Costs of War Project

“The Costs of War Project:  Linda Bilmes and Andrew Bacevich,”

Veterans for Peace (Winter 2012).

The following reports are transcriptions

of video talks by Professor Linda Bilmes

and Professor Andrew Bacevich as part of

the Eisenhower Research Group’s Costs of

War Project based at Brown University’s

Watson Institute for International Studies

(www.costsofwar.org). The videos are available

at http://vimeo.com/27254292 (Professor

Bilmes) and http://vimeo.com/27457922

(Professor Bacevich; the transcriptions

are reproduced here with the permission of

Professor Bilmes and Professor Bacevich.

Professor Bilmes’s full research paper is

available at www.costsofwar.org/article/

caring-us-veterans The Editor.

When you look at the costs of the Iraq

and Afghanistan conflicts, the numbers

published by the government are about

$1.3 trillion, but this is just the tip of the

iceberg because this is just money that has

already been spent. There are other costs

yet to come, one of the most significant of

which is for providing medical care for the

young Americans who have been deployed

to Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been

2.2 million Americans who have fought in

these wars, 1.2 million have come home

and are now veterans. Of these returned

veterans more than 600,000 have been

treated in veteran hospitals and facilities for

a wide variety of ailments, ranging from

mental health disorders, musculoskeletal

disorders, skin disorders, hearing loss, and

other injuries that were either sustained or

exacerbated during their service. These are

costs that we are just beginning to pay right

now, but they are costs that will be growing

over the next 20, 30, 40 years, and they

will add another $600 billion to $1 trillion

in cost just for caring for our veterans over

and above what we’ve already spent.

It is important to look at the full cost of

war because if you use poor accounting,

which is what the government uses, you

don’t get a real sense of what things cost.

For example, if I sell you a car for $20,000

and when you look at the fine print it costs

$40,000, you might have second thoughts

about buying that car. That’s essentially

what we’ve done with the Iraq and Afghanistan

conflicts. Congress has voted on

one quotation of how much it would cost,

but the real cost is much larger. Particularly

in the case of the care for our veterans we

haven’t set aside money to care for them so

we have incurred a long-term obligation to

provide medical care and disability benefits

for our wounded veterans without setting

any provision for how we’re going to

pay for it. What we need is an accounting

system that is based on accrual accounting

that makes transparent the true costs of war.

It’s only with a fully transparent accounting

system and budgetary systems that those in

power can really make decisions because as

of now they don’t actually have the data to

understand how much we’re actually paying

on any military activity. There are two

decisions that have to be made in regard

to every conflict: one is whether to get involved

in it; the second is how to pay for it

if you do. In the case of Iraq and Afghanistan,

we have for the first time in United

States history since the revolutionary war

borrowed virtually all of the money that

had been used to pay for these conflicts.

This has added at least $1.5 trillion to our

national debt.

At this point, I think the questions that

we should be asking are whether if not for

the decision to invade Iraq, would we still

be mired in Afghanistan?, would oil prices

be what they are?, would the national debt

be as high as it is?, and would the financial

crisis be as severe as it was? I think arguably

the answers to all four of these questions

is no. The Iraq war has been tragic in

many respects but from a purely economic

sense it has been tragic in that we have

spent money that we could have invested

in education, in our infrastructure, paying

off our debt, and other activities rather than

on activities that have very low benefit economically

speaking and which have added

a great deal to our national debt.

Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick

Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy

at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

She is the author with Professor Joseph Stiglitz

of the book The Three Trillion Dollar

War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

There is an immense and urgent requirement

to learn from the experience of the

past decade, to learn why the global war on

terror has been such a costly disappointment,

to learn why the Iraq war produced

results so radically different from what was

expected, to learn why the Afghanistan war

is now the longest war in our history. It

is crucially important to tally up the costs

of war to properly assess the wisdom or

unwisdom of the policies that landed us in

war in the first place. At a bare minimum

we’ve already spent $1 trillion, and there

are reasonable projections that we will end

up spending $2 trillion, $3 trillion, perhaps

as much as $6 trillion. This at a time when

the American economy is not performing

well and when the debt is going through the

roof.

Not to be lost of course is the question

of the human costs paid by non-Americans,

not simply by our allies but the people of

Iraq, the people of Afghanistan, and the

people of Pakistan, of Yemen, and many

other places across the Islamic world. We

know that there have been something on

the order of two to two-and-a-half million

Iraqis who are living in exile; a large

number of other Iraqis who have been displaced

from their homes. Were something

like this to happen in the United States, we

would view it as an catastrophe of historic

magnitude. The population displaced by

the global war on terror is, for example,

far larger than the population displaced by

Hurricane Katrina.

Wars create distortions, in our politics,

in our economy. War concentrates power;

war delivers profit to certain people and

imposes sacrifices on others. I think those

distortions have happened in the global

war on terror launched after 9/11. To some

degree, they have been hidden or concealed;

they’ve been hidden in part by our

unwillingness to actually pay for many of

the costs, at least the economic costs of

the war. The willingness to simply go ever

deeper in debt, to shove off the economic

costs onto future generations, that’s one

of the things that actually blind us to the

actual impact of the wars we’ve been conducting.

I would like to see the equivalent of the

9/11 Commission be undertaken and focus

on what we might call the long war: The

Commission to Study the Long War. Public

hearings; testimony by officials, participants

both soldiers and civilians, by people

who lost loved ones on 9/11, by historians

and journalists. There should be a comprehensive

effort to understand what’s

happened since the United States went to

war against so-called terrorism. I think

The Costs of War Project could make an

important contribution to the larger effort to

divine the truth.

Andrew Bacevich is a graduate of West

Point, a retired US Army Colonel, a Professor

of History and International Relations

at Boston University, and author most

recently of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.