How many paper bags does a commissary use?

Robert Reich's book, Locked In The Cabinet, is full of amusing anecdotes -- he's a very funny man. He touches more than once on the Defense Department and the immense power in the government of the Pentagon.

Anyway, Prof Reich is not a big fan of the "Defense" budget. It puzzled him, apparently, that we wasted so much money on this useless pursuit and why somebody didn't do something about it. Then one day it dawned on him: The defense budget is actually a massive jobs program. It's America's answer to European socialism. Obvious, really, isn't it?

It's actually fun to subscribe to the DoD mailing list so you can see the money flowing. Every day you get an e-mail with the latest awards (or, more likely, the ones that aren't considered Top Secret). You can do it here:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/e-mail.html

Here's a gem from a couple of days ago:

Duro Bag Manufacturing Co., Florence, Ky., was awarded an indefinite delivery requirements type contract with an estimated value of $5,603,930 for delivery of paper grocery bags to commissaries located in the Western Region.  Work will be performed at the contractor's facility and delivery made to the commissary locations in the Defense Commissary Agency, Western Region.  The contract is for a base period starting on May 1, 2006 with a contract completion date of April 30, 2009.  Three offers were received, two awards were made.  An award was also made to Ross and Wallace Paper Products Inc., Hammond, La., a small business for the Eastern Region
commissaries in an estimated amount of $4,183,340. 

If I understand it correctly, this means that these two companies will get $9.8 million for supplying paper grocery bags to commissaries for three years. That's a little over $3 million a year. For paper grocery bags.

As it happens, I looked up the price of Duro grocery bags on the web. Their most expensive bag is offered at $92.28 for 3,000 bags. That's about 3 cents a bag. So the western and eastern commissary regions are buying, at that price, about 318 million paper grocery bags, or 106 million a year. That's assuming they're paying the full price you see on the web and not getting a volume discount.  (I think they should get a volume discount, don't you?) That means they're going to be using 290,976 bags every day.

How much do these damn soldiers eat, anyway? And shouldn't they be in Iraq rather than hanging about our eastern and western commissaries?