Catherine Lutz, from the Cost of War Project at Brown University, talks to Scott about all of the balance of account information from the wars. The jaw dropping total figure of the war is revealed, as well as the human costs of the war, the unquantifiable costs on the home front, and the ongoing and unacknowledged health costs to the troops is all discussed. All of this and more on another great episode of the Scott Horton Show.
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Alright, introducing Kathryn Lutz.
She is from the Cost of War Project.
That's the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
And boy, when they say cost of war, these are the people who are really keeping track of all of it for us.
And since we're here, you know, just a few days past the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the bombing of Afghanistan, the war that continues on there, seems like a pretty good time to try to catch up on what all we spent and maybe even some of our lost opportunity costs and the rest.
Welcome to the show, Kathryn.
How are you?
Oh, great.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show here.
So, I know it's kind of hard to parse, but can you give us a ballpark on not just the DOD budget every year, but on the actual cost of the Afghan war, the Iraq war, and the various drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the regime change in Libya, and the billions spent in Syria, these kinds of things.
Do you have an overall cost of the terror war ballpark estimate for us today?
Well, we haven't added in that long, long list.
We've mainly focused for now on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and some of the other additions to the costs of the military that have come as a result of the war on terror.
So, we don't have a complete picture, but we do have bottom line number of $4.8 trillion for the cost to date.
And then in addition to that, costs for interest on the debt for these past appropriations is going to add another potentially $8 trillion.
So, this is a huge kind of unfathomable number in some ways, but it's just part of the picture.
The real costs are the human costs, of course, the body count, the destroyed communities in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, the loss of civil liberties and the sort of erosion in the rule of law such as it is that, you know, has been involved with things like our detention practices and tortures and torture and so on.
So, the human costs, refugee numbers are phenomenal, you know, 8 million people still displaced just from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, we have to start with those human numbers and then also try and wrap our minds around these financial numbers.
Well, and you know, yeah, the dollars themselves, that only just represents, you know, the means of exchange of real wealth between people.
So, it sounds like maybe it's more crass and more greedy or whatever, but that's $5 trillion and you add the other 8 to it, just an interest on the debt, that's all money that could have been spent on improving people's lives, saving their lives, feeding them, coming up with new distribution methods for other forms of wealth to reach new customers and these kinds of things.
We'll never know the lost opportunity cost just from the money spent.
And then, as you mentioned, there's the psychic cost of turning into a bunch of barbarian torture or murderers in the name of avenging ourselves from the 9-11 attack and all this kind of thing that can't be measured in any kind of, you know, numerical terms, but are more a matter of quality and soul that, you know, also definitely, you know, mean just as much or more.
But when you talk about $8 trillion just in paying the interest on the debt of the money the government borrowed to wage these two wars, I mean, really lump in the AfPak thing, you know, as the government does, as part of, you know, Pakistan, as part of the Afghan war.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
It ought to be unbelievable, but it's not, unfortunately, I guess.
Yeah, no, and I think the thing that we're trying to understand is, you know, how to do the math.
And, you know, most people just look at the Pentagon budget, the budget that has been earmarked for the wars, and that's just really not sufficient.
There's so many additional costs that are buried in other parts of the federal and even state budgets.
We have a couple of researchers who looked at a couple of the states and looked at how even, again, low state taxes, some of them are really ultimately making their way, sometimes through caring for veterans, but to deal with the costs of the wars.
But, you know, to go back to your other point, too, about what these numbers really mean, it's true.
It's about human values.
And we can make a rough estimate of the kinds of things that haven't happened as a result of spending the money on the wars, rather than on clean energy or health care, education.
You know, you look at just the recent crash in Hoboken.
And in the Times this morning, there's a story about the Chris Christie's cutting of the severe cutting of the budget for public transportation.
And that has to be accounted as part of the problem in this crash that, you know, equipment was not updated.
Safety equipment was not there that should have been there.
And the states have been, you know, again, cutting their budgets in part because they're getting less money from the federal government because it's spending it on DOD.
So, you know, the spillover effects and again, the sort of domestic body count has begun to build up as well, quite literally.
Well, yeah, I mean, you have all that tax money that that could have gone to keeping people employed or employing them in new ventures.
And even and this sounds, you know, maybe greedy or self-interested or whatever.
But I think just, you know, the ability of a mom or a dad to be able to afford to go on a family vacation once every couple of years or something like that.
It sounds like, oh, white people, first first world problems or this or that kind of thing.
But, you know, I don't know, family vacations when I was a kid or some of the most memorable parts of my life of being part of my family.
And that's huge.
And when you're talking about the money that could have gone to people doing, you know, spending quality time on just leisure with their people, that's worth uncalculable trillions, I think.
And it sounds like, you know, it's nothing compared to grand projects or whatever.
But so whole point of being alive.
Right.
Really?
You know, so that's the way I think of it.
You know, some guy couldn't buy the dinky little boat he wanted to buy or his daughter had to settle for going to a college that was lesser than the one that they really wanted to put her in.
Or these kinds of things.
That money was spent killing people in Iraq.
And that was why they couldn't do the thing that they dreamed that they wanted to do.
Mm hmm.
Well, again, as you say, that is a first world set of problems.
But the more basic problem of people dying earlier than they than they would have people, you know, shortened lives, more illness as a result of the failure of government to protect people's health.
Through these kinds of investments.
So I think, you know, we have an increasing some third world problems here as well in our country.
Yeah.
Good way to put it.
Yeah.
But to go to those numbers, too, I think, you know, when people just look at what what's being spent, the the DOD budget is is really just a fraction of the of the whole.
Amazingly, that's just one point six trillion dollars that's been spent directly on the wars.
If you look at the Pentagon accountants.
Right.
But the Pentagon base budget has gone up much faster than expected as a result of these wars.
So the war climate in Congress has has led to lots of additional trillions or billions being spent on things that are not supposedly directly relevant to the war, to waging the wars on terror.
So we've got those pace base budget, additional dollars.
We've got veterans care and disability.
And here's where I think, you know, people have a very limited sense sometimes of what the war or how long the wars are going to last.
Even if they ended tomorrow, we have, you know, people who are going to need care decades from now.
We still have veterans, family members who are being taken care of from the Spanish-American War.
And this is something that, you know, hard to believe, but true.
It's on the DOD website where they, you know, count the survivors of the dependents who are survivors of people who were in that war.
So for this war on terror, we're going to have into the 22nd century people who are, you know, having to needing care and needing this kind of funding.
And again, this is just in the United States.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, those wars have destabilized the region.
And of course, untold economic costs will accrue to the people of those countries into the 22nd century as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, a million new widows or a million new orphans, at least, in Iraq from Iraq War II and then, you know, Iraq War III now continuing on.
And, you know, yeah, to get back to that, I know that you talk about the on your website here, you talk about the difference between direct and indirect death in these wars.
But it's, you know, we definitely it's good that you count that.
We don't want to let the U.S. skate for somebody dies of easily curable disease because they're in the middle of a war zone and there's no economy and there's no health care.
There's no hospital.
There's 10 checkpoints between here in the hospital.
And so they just die.
Well, that's the fault of the war, too, even if they didn't take a bullet.
And in the Iraq war alone, we're talking about at least near a million people.
It's hard to really say when you're measuring excess death rates and all that kind of thing.
But, you know, we're talking about just levels of deprivation that Americans who weren't in that war have no experience with, not even in the very poorest parts of our country.
Yeah, no, this is a really important concept to understand is how wars have these sort of reverberating effects out on people's health and beyond the sort of bombs and the bullets in the landmines that we're more familiar with thinking about.
Just to give one example, you know, the cancer rates in Iraq have gone up as a result of some of the additional exposures that people have had.
But as you point out, the destruction of the medical system in Iraq, the killing and the flight of doctors, the decimation of the very advanced infrastructure of health care that Iraq had before the war and before the sanctions.
All of that long war has resulted in, again, many, many more deaths than would have otherwise occurred for lack of medical care.
But one other kind of thing that we we can also look at is increased rates of injury as infrastructure and buildings are bombed.
People don't have to be injured in the initial bomb attack to be injured later as Iraq, for example, lost its electrical system.
The bombing of of power plants and and other facilities resulted in people having to jury rig electricity to their homes with use of generators and connecting up to neighbors.
And what the public health epidemiologists have found is higher rates of falls and electrocutions, some portion of which have to be are likely to have been accounted for by people climbing up and trying to to take care of their own electrical system on their roof, getting electrocuted, falling.
So it's just these cascading multiple effects that result in much higher rates of death and injury as an indirect result of the war.
Yeah.
And, you know, you mentioned the cancers and everybody knows that, you know, at least the reports there is, I guess, still conflicting, you know, arguments among scientists about the depleted uranium.
Sure seems like Busby and those others have a strong case to me.
But one thing that I don't think is really in dispute at all is the toxic nature of the smoke from the burn pits at the American bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, you know, there's a new book out about that by Joseph Hickman, the Guantanamo murder whistleblower who wrote about it and has a whole section about how it's very likely that this is how Vice President Joe Biden's son died from his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan stationed right next to the burn pits.
What caused I forgot what it was, but it was a pretty unique kind of cancer.
And it's the kind of thing that a lot of soldiers are coming down with.
And if that's how the soldiers coming down with it during a one year tour of duty over there and that kind of thing, you just imagine what it's like for the people of Samara who, you know, can't move, who are stuck there.
And this is where they live is next to a burn pit of who knows what kinds of insane molecules that only burning American equipment could create.
You know, it's just it's it's like poisoning them.
You know, straight kind of poison and disregard a nice measure of the disregard of the American military for their own enlisted men and for the people that they're supposedly over there saving as well, I think.
I have always been impressed with Stan Goff, who's written, who's a ex special forces and has written on on the U.S. military and militarism and his his great coinage is, you know, the U.S. military loves its soldiers like Tyson loves its chicken, its chickens.
And, you know, the idea that we we have so many U.S. service members who have been injured in this this way is a testament to the to that.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, he died just after the terror war really got going, I guess.
But Colonel David Hackworth was the same way.
He was, I guess, the most decorated Vietnam veteran ever or something.
But he had a site called Soldier for the Truth or Soldiers for the Truth.
And basically his entire frame of reference was that the war was between the officer corps and the enlisted men.
And he was his job in the world was to protect the enlisted men from the officers who were their greatest enemies in the world, far more than any other country or group of terrorists or anybody else.
And that was his whole frame of reference.
And without even knowing the details, you just know that if that was if David Hackworth thought that that was necessary for him to be that, then it really was.
You know what I mean?
And that was a big part of why he warned against invading Iraq.
It wasn't because he was a big old bleeding heart liberal or something like that.
It was because he saw the disaster coming and and how bad it would be for the people that he cared about the most.
And that was the enlisted army and Marines who are going to be doing the killing and dying over there.
It's just like reading a Joseph Heller novel or something seriously seems like.
Well, yeah, he lived through it himself.
Right.
OK, so now Afghanistan.
I wonder how much do you have a number or a couple of different numbers for the the military occupation and or State Department so-called aid spending in these kinds of things?
Because I was hoping to drop a couple of jaws in the listening audience.
Well, the State Department USAID spending on the wars has been about one hundred and ten billion billion dollars, so that it's not it's not a small amount.
But to me, what's what's so interesting is to see the way in which reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, which sounds like a positive, you know how that money has been allocated.
This is money that supposedly is helping the people of Iraq and Afghanistan to recover from the war, even as they continue to be ongoing wars.
But in fact, when you look at the special inspector general for Afghan or Iraqi reconstruction numbers, you see that the majority of those dollars are being spent on the security forces of those countries.
In other words, what they're reconstructing or what they're constructing is a large military and police force out of all proportion to the ability of those countries to support them, you know, to sustain them into the future.
And again, as opposed to spending on repairing things like the kinds of infrastructure that have been destroyed in the war.
I mean, some dollars go that in that direction, but nothing sufficient to to get people get the country back to those two countries back to where they were before the wars.
Of course, both of them experienced serial war.
So, you know, again, you have to go back several decades at this point to really sort of see where those countries were headed in terms of their their well-being of the population.
But, yeah, no, looking at those numbers and those reports, it's clear that most of that those monies have been spent for contractors when they are spent on things like health care or or education.
So they've been spent on construction of buildings, you know, contracts to some of the big U.S. military industries like Black & Veatch, like Dynacor.
And, you know, so it's really been a real boondoggle for the for the the corporations who have been getting these very, very large contracts.
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Well, I hate to say it, but I'm predicting a lot more of that in Afghanistan coming up because they're right at the point where withdrawal led to the conclusion that we all knew it would.
You know, re-rise of the Taliban.
I mean, occupation is what really gave them their boost.
But then withdrawal has just given them all this space to come right back again.
And there's just no way to spin this as a victory and end it.
Obama already called off the troop reductions and said he's holding it at 8,500 troops and God knows how many mercs and spies and everybody else there, drone pilots and whoever in the country through the end of his presidency.
And looking at, you know, who we're looking at, it seems like everybody seems to agree that now it's in the bag for Hillary.
Well, she's not going to back down.
She can only double down.
And Trump has barely commented on Afghanistan.
But where he has, he said, oh, yeah, no, we have to stay there forever because Pakistan has nukes or something.
So, you know, I would certainly predict that he's not going to back down and leave Afghanistan.
And I don't know how in the world she could politically.
I don't even think she would want to.
So I don't know what she's going to do other than try to find maybe even rehire Petraeus and send him back to do another surge, do something, because how can they leave?
They've lost.
Well, I think the problem is here is just is the narrative, right?
All of these dollars and all of these bodies that have piled up over 15 years are all in service to this larger narrative in which military force can make the world a better place.
That, you know, you solve problems by throwing the U.S. military at it.
And the U.S. military, again, has the right to to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants.
So I think this, you know, it's the it's the story that is so distorting and makes it so difficult to imagine our way as a you know, as a country out of the problem.
So every time the the the military withdraws, you know, correlation, you know, people assume that's causation when when the U.S. military leaves, that somehow that's that's why things have gone badly, as opposed to the fact of using military solutions in the first place as the as the go to answer.
Sure.
No, yeah, you're absolutely right.
No, I agree with you.
Yeah, I'm just going, you know, basically by the frame of the narrative, which is, you know, you can't leave unless you can call it a victory.
And so they're kind of stuck.
And yeah, I mean, it's absolutely right that the Taliban.
It's not even that they were defeated.
They gave up.
They were like, yeah, Karzai, you know, he's not perfect, but he's a good posh tune and and he's a good Muslim.
And that's cool.
They basically retired.
You know, they basically just they gave up.
They couldn't stand against the new the new order backed by America and Afghanistan.
And so they left.
It took the escalation by America to against them to get them to keep growing and growing and become the monster that they are now, where I don't know if they're really a threat to just march right into Kabul at this point, like the fall of Saigon.
But it's pretty easy to imagine that they might be in that position within a few years.
Well, this is why we're doing this project.
And this cost of war project is a large group of people.
There's about 40 experts of various kinds, scholars and people who've worked in in country in those two countries with NGOs and in other capacities.
All those people have been trying to put together this information on what the wars have cost in human and financial terms, because these arguments about the war being won or lost or having to continue or not are all being made in a complete vacuum of information.
Right.
Without knowing what the costs are, how can you argue for the benefits of anything?
Right.
And even again, that this sort of a moral cost benefit analysis requires that you have the data.
Right.
And I think this is where, you know, the government has the US government has completely failed to do the sort of most basic due diligence on what has been spent and and how many people have died and will continue to die as a result of deciding to do things, you know, with with this sort of blood instrument of the military.
And so I think that's where we really need to, you know, go back to the question of, you know, how many people have died, how many people continue to die and and how many lost opportunities are there for, you know, the use of those resources.
Well, you know, part of it is we just face the bias of not being in power.
And so what do we know about it?
How could a layman like you or me be able to say that these experts are wrong, even after all this money spent and all this failure in their wake?
Still, as any Democrat or Republican will tell you the exact same phrase.
Well, the president has secret information that we don't know about.
And so what can you do except accept what they're doing?
And so even after years of this, and I don't really mean for people who are very interested because they all have their own opinions.
But I think the average person just figures, hey, if we've been at war for 15 years, one way or the other, it's because we had to be.
Otherwise, it just wouldn't be this way.
It's presumed to be a self-correcting system.
And so the fact that it's carried on is sort of becomes the proof of how necessary it was.
So it's really an entire change of mindset that we have to break through that.
Not only was it five trillion dollars spent, but it was five trillion dollars alone.
And, you know, et cetera, like that.
And try to get it.
Try to get people to come to that conclusion themselves, I guess, because they're not going to hear it from us.
They've got to hear it from either Smedley Butler or from their own mind, you know, that this just can't be worth it when you look at this level of failure.
But I don't think we're really there yet.
You know, I think mostly people shrug and go, well, the Navy SEALs are out there keeping me safe somehow, somewhere, you know.
Well, you know, journalism is really responsible here to take this kind of information and disseminate it.
Right.
When you look at when the New York Times, for example, covers the wars, they cover strategy, they cover and they cover occasional attacks.
But they don't often want to use this kind of information to really get at these tradeoffs.
Right.
And I think this, unfortunately, is mostly what a lot of people do care about.
They care about, you know, how this affects me.
And, you know, there are many people for whom this information would be really determinative.
So I think to the extent that we can circulate these numbers and that's one of the things that we work on is trying to make sure that the data is not just there, but that it circulates and that that people know, you know, again, what these the job opportunity costs.
We have an economist who's done that for us, tried to estimate how many jobs would have would have been created if the federal spending on the wars had instead been federal spending on education or health care.
And maybe some of your listeners have heard this kind of analysis before.
It's been done before with other parts of military spending in the past during the Cold War.
But again, it's it's hundreds of thousands of jobs because military spending creates fewer jobs than those other categories of federal spending.
Sure.
Yeah.
Because all they make is weapons of destruction that are useless for any other tasks.
So they don't they don't create it's not like they're creating machines that create other machines for people to use or anything like that.
They create machines that blow up and destroy property and people and wealth and all of that.
You know, it's funny because I'm more of a libertarian type.
So I'd really be interested to see.
And I don't know if anybody's ever really done that same kind of study of what if that same money had been invested in the private economy, even in private school and health care options or whatever, it'd be a fun estimate to see.
But, you know, one thing that I think I don't even mention very much anymore, although I really should, and this is something that should really be part of this discussion in terms of the economic costs of the empire, is that the inflationary monetary policy of the Federal Reserve is in great part meant to make government spending seem not so expensive.
And so a big maybe the major part of the Greenspan-Bernanke bubble that popped in 2008 had been generated by a lot of monetary inflation in order to goose the economy when really we were due for we were in the in the beginning of a recession when Bush Jr. took power.
And Wall Street got literally hit on September 11th.
The airlines and all these things.
We were due for a recession.
But instead of having one, they just hit the gas pedal on the money in order to really make Iraq seem free so they could have a bonus war.
They even sent people $300 checks in the mail as though it was their dividend from the profits of invading Iraq or something like that, when in fact it was costing all of us trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars.
But it was the delayed effect.
They made it seem free and almost got away with it.
Right.
It was September 08.
Bush almost was out of power before the thing fell.
And thank goodness at least was still on his watch when the thing came crumbling down.
But all the unemployment and all the people hurling themselves out of windows and all these things, that was the cost of the Iraq war finally come due for the American people.
And only they were experiencing it in terms of time spent in the unemployment line and wondering if their family was going to make it.
Yeah.
Here's the problem, though.
I think a lot of people have been sold the idea that military spending, the sort of financial monetary issues aside, most people will argue with you that military spending on these wars has been good for the economy.
They say, you know, we look at it.
It's a real stimulus package of a sort.
Right.
And yet here we are after 15 years of war, after 25 years of post Cold War militarism and everybody's broke.
And they say this is the recovery.
Right.
Right.
But I think for your listeners to be able to, you know, hear some of this analysis, I think, is really valuable because, again, you'll you'll be in conversation with friends and neighbors and hear this.
And I think, you know, the answer that the economists answer is no, military spending does not stimulate the economy in the way that these other forms do, because it is a less labor intensive industry.
There's very, very many fewer people who do that work, even though we have a large standing army.
The actual construction of weaponry and so on is not now, you know, a big sort of mass industrial model.
It's it's sort of craft, small, small batch kind of work.
Health care, education, it's all people based.
Right.
It's teachers and nurses and doctors and so on.
So labor intensity is so different in that and in the military and other sectors.
The domestic content is much higher.
The dollars stay in the United States when you when you're spending on education, obviously, for example.
And for Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of those dollars are going, you know, overseas to to foreign contract to contractors or contract workers in other countries.
You've got higher compensation per worker in the military because, again, these military industry corporation, the corporate contracts result in, again, per capita higher wages.
Lowest ranking service members are not, of course, paid as much.
But but again, compared to clean energy, construction workers and so on.
So between those three things that you end up with much more benefit to your community with with domestic non-military spending.
And again, we're talking about tanks for blowing things up, not tractors for reaping crops and feeding people.
Right.
We're talking about things that are that only destroy rather than multiplying out.
Other capital goods are made for improving life rather than just detracting.
So on the other hand, what actually people who sell the idea of military solutions for everything are selling is the idea of security.
Right.
They're not selling a tractor to make to make food.
They're selling the myth, the fantasy that this is going to keep them safe.
Right.
And in fact, they're polluting some field with depleted uranium in somebody else's country so they can never safely eat it again.
You know, well, again, yes, the long term health impact of war, the indirect reverberating effects are are, again, the the long the long gift that's going to keep on being gifted to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, unfortunately.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
I'm sorry I've kept you so long here.
We didn't have time to talk about the whole new nuke project and all that.
But maybe we can focus on the costs there in the future as well.
Maybe another time.
But, yeah, we hope they're do nothing nuclear missiles, as Mr. Burns on The Simpsons calls them, and that they're never used.
But assuming that they're never used, boy, what a waste of money there.
And if they are used, what an even worse waste of money.
So, yeah.
Anyway, so, yeah, I really appreciate your time.
It's been great, Catherine.
Great to talk to you, Scott.
All right.
So that is Catherine Lutz.
She is at Costs of War.
It's the Watson Institute at Brown University.
It's watson.brown.edu slash costs of war.
Just type in costs of war.
And, you know, recently there was a good article at Al Jazeera about this as well by Rami Khoury.
The frighteningly high human and financial costs of war that you can read up to.
Thanks, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
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