Casualty of War: The US Economy

July 23rd, 2005 at 07:48 Björn Hallberg

Getting strangled by the military-industrial complex.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over the next 10 years. That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact.

“Osama (bin Laden) doesn’t have to win; he will just bleed us to death,” said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. “He’s well on his way to doing it.”

[...] the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars. According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion. Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.

Since the shooting war in Iraq began in March, 2003, 1,763 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, and at least 13,336 have been wounded, according to data collected by the Iraq Index, which is assembled by the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Unlike the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, the U.S. has had to bear nearly all this war’s costs on its own. The Congressional Research Service reported that, as of early June, 26 countries had military forces in Iraq, but they make up a small fraction of the U.S. troop levels, about 140, 000; another 11 countries have already left Iraq. Just for the current fiscal year, the administration has received $107 billion in special appropriations, about $87 billion of which is directly related to military operations, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Most of the remainder has been spent on training and equipping Iraqi forces.

U.S. taxpayers must also cover other costs. For instance, the United States is spending $658 million to construct an embassy in Baghdad, which, with initial operating costs, could bring the expense of this super-secure facility to nearly $1.3 billion by the time it opens in several years.

But the situation is actually much worse in reality. Apart from the Iraq-Afghan drain, the US military has in the last couple of years increased its defense budget tremendously. For FYI 2005 it is $400 billion THAT WE KNOW OF and it will increase even more for FYI 2006. In fact the US is approaching ROW (Rest Of the World) spending on defense. And these figures do obviously not include money for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, i.e. actual conflicts. Add to this the cost and effects of increased privatization of the armed forces and even the Cato institute and Heritage foundation, as is apparent in the article, are getting cold feet.

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