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Winston T. Wheeler, research fellow at the Center for Defense Information, set out to find a straightforward answer to a simple question, “What has it cost the Department of Defense to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”
His 16-page summary, based on information from the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office, makes one cringe with embarrassment or seethe with anger at the government’s inability to answer this question with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Audits by the Defense Department’s own inspector general admit its financial management system “prevents DOD from collecting and reporting financial information ... that is accurate, reliable, and timely.” Wheeler concludes, “We may have a reliable estimate from (the Congressional Research Service) for what has been appropriated ... but we do not know what the Department has spent.”
He says, “The available figures have gaping holes and problems in them because of the sloppy, inept and misleading accounting of the costs by the Defense Department and Congress.” His best educated estimate is that these wars have cost $1.98 trillion in constant 2011 dollars. That’s $660 for every man, woman and child in America. Such tremendous expenditures, not to mention the cost of human lives, could conceivably become an explosive situation in light of our huge indebtedness and fiscal crisis and the ever-deepening frustration with our government in general by increasing segments of our society.
Americans have historically been willing to sacrifice blood and treasure for causes they understand and in which they believe. However, the so-called war on terror cannot be shown to have produced positive results commensurate with the costs. America is more financially anemic and has more enemies now than a decade or two ago.
Americans have been fed a steady diet of propaganda against anything that might be thought of as “socialist,” plus a barrage of anti-United Nation sentiments. Maybe, just maybe, the time is approaching when we should be open to listening more to our “old Europe” friends and having a more productive dialogue with a goodly majority of the rest of the world.
The U.S. has cast 32 vetoes in the U.N. against any criticism of Israel, exceeding all the vetoes cast during the U.N.’s 65-year history by the other five permanent Security Council members combined. Instead of casting more vetoes – and we’ve promised to cast another against Palestine’s application to be recognized as a state – maybe we should pause and consider that maybe other nations know something that we don’t.
Winston T. Wheeler, research fellow at the Center for Defense Information, set out to find a straightforward answer to a simple question, “What has it cost the Department of Defense to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”
His 16-page summary, based on information from the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office, makes one cringe with embarrassment or seethe with anger at the government’s inability to answer this question with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Audits by the Defense Department’s own inspector general admit its financial management system “prevents DOD from collecting and reporting financial information ... that is accurate, reliable, and timely.” Wheeler concludes, “We may have a reliable estimate from (the Congressional Research Service) for what has been appropriated ... but we do not know what the Department has spent.”
He says, “The available figures have gaping holes and problems in them because of the sloppy, inept and misleading accounting of the costs by the Defense Department and Congress.” His best educated estimate is that these wars have cost $1.98 trillion in constant 2011 dollars. That’s $660 for every man, woman and child in America. Such tremendous expenditures, not to mention the cost of human lives, could conceivably become an explosive situation in light of our huge indebtedness and fiscal crisis and the ever-deepening frustration with our government in general by increasing segments of our society.
Americans have historically been willing to sacrifice blood and treasure for causes they understand and in which they believe. However, the so-called war on terror cannot be shown to have produced positive results commensurate with the costs. America is more financially anemic and has more enemies now than a decade or two ago.
Americans have been fed a steady diet of propaganda against anything that might be thought of as “socialist,” plus a barrage of anti-United Nation sentiments. Maybe, just maybe, the time is approaching when we should be open to listening more to our “old Europe” friends and having a more productive dialogue with a goodly majority of the rest of the world.
The U.S. has cast 32 vetoes in the U.N. against any criticism of Israel, exceeding all the vetoes cast during the U.N.’s 65-year history by the other five permanent Security Council members combined. Instead of casting more vetoes – and we’ve promised to cast another against Palestine’s application to be recognized as a state – maybe we should pause and consider that maybe other nations know something that we don’t.
