With his Monday speech committing to the US to a continuation and escalation of the Afghan War, an already major increase in military spending for 2018 looks like it might be growing even more to cover the added expenses of a bigger conflict.
There is no good figure available on the cost of the first 16 years of the US war in Afghanistan. Estimates are that $1 trillion has been spent so far, between direct spending on the war itself and medical costs for Afghan War veterans.
That’s likely to just be a fraction of the overall cost, just for those 16 years, as the cost of caring for those veterans for decades to come will continue to mount. With little documentation for exactly where the money goes, the long-term costs of those 16 years are even more uncertain.
But turning that 16-year war into a 20-year war, or 24-year war, will have a predictable outcome. The costs are likely to be even harder to document, with President Trump keeping troop numbers secret. In the end, the bottom line will be more.
And potentially a lot more. The Afghan War is already America’s longest war, and it’s not like the front-line troops from 2001 are still the front-line troops of 2017. This effectively means the US is on the hook for major veterans expenses for multiple generations of troop rotations into and out of Afghanistan, and the longer the war lasts, the more veterans there will be.
While President Trump maintains that his Afghan War commitment is not “a blank check,” it might as well be. The US is already committed to an unfathomable amount of money for the amount of Afghan War already fought, and as Trump drags on the conflict the rate at which the money disappears will continue to mount. There will never be a literal ledger where someone writes in a final war cost, but those costs are very real, and will be felt for many decades to come.
The cost in $ isn’t important unless you believe the government can run short of what it creates out of thin air.
But the fact that they use that excuse to not fund socially beneficial programmes that would actually improve general welfare makes them hypocrites, con men and snake oil salesmen.
It’s all about direct funding of the oligarchy. They’re too greedy to let government spending filter through the economy to them. They want more and they want it now.
And the rest of you can go whistle.
“…will have a predictable outcome.”
How is the outcome of a war with no end in sight–nor any endgame declared–“predictable”?
Agent287s
The objective is the title of the piece.
The cost will no doubt be a part of the new top secret don’t let ’em know what yer doin’ strategy for vict’ry. Let’s face it the Taliban will have a pretty good idea when the SF are ‘leaving the base’ for a big attack, and the only ones ‘in the dark’ will be the mall trotters – same as always.
I’m pretty sure the ‘success stories’ will keep on coming out, like they have been for 17 years.
It isn’t just the up front costs, nor the long term costs. It is also the opportunity costs. It is all the things we could have done instead with trillions of dollars and the best efforts of a million man-years of our best people.
We’ll never know exactly what we lost, but we know how big it is.
So long as our rich are allowed to hoard half the wealth on earth, their highest priority will be to have an Empire class military.
Problem is, all of the educated middle-class feel that their hundreds of thousands entitles them to own millions and billions
When have the neo cons ever worried about consequences and costs-I would guess like never. This disaster imho has patraeus written all over it.
For a dire read, see link as to why the us simply cannot afford to gallup around the world with its military:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-literally-cant-afford-more-military-adventurism-21585