host: andrew tilghman, your take? conversation this over the past few weeks to be really interesting. for many months you have had the pentagon talking about the fact that they would really like to keep up to 10,000 troops in afghanistan, to continue to support the afghan army and to conduct limited counterterrorism missions and cells. particularlyan and provennt karzai have difficult to work with. now you are seeing comments from chuck hagel starting to say we might go ahead and pack it up. i think it will be interesting to see, this is such a politically delicate matter. to see where the white house comes down on this. we had a similar conversation to ago as we were packing up from a rack -- from iraq. the issue was whether troops were going to grant immunity from prosecution, and the pentagon agreed they would not leave any troops. so we had a complete withdraw from a rack. it looks like we might be going down that road in afghanistan, too. the next few weeks will be critical to that discussion because the dod need

andrew tilghman from "military times," walk us through what he said and what are the actual costs of personnel for our military. guest: the secretary is certainly right that the cost of military personnel has grown a lot over the past 10 years. there have been a lot of pay raises, particularly in the early part of past decade were the wars in iraq and afghanistan were at their peak. congress has granted additional benefits to military personnel. but what the secretary does not talk about is the percentage of that growth relative to everything else. what i found is that when i dug into the budget documents from the dod website, really what i found was that personnel costs are indeed rising, but so is the money for operations. so is spending on buying new weapons systems, and so is spending on research and development. the pie is growing at a very great rate, but each slice of the pie, personnel and everything else, is not really growing at a significant rate over any of the other ones. host: we would love to hear from you. many servicemembers coming home are military, our military is