in the middle of nowhere that have no further purpose.
Second, you can see where the temptation to cut goes. Despite the fact that we have a lot of manpower for a small country with only one land border, the costs for manpower for a third-world country are probably minimal (as opposed to costs in the US or Europe). But there must be a giant temptation to cut into pieces of the budget. $5.5 million for gasoline? What if we only paid $1 million for gasoline a year? What if we only bought 100 vehicles instead of 200? Well, then our soldiers would be less mobile, would have to do everything on foot, and would spend a lot more time sitting around at base, but they would be cheaper. Why have electricity and generators at the bases? And why have sewage? Can't they just dig trenches? And why multiple bases? Why not a big one, near the capital in case I want to go see what they're up to?
Pretty soon you save a lot of money, at the cost of having a collection of bored young men sitting around a dilapidated, shantytown base with nothing to do but play with guns. If there's anything more detrimental to long-term national stability, it has to involve narcotics.
So if you ever, God forbid, find yourself in control of Haiti, spend all your money on some public housing and a sewage treatment plant. It's hardly glamorous, but your people will thank you in the long run.
Haiti hasn't had a military since their last military went spectacularly insane some time ago, but they have two problems: they have a lot of veterans from that era who are owed a pension, and they have a lot of people without jobs. Martelly clearly thinks that he can kill two birds with one stone, and is budgeting US $95 million for the project (Fr), $15 million for pensions, $30 million for the joint civil service, and about $50 million over two years for paying for this new 3500 man force.
The first thought a lot of people have when seeing this is that $50 million is a lot of money, especially for Haiti where manpower is dirt cheap. I mean, in a country where a lot of the populace lives on $1 a day, it seems like you could spend a lot less on what is basically hiring 3500 men to go drive back and forth along a border in jeeps, and still have a lot left over to pay people to do something useful, like try to put the capital back together. I mean, if I just stick to the basics and avoid any frills, even I, who knows nothing about anything involved, could plan a military budget better then this, couldn't I?
No, but I can fail spectacularly in the process.
The Budget
Martelly's budget dedicates USD $50 million to "building a new force" over the course of what basically amounts to two years. We can reduce that to a $25 million annual budget. We can then subdivide costs into three basic categories, annual personnel costs, annual operations costs, and procurement and maintenance costs. And then make wild-ass guesses for all of them.
People
The first thing that a military needs is people. We know how many people, 3500 of them. What we don't know is how much they'll be paid. People complaining about sweatshops claims that Haitians make about $1 a day for a six day workweek, or about $300 a year. Other estimates claim that $2 a day/$600 a year is more standard (or perhaps was more standard before the earthquake). Let's assume that we want our soldiers to be happy (and their officers to), and so we budget $1000 a year for each of them on average. Furthermore, let's assume that this fund does not include that amount taken to feed them (and any other temporary expenses), which we might set at $500 a year (this is just a guess), bringing the total cost for 3500 soldiers up to $5.25 million/year.
But soldiers can't exist in a vacuum. For every soldier you need some administrative support to make sure bills get paid, equipment gets counted, and, hopefully, they get some money in their paychecks. Let's guess that for 3500 soldiers in a third world country you need 1000 civilian administrators and support personnel (this may seem like a lot, but it may not be, the US DoD has between 700,000 and 800,000 civilians who support 1.4 million active and 1.1 million reserve soldiers). Let's pay them reasonably well, but not pay for their room and board (although give them a five-day instead of a six-day work week), so another $1000 a year, bringing their costs up to $1 million.
And then to create an army we have to bring in a lot of technical support people. Mature militaries pass their technical skill from one generation to the next through constant training, but you can't do that when you're starting out. Let's make a guess that we need two hundred tech personnel, say fifty doctors (who will train their own nurses and medics), fifty IT personnel (who will train people to use radios, computers, and anything else they have on hand), and a hundred mechanics (who will work on mechanical repair, as well as train others to do the same). Now, we can't afford foreign workers really, but we need technically competent people, and those people can command high wages. Let us guess (for no real reason except that it's over the GDP per capita of the neighboring Dominican Republic) that each of these people requires an average wage of $10,000/year. That means that our tech support will cost us $2 million/year.
Overall, that brings out total cost for personnel up to $8.25 million, or basically a third of our total $25 million dollar budget. Not a promising start.
Operations
What do soldiers do? Well, in a country like Haiti, presumably they patrol the border. Haiti has one border, which is 224 miles or so, with the Dominican Republic (a country with which they sometimes feud). Organizationally, Martelly plans to divide his soldiers into battalions of 255 men (an odd number, but whatever). This means that you could maybe expect to have four battalion (1000 soldiers) on maneuvers at any one time, say two patrolling the border (as opposed to those who just stand at border crossings), and two on training maneuvers (if we're lucky).
Each moving group probably travels in commercial vehicles that hold five people (since we're cheap), or 200 vehicles. Because the terrain is rough, each vehicle probably only gets about fifteen mpg at best, and since they're driving up to eight hours a day (say at average 20mph in rough terrain), they would use a bit over ten gallons per day. Let's round that up to 15 due to the rough terrain. That's 3000 gallons per day for all 200 vehicles, and at a cost of $5/gallon (let's include the cost to import and distribute it, while excluding taxes), $15,000 a day, or $5.5 million a year. And that's just on gas.
And now we come to building and facility maintenance (equipment maintenance is somewhere else). Everyone whose ever run a building knows that this costs a lot of money? How much money? Well, let's assume it comes out to about $1000 per soldiers. That's rather expensive, but I want to make sure to overbudget in the morass that is the Haitian construction industry. There's another $3.5 million.
And now we come to a final problem. Modern armies run on electricity, but that's one thing Haiti doesn't have a lot of. Bases out on the border will have even less, unless they bring it in themselves. Assuming they can find diesel generators for themselves at 0.4 Liters/kWh efficiency, if each soldier uses an average of 1 kWh/day (enough to keep a 60W light bulb on for 16 hours and 40 minutes), then 3500 soldiers use 1.28 MWh of electricity per year, or 500,000 liters of fuel. Just to account for the fact that this is barely enough to run anything, let's do some juggling, guess that we can buy diesel for $1 a liter, but that we actually need about double that amount (1,000,000 liters). That gets us to another $1 million a year.
So, counting only three basic boxes, our operational costs come to $10 million a year, and 65% of that estimate is fuel. And that's making a lot of wild guesses along the way. Doubtless there are huge chunks of money that I've just missed, or don't know enough to include.
Procurement and Equipment Maintenance
So far, we've spent $18.25 million of our $25 million budget. Let's say I've undercounted (by about 10%), and really we've spent $20 million (give us a buffer for what I have forgotten). That gives us $5 million a year for two years, or $10 million to buy all those little toys that we get to show off at parades.
First, we need equipment for individual soldiers. Each soldier should probably be assumed to get a uniform a year, due to wear and tear and such. Because we're a small third world military, we can forego the dress uniform and just use a field uniform. Since camo uniforms are basically international, let's guess that we're paying US prices, and say about $70 for the coat and pants, and probably about $30 more for various accessories. Let's add a $50 pair of cheap boots (I hope that somewhere on Haiti you can get cheap footwear), and another $50 for the mess kit, compass, hat, and various other pieces of kit that will undoubtedly be broken every year. That comes up to $200 a year (I make wild guesses suspiciously round), but that's a cost that comes up every year, and runs to $700,000 for the whole force.
Oh wait, I forgot something, weapons. Unlike Afghanistan, not everyone can be expected to provide their own AK-47. How much does an AK-47 cost? Well, in the 2001-05 period, the Small Arms Survey claimed that they cost about $250 a piece on Haiti. That seems sort of expensive, so we're going to do a bit of bargain shopping. It turns out that they only cost about $180 in that same period on Cuba. Also the same on Grenada. Let's guess about $200 for a Kalashnikov variant in reasonable condition. So there's another $700,000, but for an equipment purchase.
Now we get to squad-level purchases. Usually the size of a squad is based on how many people you need to accomplish a specific set of tasks. In our case, it's going to be based on how many people we can squeeze into the cars we buy. Now, what we want are readily available off-road vehicles, SUVs probably, where the international market for spare parts (and more vehicles) is robust. We agree to take a hit to mobility by buying vehicles that aren't that off-road, and look through the vehicle catalogs. There are a lot of 4x4 SUVs with a five person carrying capacity on the market, going for about $30,000. Okay, so one vehicle for every five people, plus reserve vehicles, would be about 1000 SUVs, which would be about...
$30 million? That's not only too much, that's completely out of our budget range. Okay, so much for organic equipment. Obviously not every squad can have their own car. We'll have to implement a motor pool, where only those units currently on deployment or training (1000 soldiers, or 200 vehicles) will have vehicles. So with only 200 SUVs, and maybe 50 spares for replacements and emergencies, that leaves us with a cost of...$7.5 million? Well, there's the rest of our budget.
Why the hell does this cost so much? What do these SUVs come with? Power door locks? Power windows? Automatic transmission? Satellite radio? Voice-activated controls? WTF? How do real militaries justify paying for all of this? Oh wait, because real militaries buy HMMWVs, MRAPs, and other vehicles that cost over $100k a pop. So, assume we can negotiate with a factory somewhere and get the super-stripped down version of these vehicles. Maybe get a deal in bulk. What does that get us down to? About $20,000 maybe? So $5 million, just on SUVs. Wonderful.
Of course, we're not quite done yet. Our vehicles have to have one more modification, figure $100 a vehicle to install a CB radio or something. It's not very good, but it will let us have some communications. Plus we might want one in more of our base facilities, and backups. Figure 500 units total. Hopefully just $50,000.
And now we're down to our bases. Let's say we build three of them on the border, and two inland. Guessing at land costs from completely inaccurate sources, let's imagine that we can buy 50-100 acres our in the back country in Haiti (away from the coast) for, say, $100,000, so we spend $500,000 just on the land for our facilities. Now we have to pay for what goes on it.
What goes on it? Too much to count. Let's just say it'll eat up any money we have left. Don't believe me? Well, we said we would have diesel generators (that's about $100,000 a generator, used). And we have lots of vehicles, so we'll have to have a shop for them, with tools to work on them with. And how about gasoline? Are we going to have gasoline pumps or do we refill our vehicles with loose gas cans and a funnel and accept the risk of a catastrophic explosion? How about communications? We can't afford a real radio system, so we'll have to put together a HAM radio or something for each base, with extra wattage to talk to the rest of the country. What about toilets? What about water? Water purifiers? Sewage lines? Septic tanks? Or are we just going for the old "buckets upstream, toilets downstream" approach? What happens at night? Are we going to have any lights in this place?
And that's not all. Now that we've bought all this fancy equipment we've got to maintain it. A good rule of thumb I use is that the cost for a piece of equipment is 10% or the original cost per year for parts (we already pay for labor), and 10% a year towards replacement, or 20%. This may seem a bit extreme, but remember that we're driving our SUVs 70,000 or more miles a year. We'll be lucky to get away with just that, even if it does budget for replacing them every ten years. So, we bought $5.75 million dollars worth of bulk equipment, which leaves us with an annual reoccuring expense of about $1.15 million. Per year. Every year. For as long as you want to keep it.
So, altogether we spent basically $7 million, and we haven't even built our bases yet (we did account for maintaining them though). That gives us $3 million to build five facilities, and then buy all the other miscellaneous goods, medical supplies, paint, technical supplies, computers for the administrators, flashlights, power cords, rope, trail-blazing and trail-making tools, chains, shovels, individual radios, binoculars, cameras, hell, even blankets for when we're out of radio range and have to use smoke signals. Which won't work because we didn't budget anything for matches.
And that doesn't count expensive things we left out, like tow trucks (because you can't run 100 SUVs through rough terrain for 75,000 miles a year without having an accident, or X-ray machines, because when you have a broken bone sometimes you really want one, or GPS border demarcation, because it's really, really embarrassing (not to mention expensive) to accidentally invade your neighbors.
What Did We Get?
And so our $50 million investment bought us 500 soldiers at any one time on the border, and another 500 ready for emergencies, traveling in decent vehicles, but possessed of only one pair of boots at a time (probably), one BDU-style uniform (not very waterproof), one AK-47 (without ammunition, because we didn't budget for that), who live in huts made out of corrugated metal (blew the construction funds on proper sewage), but at least are reasonably well paid by local standards, and well maintained. As far as third-world armies go, this one is probably happier then most, but still as expensive as hell.
What We Should Learn
First, militaries are expensive. For countries like Haiti, they're almost a luxury item. There's a reason people say that defense spending doesn't help the economy much, because it doesn't. You end up paying a tremendous amount of money for consumables like fuel, and for building large structures in the middle of nowhere that have no further purpose.
Second, you can see where the temptation to cut goes. Despite the fact that we have a lot of manpower for a small country with only one land border, the costs for manpower for a third-world country are probably minimal (as opposed to costs in the US or Europe). But there must be a giant temptation to cut into pieces of the budget. $5.5 million for gasoline? What if we only paid $1 million for gasoline a year? What if we only bought 100 vehicles instead of 200? Well, then our soldiers would be less mobile, would have to do everything on foot, and would spend a lot more time sitting around at base, but they would be cheaper. Why have electricity and generators at the bases? And why have sewage? Can't they just dig trenches? And why multiple bases? Why not a big one, near the capital in case I want to go see what they're up to?
Pretty soon you save a lot of money, at the cost of having a collection of bored young men sitting around a dilapidated, shantytown base with nothing to do but play with guns. If there's anything more detrimental to long-term national stability, it has to involve narcotics.
So if you ever, God forbid, find yourself in control of Haiti, spend all your money on some public housing and a sewage treatment plant. It's hardly glamorous, but your people will thank you in the long run.