US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4T dollars | Hacker News Reader

US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4T dollars

watson.brown.edu

103 pointsnibepins60 comments

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Summary:

- Over 801,000 people have died due to direct war violence, and several times as many indirectly

- Over 335,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting

- 37 million - the number of war refugees and displaced persons

- The US federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $6.4 trillion dollars

- The US government is conducting counterterror activities in 80 countries

- The wars have been accompanied by violations of human rights and civil liberties, in the US and abroad

Before each war, leaders should sit down, write down hypothetical outcomes and see if they still feel it makes sense. Then, after the conflict, come back and see how their estimates were. I'm hopeful that people would be more prudent if they could foresee the impact of their decisions.

Would it ever make sense? This is not how greed and hatred work

They do that, it happens that

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

It reminds me of a recent quote I saw in the news:

"The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t [in love with me], because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy, but we're getting out of the endless wars."

That same person boasts about an increased pentagon budget. Where does he think that money goes?

It doesn’t seem like either leading candidate has taken a position on the military-industrial complex.

The fetishization (despite the massive reduction in the percentage of the population who have served) of the military in the US makes it really hard to take a strong stance against the MIC as a politician (aiming for the presidency, representatives and some senate seats have more freedom here).

Congress less so: Rockwell was the pioneer in making sure every congressional district had a contractor or manufacturer making a part of the B-1 bomber to keep congress from cancelling it.

>“We’ve totally rebuilt the military — $2.5 trillion,” he said, going on to talk about a contract awarded to that shipbuilding company, Fincantieri Marinette Marine, “to build the next generation of guided missile frigates for the United States Navy.”

>He then mentioned missiles, rockets and tanks, saying: “What we had were great people in the military, but they weren’t given the right equipment, so now they are. Two and a half trillion dollars. … We’ve invested the $2.5 trillion

Quote from whom? Non USA person here.

Someone is sneaking in pro-Trump commentary/politics.

Of course Trump is like the infinite monkey matrix. Wait a bit and he'll adopt your political position.

If they made their projections public that might cut down on the racket aspect.

But they did make their projections public.

"VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY: My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3080244/ns/meet_the_press/t/transc...

Seems like you're presuming too much strategic thinking on the part of our political leadership.

I think it's presumptive to assume that the people who are paraded around for the circus that is politics are the strategic leadership.

I agree. One of the problems that arises, however, is that wars get passed down from administration to administration, and once that happens, nobody wants to be the one to pull out and have that on their legacy.

It happened in Vietnam, and it's happening today in the Middle East. In both cases, the government knew early on that "total victory" was not possible, yet administrations kept pressing on. As long as leaders fear the political fallout of such major decisions, they will act in their best interest, even if it costs thousands of young lives.

Those totals include all deaths in the region which includes ISIS and other conflicts - important info to include

"Bush Fired Larry Lindsey for Saying the War Might Cost $100 Billion" https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/bush-fired-larr.html

"On September 15, 2002, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lindsey estimated the high limit on the cost of the Bush administration's plan in 2002 of invasion and regime change in Iraq to be 1–2% of GNP, or about $100–$200 billion. Mitch Daniels, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, discounted this estimate as 'very, very high' and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated that the costs would be under $50 billion. Rumsfeld called Lindsey's estimate 'baloney'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_B._Lindsey#Cost_of_th...

How many trillions of dollars has the USA saved on oil costs by keeping the middle east in a constant state of turmoil, though?

https://www.cfr.org/timeline/oil-dependence-and-us-foreign-p...

That's a great question

It would have been much cheaper to buy off the Hussein family, and play them against the Iranians if cheap oil was the objective.

yeesh... I mean, not that that data point isn't important but fucking hell is that grim.

It can't be all that many, since the US is now a net exporter.

20 years later, after importing around 4 billion net barrels per year for that period. We now had seven months where we shipped around ten million more barrels per month than we imported. Back to a net importer as of May though.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

Each trillion dollars is about $10,000 per US tax payer and turmoil typically means less production, which means lower supply and higher prices.

The US would have done shale oil more quickly.

But thank you for pointing out that the military is a gigantic subsidy for the oil industry.

I believe the $6.4T doesn't include the >$1T spent domestically on security theater (TSA), NatSec tech used for low level crimes (eg: Fusion Centers) and bulk surveillance of Americans not suspected of a crime.

Yes, this refers only to waging war on foreigners. Waging war on Americans has its own budget.

A little arithmetic:

6.4T USD / 128M US households = 50K USD/household

50K USD/household/ 9 years = 5.5K USD/household/yr

That's pretty significant when you see that median household income across the nation ranged from $38,000/yr - $68,000/yr [1]. 5% - 13% of your paycheck going to a war

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

Thanks for the additional context, the numbers are even more astonishing when compared to the median income

And despite all of the efforts the adversaries haven‘t effectively been taken down, the world is not a more secure place, the reputation of the US has taken damage, in a few years the next IS and taliban are coming, under another name.

Of note is that Sept 11 was an extreme, one-off outlier.

From 1975 to today, the US has been at historically low-levels of domestic terrorism. Five years prior (in 1970), the US reported 400 domestic terror attacks/year [1].

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers leak exposed massive & systemic FBI wrongdoing. Afterward, the agency was reformed and re-tasked into a law enforcement mission (until 2012). By 1975, domestic terrorism had sharply fallen & has remained at that low level since.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/11/nine-... [orig data source: Rand Corp]

It's worse than that. The Taliban is as strong as it ever was and there weren't groups like ISIS before these wars. Al-Qaeda had hundreds of members before 9/11, ISIS had tens to hundreds of thousands. Our "adversaries," generally people (admittedly not the nicest people) who want their sovereignty, have grown exponentially.

> And despite all of the efforts the adversaries haven‘t effectively been taken down

Some might argue that that wasn't even the objective and that the take down of adversaries was only a narrative created to justify the start of these wars.

The point of the war was never to accomplish anything. It was to burn money.

A mechanism to transfer money from people's paychecks to defense contracting companies.

3 million veterans of these wars will require up to 80 years of veteran pension, health and disability services.

WWII had 16 million veterans and Vietnam 9 million.

So roughly 100 were killed for every american dead in 9/11. Thas's a harsh punishment, US certainly doesn't know what mercy is . Edit: missed by two orders of magnitude. Still, a lot. Also: not a blame, just observations.

The US backed the jihadists (mujahidden) against the secular Saur government in the 1970s and 1980s, so that blew back from that too. Along with the US military opening foreign bases in the Arabian dictatorship a decade before 9/11 (military bases closed two years after 9/11).

The vast majority of these deaths are due to internal strife, they weren't killed on the orders of the US.

In hindsight, the second war in Iraq was a disaster of course, but why blame the US for every bad part of the outcome? What about the Iraqis? What about Iran? If the US hadn't started that war, the regime may well have collapsed during the Arab spring.

As for Afghanistan, that conflict started well before US involvement after 9/11.

No blame, just numbers.

You call it "harsh punishment" as if the US intended these consequences, because it knows "no mercy". That sounds like blame to me.

>In hindsight, the second war in Iraq was a disaster of course, but why blame the US for every bad part of the outcome? What about the Iraqis? What about Iran?

The US destroyed their lives. Their communities were destroyed, their jobs vanished, and their loved ones were dead. Many certainly reacted despicably, but the US deserves most of the blame.

>If the US hadn't started that war, the regime may well have collapsed during the Arab spring.

One of the major triggers for the Arab Spring was the US diplomatic cable leaks, and much of the military power any insurgents had was a result of US backing. Without the War on Terror, the Arab Spring would have been a completely different thing if it happened at all.

> The US destroyed their lives. Their communities were destroyed, their jobs vanished, and their loved ones were dead. Many certainly reacted despicably, but the US deserves most of the blame.

The US gets blamed for the deaths that occured, but it won't get praise for the deaths that may have been prevented. Consider who Saddam Hussein was, how he came to power, how he stayed in power and what his dictatorship was like.

Does he strike you as someone who can maintain a dynasty? In a country like Iraq, where the regime is Sunni despite being in the minority, where the Shia majority is being supported by neighboring Iran?

Consider what the Iraqi military could have done under Saddam Hussein to its own people, in the case of a civil war. Consider that Saddam Hussein didn't hesitate to kill over 100,000 Kurds and Assyrians.

> One of the major triggers for the Arab Spring was the US diplomatic cable leaks, and much of the military power any insurgents had was a result of US backing. Without the War on Terror, the Arab Spring would have been a completely different thing if it happened at all.

That almost sounds like your average dictator blaming all civil unrest on "foreign meddling". Sure, you can blame the US or Wikileaks for exposing these regimes, or for running a couple of covert support operations, but it also takes a huge part of the people to actually do the uprising.

>Consider who Saddam Hussein was, how he came to power, how he stayed in power and what his dictatorship was like

Though Hussein's power grab was later, let's not forget the US support for the Ba'ath party takeover. They were willing to purge communists, they must be good guys.

Then we gave Hussein billions in aid, because if they're willing to kill Iranians they must be good guys. Even after hearing he was gassing Kurds, we tried to blame it on Iran and continued aiding him.

>Does he strike you as someone who can maintain a dynasty?

His reign, as terrible as much of it was, at least kept the country functioning. Succession likely would have led to problems, but it's nonsense to say that justifies US action. We ensured it caused major issues to avoid a risk of it causing major issues?

>That almost sounds like your average dictator blaming all civil unrest on "foreign meddling". Sure, you can blame the US or Wikileaks for exposing these regimes, or for running a couple of covert support operations, but it also takes a huge part of the people to actually do the uprising

The US is not the main reason the people were willing to rise up, but US action unquestionably influenced when and how they rose up. If you change your original sentence I quoted to "the regime may well have collapsed over the past twenty years," I think we're in agreement.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily in favor of any of these foreign interventions. I just don't accept that the US gets so much blame just for being involved at some level in a conflict that they have some strategic interest in.

We're talking about the Iraq War here, they deserve far more blame than they get.

From the point of view of economics I suspect this is akin to a stimulus package because, again I suspect, that the bulk of that sum of money goes to American contractors and American personel.

About 10 minutes after this submission made to the top of HN's homepage, it disappeared from the homepage

It's political content, it is almost certainly being flagged by a lot of people.

That’s because it breaks HN rules

I guess HN has some un-utterable numbers of it's own.

Its right in the footer on every page

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Before 2000 we were spending ~$250B/y on defense budget. That alone would be $5T since 9/11.

Less money than the Fed has pumped into the economy over the same time period.

Much of the reason for it is to pump money into the economy via Raytheon, Lockheed Martin etc. It all ultimately boils down to money.

That is bullshit.

Everyone in the world knows that most dangerous countries are North Korea, Iran and Russia. So that US has to spend enormous amount of money to protect themselves.

I woke up yesterday to a breaking news that the Trump admin announced new troop withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan and was really encouraged.

War is one of those things I’ve gone from hawk to dove on as I’ve become older. I want a total drawdown in the entire Middle East, and I would love to see the majority of our overseas bases closed.

Reminder: Trump is the first president since Reagan to not start any wars.

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