For this article, I’ll need you to remember two numbers. 1. $500,000,000 and 2. 60.
I know a good number of you have stopped reading because I put this task to you, but hang tough: this is a team effort.
Let’s start with the first number. $500,000,000 is the number of moneys that the United States has invested in the effort to train moderate Syrian soldiers in order to fight the growing threat of Isis in Syria and the Middle East. This number makes no sense in the political landscape, so I’ll try to put it into perspective.
If you went to a Dollar Store, you could by 500,000,000 things (pre-tax). (Assuming they were all one dollar). If you were buying an Island worth $400,000,000, you could still stop at the Dollar Store afterwards.
Now that we’ve established the sheer scope of that money, let’s deal with the other number you have been tasked to remember.
Sixty. As in, the U.S. effort to train moderate Syrian soldiers has resulted 60 soldiers trained. The hope was to train 5,000, but we have 60. I do not want to get over-technical in this post, but that is 1.2% (source: calculator) of the soldiers that they were hoping would wage anti-jihad against ISIS. Another surprising stat, each one of these soldiers are worth $8,333,333.33 (source: rough estimate).
Now, seeing the military genius of President Obama in years passed, I can confidently say that there is more than meets the eye here. Surely this group of men, smaller than the average attendance of a Christian Death Metal concert, is much more than meets the eye. Here are some possible explanations.
- Have you ever seen the movie the Expendables? Me neither, but I heard a solid summary about it. Perhaps each of these soldiers are the Dolph Lundgren or Mickey Rourke of Syria.
- Some type of Robo-soldier, like the TV show The Million Dollar Man, but because of our crappy healthcare and super inflation, it takes $8.3 mil a man.
- Each of these soldiers received a signing bonus, a early success bonus, a referral bonus, and their first 1,000 years of salary upfront.
- Typical Government idiocracy and waste.
At this point, the Pentagon admits that they are going to no longer try to recruit moderate Syrians, of whom we may have recruited all the ones that aren’t currently refugees in the EU, and they are going to switch gears and teach this group of warriors, the amount of whom could fill two typical classrooms in high school, how to call in air-strikes by the U.S.
Now, that sounds perfect and will definitely defeat President Assad ISIS our hopes for a peaceful Syria, but as a token of goodwill, I have created a list of ideas which we could waste $500,000,000 on more efficiently.
- Offer President Bashar al-Assad $500,000,000 to stop being evil. Honestly, that’s a lot of money.
- Pay the people we have already trained to fight the wars that we are trying to fight through a collection of soldiers smaller than most lines at a Check’n’Cash. (Proxy wars are sooooo ’80s)
- Pay Google $500,000,000 to make all of this go away. (You know as well as I do that they have a secret robot army).
- Pile the $500,000,000 on a Pentagram and burn it to please the Old Ones, asking those deities to destroy our enemies.
- Invest in infrastructure or some other dumb idea.
- Convert the $500,000,000 into Sacagawea dollar coins and literally make it rain on ISIS. (Note: would be pretty awesome.)
Republican Funk 