It occurs to me, reflecting on the Pentagon's decision to extend Army deployments from 12 to 15 months, that the U.S. social cost of the "surge" is being undercounted. Of course there is a dispute between Congress and the Administration about the true financial cost to the government; and that's just current appropriation cost, it doesn't count the future implied costs like caring for more soldiers with brain injuries that Stiglitz and Bilmes have called attention to.
But even the Stiglitz/Bilmes considerations lead to an undercount of the social cost since it just considers the financial costs. (S/B consider other things besides costs to the govt, like increases in the price of oil.)
In particular: what is the uncompensated cost to soldiers and their families of three months' additional deployment?
Clearly, it's not zero. Being stationed in a combat zone entitles you to combat pay, but if this fully compensated for the additional deployment, soldiers and their families would be indifferent between having their deployments extended or not. Skimming the press coverage on military families' reactions to the extended deployments, I think we can rule that out.
Has anyone looked at this?
If not, how could we estimate it?
We could look at the gap between the combat pay and what these soldiers would be earning if they remained in the U.S. Clearly not the right number, but a number worth knowing.
We could look at the cost of life literature and say that being additionally deployed is like losing 3 months of your life. Clearly this would be an overestimate, because you get to do some being-alive things while you're deployed, like receive letters from your family, but I think everyone would agree that the average soldier who is additionally deployed loses a huge chunk of their "being-alive" benefit. And then there is the risk of death and serious injury and fear of same which we know is not going to be anywhere near fully compensated.
We could look at the cost-of-commuting literature. That, presumably, would give us an underestimate.
We could look at the criminal justice literature. Surely some "conservative" economists, arguing for longer prison sentences as a deterrent to crime, have come up with an estimate of the cost of being in prison.
And we could look at the contingent valuation literature. Surely, somewhere in there, young, able-bodied people have been asked a question similar to, how much would we have to pay you to deprive you of freedom for three months? How much would you pay to avoid such an outcome?
Ideas? References?
P.S. When Union soldiers bought their way out of the Civil War, how much did they pay?
P.P.S. When Americans went to college to get draft deferments during Vietnam, how much did they pay to do so? (There was that study that showed a spike in enrollments corresponding to birthdays/draft lottery...)