[RangerScience]

Fuck that, I do, and it'd be pretty goddamn cheap. Likely benefits are training / practice, unlikely benefits are deeper anthropological and jungle-life (why those plants?) understanding, and the Pascal's Mugger benefit is "huh magic...?". And then there's the weird side-benefit of encouraging scientific investigation of all things.

Seriously, the biggest expense is going to be shipping the researchers.

[Gravityloss]

Would it be cheaper to send soldiers out with vests or gri-gri? Probably in the west at least, vests are more cost effective. If a soldier is worth a million, one in hundred soldiers is saved by a vest during their career and a vest costs a thousand dollars, it's a ten to one return. But somewhere else, the inputs might be quite different.