Man Days

Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
--Ozymandius, Percy Bysshe Shelley

I don't need no arms around me
And I don't need no drugs to calm me
I have seen the writing on the wall
Don't think I need anything at all
--The Wall, Pink Floyd
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The military's concept of Man Days is an estimate of how many days it would take to complete a specific project. An example: A Corps Support Annex to an Operations Order could take 20 man days to complete. Let us extend the idea to MAN YEARS.

An example of the application of this larger concept would be the Pyramids. How many man years were used to execute that monumental task? It is estimated that it took 100,000 men decades to complete the task. Let us apply this concept to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Let us use 1o years as the length of the Afghan War, another great desert project undertaken with a correspondingly large number of man years. If the average yearly strength was 100,000 soldiers and 35,000 contractors, the total is 135,000 x 10 = 1.35 Million man years expended only in military effort in Afghanistan. Add in NATO, the United Nations, and political man years into the mix and the figure is even more impressive.

Let us add in Iraq, with approximately the same Man Year outlay for, say, eight years. To arrive at the correct military burden at any given time, we must add in the personnel stationed in the Philippines, the Horn of Africa, the Trans Sahara, and all of the world's other hot spots.

Up against our current outlay of Man Years, the pyramids seem like an easy project, as it was finite. And they actually built something which has lasted for a few millennia.

Ultimately, it is all sand in the wind.