Not only is the cost noteworthy but it appears that there are attempts now to “lock in” contractors as a permanent element of the total force.
Latest Estimate Pegs Cost of Wars at Nearly $5 Trillion
Naomi LaChance @ The Intercept
The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.
There are even more costs of war that Crawford does not include, she writes. For instance, “I have not included here state and local government expenses related to medical care of veterans and homeland security. Nor do I calculate the macro economic costs of war for the U.S. economy.” She also notes that she does not add the cost of war for other countries, nor try to put a dollar figures on the cost in human lives.
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Phi Beta Iota: The graphic below, created by Medard Gabel in 2007, remains the gold standard for comparing the cost of war versus the cost of peace. War continues to dominate our lives because war produces concentrated profit for the banks and corporations that have bribed and blackmailed governments into submission. Peace, while much more profitable than war, distributes the profits across the entirety of all economies and societies. That is not attractive to banks and corporations seeking to maximize their extraction of value from the whole.
See Also:
Peace Intelligence @ Phi Beta Iota
