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The Intercept reports:
The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report [PDF] [...] from Brown University's Watson Institute. That's the highest estimate yet.
Neta Crawford of Boston University, the author of the report, included interest on borrowing, future veterans needs, and the cost of homeland security in her calculations.
The amount of $4.79 trillion, "so large as to be almost incomprehensible", she writes, adds up like this:
- The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and other overseas operations already cost $1.7 trillion between 2001 and August 2016 with $103 billion more requested for 2017
- Homeland Security terrorism prevention costs from 2001 to 2016 were $548 billion.
- The estimated DOD base budget was $733 billion and veterans spending was $213 billion.
- Interest incurred on borrowing for wars was $453 billion.
- Estimated future costs for veterans' medical needs until the year 2053 is $1 trillion.
- And the amounts the DOD, State Department, and Homeland Security have requested for 2017 ($103 billion).
Crawford carried out a similar study[PDF] in June 2014 that estimated the cost of war at $4.4 trillion.
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Total Cost of USA's Wars Since 2001 Approaches $5 Trillion
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You recoil from the crude; you tend naturally toward the exquisite.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:20PM
I thought Russia was where empires go to die.
The Swedes, French, and Germans. Arguably the Vikings handled it pretty well without collapsing... or did they? So 3 to 4 out of 4. You could get really meta and call out USSR as #5 but ... 3 out of 3 isn't too controversial. The Swedes should be embarrassed at being surprised by the whole "winter" thing, although arguably what they did was simply bite off more than they could chew and the climate was irrelevant to that.
Afghanistan has 8 invasions on its wikipedia page and the only eventual success was the Caliphate which did the typical Afghanistan thing of "hi we're the Afghanistan Welcome Wagon and here you can have a city we don't want anyway, we'll move to the mountains and guerilla warfare kill you for all eternity until you leave, now have a nice day" and then the rebels bled them for twelve centuries from the mountains until the last holdouts were finally wiped out a bit more than a century ago. So yeah to "win" in Afghanistan all we gotta to is keep up "The Surge" for another eleven centuries or so just like the Caliphate did. You could argue they never controlled the Afghani's anyway, they just got the city slickers to mostly go to mosque and follow most of the laws some of the time, it wasn't quite "Romans conquer Carthage" type of invasion. The mongols were kinda the same situation. Like when my kids argue in the car and I let one of them become "the president of the back seat" they're pretty happy about the job title but they don't really have executive power as power is conventionally understood. Arguably nobody has ever really run all of Afghanistan entirely even the Taliban never entirely controlled the whole place at any given moment. Not like India or western countries. More like American wild west. If it were not for all the recent unpleasantness and 9/11 and all that I think Americans would favorably compare our somewhat mythological "wild west" to Afghanistan's actual history. Its an interesting country to read about, preferably from a great distance. Well the USA hasn't collapsed entirely yet, just on the downward slope, but you can realistically argue at least 6, 7, maybe 8, out of 8. 7 out of 8 isn't too controversial as long as we don't discuss who the 8th was/is.