The three trillion dollar war
Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes cast a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans--for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy.--From amazon.com.
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What Hacker News says
- Sorry but your $800bn figure is bullshit. I'd highly recommend reading The Three Trillion Dollar War: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Trillion_Dollar_Wa...
Even moderate estimates put it at about $5 Trillion, the most conservative at $3 trillion, with the high end (reality) at $8+.
One huge cost people completely ignore is the cost of health care for the vets we bring back who suffer from a huge number of physical and mental issues. It's also one we'll be paying for the next 40-50 years.
- I'm not a military economist type, but I'll take a stab at this.
Apart from the costs you cite, which are certainly significant, there's the cost of replacing equipment, much of which dies quite quickly in the desert.
There's also the cost of oil (which the US buys, and doesn't just steal out of Iraq's oil wells, as far as I know). Believe it or not, the US military is the largest single consumer of oil in the world. Here's an interesting article about it:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199
From the figures in that article, I'd estimate that the US military uses about $10 billion a year in oil, at today's prices.
Contractors are a huge expense. From what I've read, there are as many contractors in Iraq as there are US military personnel, each getting paid much, much more than a soldier.
According to the following article, the US spent about $100 billion on contractors between 2003 and 2008:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7557995.stm
Then there's all the money that's simply "lost". For example:
"How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1
There are no doubt many other expenses, such as the new $600 million "embassy" in Iraq (which is going to cost $1.2 billion a year to operate).
For more details see the Congressional Budget Office's report on the "Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan"
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/86xx/doc8690/10-24-CostOfWar_Test...
and "The Three Trillion Dollar War":
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/...
Unfortunately, as outrageous as the money wasted on the war is, the human cost has been much worse, and it may not be fully paid for generations to come.
