Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
America’s
Post-9/11 Wars Have Cost $5.9 Trillion
William
D. Hartung
November
21, 2018
The
Nation
Just in time for
next year’s Pentagon spending debate, a new report is calling for a
huge increase in the Defense Department’s budget, which is already at one of
the highest levels since World War II. The document was produced by the
National Defense Strategy Commission, a congressionally mandated group charged
with assessing the Trump administration’s new national-defense strategy.
The premise of the
new report is that America faces a “national security emergency” that leaves
its ability to defend “its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests”
increasingly in doubt.
As its solution,
the commission calls for an increase in Pentagon spending of 3 to 5 percent
above inflation for at least the next five years. According
to calculations by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the high end of this
range would mean an annual Pentagon budget of an astonishing $972 billion by
2024—a potential boon for Lockheed Martin and its fellow weapons-makers, but a
disaster for US taxpayers. It is unlikely that Congress will sign off on such a
hefty increase, but the fact that it has been put forward at all will provide
more rhetorical ammunition for the hawks on Capitol Hill, making it all the
harder to rein in runaway Pentagon spending.
It’s not as if the
Defense Department is starved for funds. The United States
spends more on its military than the next seven countries in the
world combined (five of which are US allies).
The increase in
Pentagon spending in the past two years alone is greater than the entire
military budget of Russia. And that’s before the massive
increases proposed by the strategy commission.
Perhaps this
proposal shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the source. The commission was
co-chaired by Eric Edelman, an Iraq War supporter and former top aide to
Vice President Dick Cheney, and Gary Roughead, the former chief of US naval
operations and a current board member of Northrop Grumman,
the fourth-largest weapons contractor in the United States.
The members of the
National Defense Strategy Commission followed a time-tested playbook. They
start by enumerating a long list of potential threats, exaggerating them in
scale and importance; then they assert that the best way to address these
challenges is to double down on the military-first approach that has
characterized US foreign policy throughout this century. Yet this argument
ignores the fact that the greatest threats we face cannot be solved with
military force, and that attempting to do so will have disastrous consequences,
as America’s nonstop wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia
have demonstrated. The commission report gives lip service to diplomacy, but
only as an adjunct to military power, not as a value in its own right.
We should be
spending less time figuring out how to fight wars with Russia, China, Iran, or
any other nation, and more on how to forge partnerships to address the biggest
challenges to continued life on this planet: climate change and nuclear
weapons. But the new report is silent on the first problem, while on the
second, it has not one discouraging word for the Pentagon’s dangerous,
counterproductive plan to spend $1.2 trillion on a new generation of
nuclear weapons over the next three decades.
Thankfully, there
was another study released last week that takes a more critical view
of America’s policy of endless war and runaway military spending. Issued by the
Costs of War Project at Brown University, it estimates the full price of the
United States’ post-9/11 wars at $5.9 trillion—a stunning figure when you
consider that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond have caused far more
harm than good. The study takes a comprehensive look at the War on Terror, from
the direct costs of overseas military operations to current and future spending
on the veterans of those conflicts, to the budget of the Department of Homeland
Security, to the interest on the debt resulting from the fact that these wars
have been financed through deficit spending.
A
companion report by the Costs of War Project tallies the immense
human costs of the post-9/11 wars: over 240,000 civilian deaths, more than 21
million people displaced, widespread environmental devastation, and over 300,000
veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries, to cite just a few examples.
In the face of this catastrophe, the idea that a more militarized US policy is
the answer to the world’s security challenges is absurd.
When the new
Congress convenes in January, let’s hope it takes a fresh look at the
consequences of our current policy of endless war and continuous preparation
for war—and puts the report of the National Defense Strategy Commission back on
the shelf, where it belongs.
William D.
Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for
International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin
and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books).]
Copyright c 2018
The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted
without permission. Distributed by PARS International Corp.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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