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President Trump greets National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford to discuss current operations. D. Myles Cullen/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
When Donald Trump wanted to “do
something” about the use of chemical weapons on civilians in Syria, he had the
US Navy lob 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield (cost: $89 million). The strike was symbolic at best, as
the Assad regime ran bombing
missions from the same airfield the very next
day, but it did underscore one thing: the immense costs of military action of
just about any sort in our era.
While $89 million is a rounding error in
the Pentagon’s $600 billion
budget, it represents real money for other
agencies. It’s more than twice the $38 million annual budget of the US Institute of Peace and more
than half the $149 million
budget of the National Endowment of the Arts,
both slated for elimination under Trump’s budget blueprint. If the strikes had
somehow made us – or anyone – safer, perhaps they would have been worth it, but
they did not.
In this century of nonstop military
conflict, the American public has never fully confronted the immense costs of
the wars being waged in its name. The human costs – including an estimated 370,000
deaths, more than half of them civilians, and
the millions who have been uprooted from their homes and sent into flight, often across national borders – are surely the most
devastating consequences of these conflicts. But the economic costs of our
recent wars should not be ignored, both because they are so massive in their
own right and because of the many peaceable opportunities foregone to pay for
them.
Even on the rare occasions when the
costs of American war preparations and war making are actually covered in the
media, they never receive the sort of attention that would be commensurate with
their importance. Last September, for example, the Costs of War Project at
Brown University’s Watson Institute released a paper demonstrating that, since 2001, the US had racked up
$4.79 trillion in current and future costs from its wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria, as well as in the war at home being waged by
the Department of Homeland Security. That report was certainly covered in
a number of major outlets, including the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles
Times, the Atlantic, and U.S. News and
World Report. Given its
importance, however, it should have been on the front page of every newspaper
in America, gone viral on social media, and been the subject of scores of
editorials. Not a chance.
Yet the figures should stagger the
imagination. Direct war spending accounted for “only” $1.7 trillion of that sum, or less than half of the total
costs. The Pentagon disbursed those funds not through its regular budget
but via a separate war account called Overseas Contingency Operations
(OCO). Then there were the more than $900 billion in indirect war costs
paid for from the regular budget and the budget of the Department of Veterans
Affairs. And don’t forget to add in the more than half-trillion dollars for the
budget of the Department of Homeland Security since 2001, as well as an
expected $1 trillion in future costs for taking care of the veterans of
this century’s wars throughout their lifetimes. If anyone were truly
paying attention, what could more effectively bring home just how perpetual
Washington’s post-9/11 war policies are likely to be?
That cost, in fact, deserves special
attention. The Veterans Administration has chronic problems in delivering
adequate care and paying out benefits in a timely fashion. Its biggest
challenge: the sheer volume of veterans generated by Washington’s recent
wars. An additional two million former military personnel have entered
the VA system since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Fully half of them have already been awarded lifetime disability
benefits. More than one in seven – 327,000 – suffer from traumatic brain injury. Not
surprisingly, spending for the Veterans Administration has tripled since 2001. It has now reached more than $180
billion annually and yet the VA still can’t catch up with its backlog of cases
or hire doctors and nurses fast enough to meet the need.
Now imagine another 15 years of such
failing, yet endless wars and the flood of veterans they will produce and then
imagine what a Cost of War Project report might look like in 2032. Given
all this, you would think that the long-term price tag for caring for veterans
would be taken into account when a president decides whether or not to continue
to pursue America’s never-ending wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. But that, of course, is never the case.
What a military-first
world means in budgetary terms
Enter Donald Trump. Even before he
launches a major war of his own – if he does – he’s loosed his generals to
pursue with renewed energy just about all the wars that have been started in
the last 15 years. In addition, he’s made it strikingly clear that he’s ready
to throw hundreds of billions (eventually, of course, trillions) of additional
tax dollars at the Pentagon in the years to come. As he put it in a September 2016 interview on Meet the Press,
“I’m gonna build a military that’s so strong… nobody’s gonna mess with us.”
As he makes plans to hike the Pentagon budget once more, however, here’s what
he seems blissfully unaware of: at roughly $600 billion per year, current
Pentagon spending is already close to its post-World War II peak and higher than it was at the height of the massive 1980s military
buildup initiated by President Ronald Reagan.
On the dubious theory that more is
always better when it comes to Pentagon spending (even if that means less is
worse elsewhere in America), Trump is requesting a $54 billion
increase in military spending for 2018. No
small sum, it’s roughly equal to the entire annual military budget of France,
larger than the defense budgets of the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, and
only $12 billion less than the entire Russian military budget of 2015.
Trump and his budget director, Mick
Mulvaney, have pledged to offset this sharp increase in Pentagon funding with
corresponding cuts in domestic and State Department spending. (In a
military-first world, who even cares about the ancient art of diplomacy?) If
the president gets his way, that will mean, for instance, a 31% cut in the
Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and a 29% cut in the State
Department’s. Eliminated would also be $8 billion worth of block grants that
provide services to low-income communities, including subsidies for seniors who
can’t afford to heat their homes, as well as any support for 19 separate
agencies engaged in purely peaceable activities,
including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Legal Services, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
AmeriCorps, and the Appalachian Regional Commission, which invests in economic development, education, and infrastructure projects in one
of the nation’s poorest regions.
Overall, as presently imagined, the
Trump budget would hike the Pentagon’s cut of the pie, and related spending on
veterans' affairs, homeland security, and nuclear weapons to an astounding 68% of federal discretionary spending. And keep in mind
that the discretionary budget includes virtually everything the government does
outside of entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that perpetual war and the urge to
perpetuate yet more of it leaves little room for spending on the environment,
diplomacy, alternative energy, housing, or other domestic investments, not to
speak of infrastructure repair.
Put another way, preparations for and
the pursuit of war will ensure that any future America is dirtier, sicker,
poorer, more rickety, and less safe.
Taking the gloves off
when it comes to the costs of war
The biggest beneficiaries of Pentagon
largesse will, as always, be the major defense contractors like Lockheed
Martin, which received more than $36 billion in defense-related contracts in
fiscal 2015 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available). To
put that figure in perspective, Lockheed Martin’s federal contracts are now
larger than the budgets
of 22 of the 50 states. The top
100 defense contractors received $175 billion from the Pentagon in fiscal year 2015,
nearly one-third of the Department of Defense’s entire budget. These
numbers will only grow if Trump gets the money he wants to build more ships,
planes, tanks, and nuclear weapons.
The Trump administration has yet to
reveal precisely what it plans to spend all that new Pentagon money it’s
requesting on, but the president’s past statements offer some clues. He has called for building up the Navy from its current level of 272
ships to 350 or more. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the construction costs alone of such an effort
would be $800 billion over the next three decades at an annual cost of $26.6
billion, which is 40% higher than the Navy’s present shipbuilding budget.
To put this in perspective, even before
Trump’s proposed increases, the Navy was planning major expenditures on items
like 12 new ballistic-missile-firing submarines at a development and building cost of more than $10 billion each. As for new
surface ships, Trump wants to add two more aircraft carriers to the 10 already
in active service. He made this clear in a speech on board the USS Gerald
Ford, a new $13 billion
carrier that, as with so much Pentagon
weaponry, has been plagued with cost overruns and performance problems.
President Trump also wants to double down
on the Pentagon’s preexisting program to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years on a new generation of
nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles. While that
plan is politely referred to as a “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal, it
already essentially represents Washington’s bid to launch a new global arms
race. So among a host of ill-considered plans for yet more expenditures,
this one is a particular ringer, given that the United States already possesses
massive nuclear overkill and that current nuclear delivery systems can last
decades more with upgrades. To give all of this a sense of scale, two Air
Force strategists determined that the United States needs just 311 nuclear warheads to dissuade any other
country from ever attacking it with nuclear weapons. At 4,000 nuclear
warheads, the current US stockpile is already more
than 13 times that figure – enough, that is, to destroy several planet Earths.
And don’t forget that Trump also wants
to add tens of thousands more soldiers and Marines to the military’s
ranks. By the most conservative estimate, the cost of equipping, training, paying, and deploying a
single soldier annually is now close to $1 million (even leaving aside those
future VA outlays), so every 10,000 additional troops means at least $10
billion more per year.
And don’t forget that the staggering
potential costs already mentioned represent just the baseline for military
spending — the costs President Trump will set in motion even if he doesn’t get
us into a major war. Not that we’re not at war already. After all, he
inherited no less than seven conflicts from Barack Obama: Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Each of them involves a
different mix of tools, including combat troops, trainers, Special Operations
forces, conventional bombing, drone strikes, and the arming of surrogate forces
— but conflicts they already are.
Based on his first 100-plus days in
office, the real question isn’t whether Donald Trump will escalate these
conflicts — he will — but how much more he will do. He’s already allowed his
military commanders to “take the gloves off” by loosening the criteria for air attacks in Afghanistan, Syria,
Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia, with an almost instant increase in civilian casualties as a result. He has also ceded
to his commanders decision-making when it comes to how many
troops to deploy in Iraq, Syria,
Afghanistan and elsewhere, making it a reasonable probability that more US
personnel will be sent into action in the months and years to come.
It still seems unlikely that what must
now be considered Trump’s wars will ever blow up into the kind of large-scale
conflicts that the Bush administration sparked in Iraq. At the height of
that disaster, more than
160,000 U.S. troops and a comparable
number of US-funded private contractors were
deployed to Iraq (compared to 7,000 troops and more than 7,800
contractors there now). Nor
does the talk of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 3,000 to
5,000 suggest that the 8,400 troops now there will ever be returned to the level of roughly
100,000 of the Obama “surge” era of 2010 and
2011.
But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just
yet. Given Trump’s pattern of erratic behavior so far – one week
threatening a preemptive strike on North Korea and the next suggesting talks to
curb Pyongyang’s nuclear program – anything is possible. For example,
there could still be a sharp uptick in US military personnel sent into Iraq and
Syria when his pledge to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS doesn’t vanquish the
group.
And if we learned anything from the Iraq
experience (aside from the fact that attempting to use military force to remake
another country is a formula for a humanitarian and security disaster), it’s
that politicians and military leaders routinely underestimate the costs of
war. Before the invasion of Iraq, Bush officials were, for instance,
citing figures as low as $50 billion for the entire upcoming operation, beginning to end.
According to figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service,
however, direct budgetary costs for the Iraq intervention have been at least 16
times larger than that – well over $800 billion – and still counting.
One decision that could drive Trump’s
already expansive military spending plans through the roof would be an incident
that escalated into a full-scale conflict with Iran. If the Trump team – a
remarkable crew of Iranophobes – were to attack that country, there’s no telling
where things might end, or how high the costs might mount. As analyst Ali Vaez
of the International Crisis Group has noted, a war with Iran could “make the Afghan and Iraqi
conflicts look like a walk in the park.”
So before Congress and the public
acquiesce in another military intervention or a sharp escalation of one of the
US wars already under way, perhaps it’s time to finally consider the true costs
of war, American-style -– in lives lost, dollars spent, and opportunities
squandered. It’s a reasonable bet that never in history has a society
spent more on war and gotten less bang for its copious bucks.
This piece is reposted from Tom.Dispatch.com
on
May 9,
2017 with that site's
permission.