From Military.com:
“Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost
American Taxpayers $6.4 trillion, Study Finds”
American taxpayers have spent
$6.4 trillion in nearly two decades of post-9/11 wars, which have killed some
800,000 people worldwide, the Cost of Wars Project announced Wednesday. The
numbers reflect the toll of American combat and other military operations
across 80 nations since al-Qaida operatives attacked the World Trade Center in
New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001, launching the United States
into its longest-ever wars aimed at stamping out terrorism worldwide. The
annual spending estimates released Wednesday show a general decline in war
costs in 2019 as U.S. troops face less combat in major war zones such as
Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Still, the estimated price tag for those wars
increased by $500 billion since November 2018, and it has doubled since the
Cost of Wars Project -- a product of Brown University's Watson Institute of
International and Public Affairs and Boston University's Frederick S. Pardee
Center -- first looked at cumulative wartime costs in 2011. Sen. Jack Reed of
Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
praised the workers involved in the project -- 35 scholars, legal experts,
human rights practitioners and physicians. "The budget of the Pentagon is
difficult to weed through is an understatement," Reed said. "My hope
is that this report will continue to inform, educate and serve as a resource as
we consider these wars going forward ... to give us a better sense of the costs
of wars not in a snapshot, but the long-term costs. This should be for us [in
Congress] a guide to our policies, our procedures and actions going
forward." The actual monetary and human costs of these wars is difficult
to discern, said Neta Crawford, the report's author and a Boston University
political science professor, who blasted the lack of budget transparency of
federal institutions including the Pentagon and departments of Veterans Affairs
and Homeland Security. In recent years, Crawford asserted those institutions
have made accessing information on how they spend taxpayer dollars more
difficult, including where money is being spent overseas because items that
were once reported are now "disappearing from the budget." She argued
Wednesday that without proper accounting, the American public cannot shape
informed opinions on the courses of these wars, which are generally viewed as
"winding down" but continue to cost thousands of lives in 2019. The
Pentagon's share of the spending includes the nearly $2 trillion since 2001 in
overseas contingency operations funds, the wartime spending coffers used to
fund most operations in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The Defense
Department has added more than $900 billion to its base budgets since those
operations began, which it likely would not have needed in peacetime, Crawford
said. But the project's cost estimates consider not only Pentagon wartime
spending, but also about $1 trillion in spending on homeland anti-terrorism
measures, $131 billion for State Department wartime spending, $437 billion for
veterans care through fiscal 2020 and $925 billion of interest payments that the
United States will pay on money borrowed to fund those operations. It also
includes a projected price tag of more than $1 trillion in future spending on
medical care through fiscal 2059 for the men and women who have fought these
wars, which is anticipated to grow further, even if the wars were to end in the
next year. "That's a very rough estimate," Crawford said. "I
think it's low balling, honestly." The costs of America's post-9/11 wars
include not only money but the loss of lives, which the report estimated to
have exceeded 800,000 people. That tally includes combatants and noncombatants
in countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The report
outlines the toll on Americans. Since operations were launched in Afghanistan
in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, 7,014 U.S. service members have died in
American wars, 22 Pentagon civilians have been killed, and 7,950 U.S.
contractors have died. Other deaths include more than 12,000 deaths among U.S.
allied troops, 173,000 deaths in the ranks of national military and police
forces, nearly 300,000 enemy fighters killed and more than 310,000 civilian
deaths. Those tallies remain largely incomplete, Crawford said, estimating
civilian deaths in war zones where Americans have operated could be twice those
reported, but were impossible to verify. She urged better transparency from the
Pentagon -- and other federal institutions -- on budget decisions and ongoing
operations in the wars. "There's a lot of blood and treasure spent, but
we're not sure if [the wars] are successful," Crawford said, highlighting
recent Pentagon estimates of number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan that
show similar strength as it held in 2001 and estimates of Islamic State
fighters in Iraq and Syria that show the group might still boast 35,000 to
100,000 fighters following its loss of territory earlier this year. "So
how successful is the strategy and how successful could it be?" she asked.
"... We can't assess in some instances what those answers are."
^ While it is important to know
the facts (ie. the monetary cost as well as the human cost) of the War on
Terrorism it is also important to know how many terrorist attacks were stopped
around the world and an estimated number of how many lives were saved around
the world, etc. You can not simply look at a Dollar Amount and see the whole
picture. One thing that is clear in the 18 years since 9-11 is that the
American soldier (along with our allies around the world) have done more to
keep the world safe than almost any other time in history. ^
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