Why are you laughing. That's $250M in entertainment that doesn't need to be shipped to a military base. Assuming it isn't all downloadable media that's a lot of physical goods that doesn't need to be inspected, shipped, and inspected to remote Military bases.
And if you're running the gambling halls it's going to be a lot harder for a soldier to get into a compromising amount of debt.
Besides the $100M a year in "profit" I'd wager these machines generate even more in cost savings.
I mostly posited it as a joke for winking at the fictitious studies, but yah the comparative cost to alternatives may be not too shabby after all. "Compared to what" is often a question left as an afterthought. I try to think of alternatives right off the bat. But once you start diluting a story against reasonable alternatives and see where a decision landed in the valley of options the story loses some of its outrage edge.
If this article was written by almost any other news org I would say "compared to what" would be some attempt to privatize the entertainment so someone could make a profit, luckily the article seems genuinely interested in the harm the machines are creating for the military.