The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Did Not Cost $8 Trillion
First the left hated me and now I guess the right can, too, for my consistent opinions
America did not go broke waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Seriously?
Let's audit those categories.
$2.1 trillion for overseas contingency operation funding for the costs of fighting. I will quibble over whether everything in that category should be counted because a lot of upgrades the military wanted anyway could be folded into that category. Maybe the military would have gotten that or maybe it wouldn't. But it was not strictly speaking a cost of war. Still, America has a history of spending money on overseas wars so we don't spend blood. Comparing the 7,000 American KIA over twenty years of those wars compared to the hundreds of thousands Russia has suffered in three years highlights that emphasis. So I won't reduce this category. America rightly views any deaths of our citizens at war as tragedies. We should think hard before we send them to war (and I only almost was sent overseas into a relatively safe combat support role, so I'm not boasting about what I risked). And we should spend money rather than blood when we do. So because I consider that exchange worth it, I do not challenge this. ALLOWED.
$1.1 trillion for homeland security. This is not spending related to our wars abroad. It is spending related to being attacked at home on September 11, 2001, and not wanting to suffer that again. And absent wars abroad that included allies to fight and kill terrorists over there, the costs of homeland security over here would have been higher. As would the costs of more major terrorist attacks by jihadis who did not have to defend their home turf instead of focusing their energies on a bigger 9/11. But rather than speculate about what the costs would be in that counter-factual, I'll simply call this category DISALLOWED.
$0.5 trillion for veterans care. Some portion of that would have been expended regardless of war casualties. We have veterans care in peacetime. Just training for war harms veteran health—when it doesn't kill them while soldiers. Still, it is way outside my lane to evaluate this claim even if I could see the full study rather than the pie chart in the linked piece. And I would never say this is an area to cut core services to help those whose wounds, injuries, disease, or ailments were caused by serving in uniform in defense of America. ALLOWED.
$1.1 trillion for interest on borrowed money. This accounting tool is never used for social welfare or any other spending. Since defense is the most basic of the responsibilities of the federal government, I consider defense spending first in line on the ledger, and so is fully covered by tax revenue. Interest on our cumulative debt now exceeds our defense spending. DISALLOWED.
$0.9 trillion for increases to the base defense budget "due to" the post-9/11 wars. You can't really say whether those increases over twenty years represent costs of the wars or were simply justified by the wars and would have been spent anyway. Since much of the costs of maintaining a military continue through war and peace, I don't have high confidence that this is really a cost of war. DISALLOWED.
$0.2 trillion for State Department overseas contingency operations expenses. Imagine the costs for protecting our embassies abroad if we weren't killing jihadis and distracting them on their home turf? DISALLOWED.
And then the study added in an additional 30 years of veterans health costs beyond the period of the wars attributed to the wars of $2.2 trillion. That's fun! Now do domestic spending! What's the thirty-year cost of the Deficit Reduction Act or any other stimulus spending package of the last twenty years? When spending is increased on any other budget item, we calculate the 10-year cost. And we always underestimate that. But what added domestic spending ever gets cut? That increase simply becomes part of the base budget that then ratchets up. We'll see if current efforts reduce that long record of ever-expanding deficit spending. But for now? DISALLOWED. WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
So we have 22 years of costs totaling $2.6 trillion dollars. That's a ton of money. Or $118 billion per year. That's still a lot of money. But in the Beltway World, it's a rounding error when multiples of that amount are authorized at the stroke of a president's pen repeatedly in our deficit spending:
Note that our budge deficits were pretty small, relatively speaking, from 2001 through 2008, after which the Iraq War wound down until the rise of ISIL in 2014 led to Iraq War 2.0. And the Afghanistan War effort that was briefly surged in 2009-2011 with a truncated offensive was wound down by 2014, too. So clearly our deficits were not caused by the wars. They certainly contributed—but not on the interest issue—but there were plenty of non-defense spending reasons for that.
If your concern is the spending rather than what was achieved—don't ignore that Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Trump all considered waging war against Saddam or jihadis in Iraq in our interest—focus on domestic spending where the real money is. And we did win the Iraq War, although it is not appreciated. Oddly enough, even Obama and Biden boasted of the outcome when their party had turned against both. The facts remain the same, so my opinion does not change despite changing political winds.
I'll grant we screwed the pooch on Afghanistan. But who knows how twenty years of our presence affected the Afghan people to make them less tolerant of jihadis. Maybe we planted seeds that will grow in future years to our benefit. I'll just say we lost the war for now. But we did buy twenty years of time. Time the Islamic world had to wage its civil war over who defines Islam.
I reject the university study claims about the Iraq and Afghanistan campaign spending in its facts, effects, and implications.
NOTE: Top chart from the cited article.