14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts at the Brown University has just released a new report on the War on Terror, which seeks to quantify the exact costs the United States are facing, and will continue to face, in this conflict. The document shows that more than 225,000 lives have already been lost, alongside $4 trillion.
The document, released by the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown, is meant to bring the issue of the massive costs associated with the war effort back into the spotlight, and to spur public discussions.
According to the authors, the report is designed exclusively to assess the human and economic costs of the military response the US gave shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that knocked down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in New York City.
At this point, war operations are being conducted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the original announcement that the War on Terror had began was made. The costs are extremely high for the level of sophistication the US Army boasts.
When it came to calculate the economic costs of these operations, the Brown team included not only the $1.3 trillion the Pentagon appropriated thus far for the war effort, but also the 1.9 to 2.7 trillion dollars the Army will spend on related activities.
These include veterans' care, homeland security, war-related aid, interest payments, the base budget of the Pentagon, and the federal obligations the government took to care for past and future veterans.
According to the new document, which was produced by the ERP team at the Watson Institute for International Studies, continuing the war efforts will require at least $450 billion in Pentagon spending by 2020.
The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary group of 20 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists, and it represents one of the first time that most of the hidden costs of war have been taken into account.
Some 31,000 people in uniform and military contractors died over the course of the war. A very conservative estimate shows that around 137,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since the war began, and that 7.8 million people took the paths of exile.
“This project’s accounting is important because information is vital for the public’s democratic deliberation on questions of foreign policy,” explains the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Family professor of anthropology and international studies Catherine Lutz, the co-director of the ERP.
“Knowing the actual costs of war is essential as the public, Congress and the President weigh the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, and other areas including the deficit, security, public investments, and reconstruction,” she adds.
“There are many costs and consequences of war that cannot be quantified, and the consequences of wars don’t end when the fighting stops,” adds Boston University professor of political science and former Brown graduate student Neta Crawford, the other co-director of the ERP.
“The Eisenhower study group has made a start at counting and estimating the costs in blood, treasure, and lost opportunities that are both immediately visible and those which are less visible and likely to grow even when the fighting winds down,” she adds.
Details of the report can be found at this website.