You are so stuck on body count. If you think the 156 lost are the only casualties of the Afghan conflict then you have much to learn. The numbers for the military who have come back with debilitating wounds, visible and invisible is much higher than that, numberings approached 2000 at the end of last year. The invisible ones were ignored by the DOD and VA in the past, but not now, thank goodness. The cost to treating those wounds must be taken into account in the budgets. More of the injured will surface in the future. As someone posted earlier the older the veterans get, the more it costs for each one.
There are over 700,000 vets in Canada and only 226,000 are actually clients of VAC. It's often quoted that 1500 vets die every month, but that number com es from the 700,000 not the 226,000.