What Has Been the Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars?
Email from Winslow Wheeler
This week, as the media runs its displays on America ten years after the 9/11 attacks, there will be references to the dollar costs. A figure some will use is the one trillion dollars President Obama cited as for the war in Iraq. That figure is a gross underestimate.
The war in Iraq and its costs are inseparable from the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and elsewhere. Indeed, when the Defense Department seeks appropriations for them, it does not distinguish the costs by location; nor does Congress in appropriations bills.
Moreover, the DOD costs are hardly the whole story: add costs in the State Department budget for aid to the governments (such as they are) of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
Add also the costs to care for the US veterans of these wars. That would include the care already extended and the care now obligated for the duration of these men's and women's lives.
Add to that the expanded costs of domestic security against terrorism.
Add also the interest we annually pay for the deficit spending that has financed the wars.
In short, if all the wars were to end today without a single penny appropriated for military operations, etc. for the upcoming fiscal year (2012), the federal costs already incurred would be from $3.2 to $3.9 trillion. If the wars were to run their course — as currently (and optimistically) estimated by the Congressional Budget Office — the costs (together with additional interest payments for the required deficit spending out to the year 2020) would come to an additional $1.45 trillion.
All that would make a total cost from $4.7 to $5.4 trillion — assuming everything in the future goes according to plan.
See a breakout of these costs in the summary table of Brown University's Costs of War study. Find that table at http://costsofwar.org/article/
In sum, the costs to be incurred are very roughly five times the $1 trillion President Obama has articulated.
Breaking down some of these costs is also instructive.
The Congressional Research Service has assiduously tracked direct appropriations for DOD (and State Department) expenses for the wars. For the period up to the end of this month (after ten years of wars), CRS records the DOD appropriations for the wars to be $1.2 trillion. (Find the latest CRS study on this at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/
Linda Bilmes of Harvard performed an analysis of the up to $1.4 trillion cost for veterans and their families; find her analysis at http://costsofwar.org/article/
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was not one of Brown University's Costs of War analysts, but he has written incisively about both the federal and the broader economic costs of the wars. Find a summary of his analysis (and links to other useful broader economic analysis of the wars) at http://www.slate.com/id/
There are, of course, other human and moral costs that the Costs of War Study addresses and that others have addressed as well. As the American media cranks it out for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it will eagerly prompt the emotions of the original event. Thinking and reacting that way is precisely how we ended up spending something in excess of $5 trillion and achieved a result that is the solid basis for only an argument — and very little more.
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Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
