{"id":19434,"date":"2020-01-19T03:39:11","date_gmt":"2020-01-19T08:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=19434"},"modified":"2020-03-30T06:34:19","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T10:34:19","slug":"usa-adding-up-the-cost-of-our-never-ending-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=19434","title":{"rendered":"USA: Adding up the Cost of Our Never-Ending Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY .<\/p>\n

An analysis described by Mark Thompson for the Project on Government Oversight<\/a><\/p>\n

Wars cost too much. That\u2019s really not a surprise. The surprise is how much more they cost than we\u2019ve been told.<\/p>\n

It might help to think of the nation\u2019s post-9\/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq like a pair of icebergs. The Pentagon has a web page that tells us how much we\u2019ve each paid for the wars. But that only tells us how much of those icebergs we can see above the waves. While it includes totals for war fighting, it doesn\u2019t track the Pentagon\u2019s bigger war budget, interest paid on money we\u2019ve borrowed to fight the wars, veterans\u2019 care, and other ancillary costs. There\u2019s a whole lot more hidden beneath the waves. The real issue isn\u2019t whether the cost of war is high; the issue is why the U.S. government keeps under-estimating it, and why U.S. citizens and taxpayers keep tolerating it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nDirect spending by the Pentagon on the nation\u2019s post-9\/11 wars, shown in red, accounts for only 36 percent of their total cost.\u00a0(Chart:\u00a0United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9\/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion, page 6, by Neta C. Crawford for the Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University)<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

The cost versus benefit of the nation\u2019s post-9\/11 wars was highlighted December 9 when the Washington Post began publishing a blockbuster series detailing how poorly the war in Afghanistan is going. The series is based on more than 400 internal government interviews that the Post largely pried from the congressionally created and independent Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction under the Freedom of Information Act. The stories show how U.S. government officials have misled the American public over the past 18 years by publicly declaring how well the war was going while privately acknowledging the opposite.<\/p>\n

It echoes much of the analysis on Afghanistan we\u2019ve done regularly here at the Military Industrial Circus (May 2017\u2019s \u201cWhat kind of military willingly walks onto a perpetual treadmill when the chance of prevailing is next to nil?\u201d) about the rampant truth-fudging (August 2017\u2019s \u201cOne can only take the constant spinning for so long before becoming dizzy and cynical over can-do officers who can\u2019t-do.\u201d), the hiding of key indicators about the war\u2019s progress from the American people who are paying and dying for it (November 2017\u2019s \u201cWhen things are going well, there\u2019s no shutting up the Pentagon.\u201d), and the blindness of our national leaders through three administrations (last March\u2019s \u201cAmerican hubris is always amazing to see, especially in hindsight.\u201d).<\/p>\n

For those too young to remember, the nation\u2019s seemingly never-ending post-9\/11 wars began as an invasion of Afghanistan. It was designed to crush its Taliban-run government for offering sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to the 9\/11 attacks. But it quickly morphed into a \u201cGlobal War on Terrorism\u201d that has involved U.S. military action in about 80 nations. In 2003, the U.S. also invaded Iraq, arguing\u2014wrongly as it turned out\u2014that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and played a role in the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n

The global war on terrorism has killed 7,028 Pentagon personnel, both military and civilian, since 9\/11 (at least 7,800 others, employed by private U.S. contractors, have also died in Afghanistan and Iraq.) But its mission creep has also created a non-nuclear chain reaction: The U.S. repeatedly decided it needed more troops, which has led to more veterans. Many of those heroes thankfully have survived wounds that would have killed them in prior wars. But that will boost the cost of their care for decades to come. The Department of Homeland Security, which the government cobbled together from existing agencies in 2003, was padded out with its own bureaucracy. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development got their own off-budget accounts too. And the federal government began borrowing money to pay for all this.<\/p>\n

You might think, as a taxpayer, that you could just wander over to defense.gov and look up the cost of those two wars. After all, they\u2019ve been the Pentagon\u2019s focus, fiscally and otherwise, for nearly 20 years. But you\u2019d be wrong. The Pentagon, whether reporting on wars or weapons, is remarkably opaque when it comes to spelling out how much they cost. So outsiders have had to step in to make cents of how much our recent wars have cost.<\/p>\n

Even more amazingly after nearly 20 years of war, keeping track of how much the U.S. is spending on the wars may be getting tougher. \u201cIn some instances, DOD, State Department and Department of Homeland Security Budgets are opaque,\u201d notes a recent report by the Costs Of War Project, which consists of a team of about 50 experts. \u201cIndeed, because of recent changes in budgetary labels and accounting at DOD, DHS, and the State Department, understanding the costs of the post-9\/11 wars is potentially even more difficult than in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. has spent an estimated $5.4 trillion on its post-9\/11 war on terror, with an additional $1 trillion due for veterans\u2019 care in the future. (Table: United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9\/11 Wars through FY2020: $6.4 Trillion, page 3, by Neta C. Crawford for the Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University)
\nThose interested in minimizing war\u2019s costs will limit their ledger to what the Pentagon actually is spending on combat. A more complete accounting will add in additional military spending routinely ladled into Pentagon coffers during wartime. A still-fuller accounting will add veterans\u2019 care, homeland security, and interest on the money we\u2019ve borrowed to fight the war.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of wishful thinking involved when the U.S. is thinking of going to war. If the government were simply sloppy and slipshod, its estimates would be both low and high. But invariably, they are low, which suggests there\u2019s a motive to the math: Low-balling the cost of war makes it more likely war will happen.<\/p>\n

The bureaucratic imperative of how the Pentagon buys its wars and weapons is the \u201cbuy-in,\u201d a rosy projection designed to show that the conflict or hardware is a relative bargain. Yet once the war or hardware has achieved escape velocity, its price begins escalating.<\/p>\n

(Article continued on the right column)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Question for this article:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

\n

Does military spending lead to economic decline and collapse?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

(Article continued from the left column)<\/p>\n

The Pentagon argues the nation\u2019s investment in any particular piece of shiny new weapon has grown so massive that abandoning the effort would send those sunk costs spinning down the drain. Likewise, war costs soar because of mission creep\u2014rebuilding Afghanistan instead of simply ousting the Taliban following the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example\u2014and concern that pulling out before achieving victory would mean the lives of those Americans already killed in the effort would have been wasted.<\/p>\n

Of course, no one can predict the final cost of a war before it has begun. Yet before it begins the government tends to speak of a war\u2019s monthly cost. In Iraq, for example, that led to an early claim that the war would cost $2 billion a month, totaling perhaps $50 billion. Those relatively low numbers, in Pentagon terms anyway, grease the skids to war.<\/p>\n

But watch how they grow.<\/p>\n

The litany of minimized post-9\/11 war-cost estimates is long. It got off to an ignoble start when one White House official suggested the Iraq war might cost more than his finger-crossing political masters wanted to admit. In September 2002, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey played the skunk at the Garden of Eden party (Iraq has several sites vying to be the biblical paradise) when he suggestedthe Iraq war\u2019s cost to the U.S. could range between $100 billion and $200 billion. He tried to gussy up his then-exorbitant estimate: \u201cThe successful prosecution of the war,\u201d he argued in the Wall Street Journal, \u201cwould be good for the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Lindsey was unceremoniously combat-booted from the White House three months later. Mitch Daniels, the director of the White House\u2019s Office of Management and Budget at the time, said the war\u2019s cost couldn\u2019t be estimated. But he declaredLindsey\u2019s estimate was \u201clikely very, very high.\u201d<\/p>\n

By January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld uncharacteristically deferred to Daniels\u2019 bean counters when it came to projecting the war\u2019s cost. \u201cWell, the Office of Management and Budget has come up with a number that\u2019s something under $50 billion for the cost,\u201d saidRumsfeld, who seemingly rarely embraced others\u2019 views when he believed strongly in his own.<\/p>\n

In April 2003, just after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the Pentagon saidthe Iraq war would cost about $2 billion a month. But three months later, Rumsfeld raised lawmakers\u2019 eyebrows when he doubledits estimated monthly cost to $3.9 billion (along with nearly $1 billion a month for Afghanistan).<\/p>\n

The avarice avalanche had begun.<\/p>\n

By July 2006, nearly five years after the 9\/11 attacks, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saidCongress \u201chas appropriated about $430 billion to DOD and other government agencies for military and diplomatic efforts in support of GWOT [the Global War on Terrorism].\u201d (You know you\u2019ve reached the Big Time in Washington when your pet project rates its own acronym.) That translated into about $7.4 billion a month.<\/p>\n

But the numbers were squishy. \u201cGAO\u2019s prior work found numerous problems with DOD\u2019s processes for recording and reporting GWOT costs, including long-standing deficiencies in DOD\u2019s financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual cost data, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation,\u201d top U.S. Bean Counter David Walker (officially known as the Comptroller General of the United States, the position that runs the GAO), told a congressional panel. \u201cAs a result, neither DOD nor the Congress reliably know how much the war is costing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s quite a statement coming from the congressional Bookkeeper-in-Chief.<\/p>\n

By 2014, the Congressional Research Service said that the U.S. had spent $1.6 trillion \u201cfor military operations, base support, weapons maintenance, training of Afghan and Iraq security forces, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans\u2019 health care for the war operations initiated since the 9\/11 attacks.\u201d That worked out to about $10.3 billion a month.<\/p>\n

But even that eye-watering sum misses the mark. The Costs of War Project has spent the past decade pawing through government documents to try to tote up the post-9\/11 wars\u2019 total cost. Its latest calculation, released in November, says the U.S. will have spent $5.4 trillion on the global war on terrorism by the end of the current 2020 fiscal year, along with an additional $1 trillion for veterans\u2019 care beyond that. That\u2019s about $20,000 per American.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are many hidden or unacknowledged costs of the United States\u2019 decision to respond to the 9\/11 attacks with military force,\u201d the group, run out of Brown University\u2019s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, says on its website. \u201cWe aim to foster democratic discussion of these wars by providing the fullest possible account of their human, economic, and political costs, and to foster better informed public policies.\u201d The group\u2019s work is largely funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Colombe Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and Boston and Brown universities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe go to war with optimistic assumptions\u201d of duration, cost, and casualties, says Neta Crawford, head of Boston University\u2019s political science department and one of the Costs of War Project\u2019s leaders and author of its latest study. \u201cMost people believe that force is effective, but the history of war is that [winning] doesn\u2019t happen at least half the time,\u201d Crawford told POGO.<\/p>\n

And it isn\u2019t just fusty academics who feel that way. \u201cNo government-wide reporting consistently accounts for both DOD and non-DOD war costs,\u201d advises an April reportfrom the Congressional Research Service. Not only hasn\u2019t the government been able to win its post-9\/11 wars; after nearly two decades it can\u2019t tell us how much it has spent failing to do so.<\/p>\n

Put that in your howitzer and light it.<\/p>\n

The bottom line, so far: According to the Costs of War Project, we\u2019re staring at a $5.4 trillion tab for the post-9\/11 wars, through September 30, 2020, the final day of the current fiscal year.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s an average of $23.7 billion monthly for the past 228 months.<\/p>\n

Something to keep in mind the next time the Pentagon predicts a war is going to cost $2 billion a month.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DISARMAMENT & SECURITY . An analysis described by Mark Thompson for the Project on Government Oversight Wars cost too much. That\u2019s really not a surprise. The surprise is how much more they cost than we\u2019ve been told. It might help to think of the nation\u2019s post-9\/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq like a pair of … Continue reading USA: Adding up the Cost of Our Never-Ending Wars<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,91],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-19434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disarmament","category-north-america","tag-north-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}