13 March 2005

Support

I was reading recently about the government's reluctance to reimburse soldiers for their personal purchases of armor and supplies.

The difficulties are obvious. At what point are supplies justified? A system of validating purchases, and defining acceptable categories, after-the-fact is filled with opportunity for abuse and chaos. The government has to be a watchdog on what the soldiers purchased, and yet the government should have made the purchases themselves. Support has been turned into scrutiny--a scrutiny that exists to protect the public from frivolous government spending.

Looks like nobody wins except for those whose only goal was to get troops into Iraq in the first place.

[ posted by sstrader on 13 March 2005 at 3:37:52 PM in Politics ]