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The US has spent $1.5 trillion on war since Sept 11 attacks

161 points by mfrw 8y ago

mmjaa 8y ago
crickets Nobody seems to care. I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now. EDIT: you can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the innocent victims. This will get you downvotes - nobody likes to think of their military as anything less than 100% honourable and invulnerable to such error. Nobody wants to know about the maimed kids and utterly evil destruction of civilisation at the hands of America's Thug Warrior Class... You can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the cost to Americans - nobody likes to think what those $Trillions could have done, to improve American society - and there is much it could have done (e.g. Healthcare, Skid Row, colony on Mars, etc.). So, how can we get Americans to see the idiocy of their military-industrial-pharmaceutical-complex? What methods, perhaps extreme, might gain their decadent attention to the issue of their out of control state? One wonders ..
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  >I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now. Care to explain how this is true?
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    American (military-industrial workers) need to eat too, yo. Its poor uneducated thug classes, currently serving in the military, need something worthwhile to justify their existence and continued participation in what can, in all fairness, be described as a Death Cult.
    - sremani 8y ago
      The leeches are not the poor uneducated thug classes. Its the over-educated test-taking class that has no real world skills other than paper pushing and mistaking maps for real location, while occupying positions of high authority in DC.
  - qaq 8y ago
    Well the effects are hard to calculate but hard to argue that having worlds top military gives one a lot of negotiation leverage.
    - vibrio 8y ago
      Does it? Can that leverage be disentangled from being the largest economy? Economics is a much more effective tool.
      - qaq 8y ago
        Yes it can imagine there is no US mil and Saddam Hussein actually took over Quatar Kuweit and UAE and Saudi Arabia and than made a deal with Russia. Whant to calculate effects on US ecomony?
        vibrio 8y ago
        We did prevent that scenario. The discussion did shift from "having the worlds top military" to "imagine there is no US military". I don't advocate US military disarmament or blind pacifism, but there is some room for enhancing efficiency and still maintaining the world's top military (and economy).
        qaq 8y ago
        I think I worded the example poorly but my understanding is that there is a mil. doctrine of what kind of resources US mil. needs to be able to have X silm. engagements it's hard to say how much you can scale back and keep the same capability. I would imagine that it includes handling Russia and China at the same time for example.
- bairrd 8y ago
  Can you explain why you think $1.5 trillion in defense spending stopped the US from being a third world country? With the state of infrastructure & healthcare in this country, and the absolute lack of over-site in military spending because of a blind 'support the troops/cops' mindset that leads to trillion dollar F-35s and small regional police departments having the capital to buy road-destroying APCs, I honestly can't fathom how spending $1.5 trillion to drop white phosphorus on random Yemenis is anything close to justifiable.
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    Its not justifiable, thats the point. But those folks who assembled the white phosphorous bombs that were dropped on innocent people, and who live in Americas 'heartland' in safety, surety and comfort, sure did need to get paid that day. Does that help you understand the situation?
    - NickM 8y ago
      Yeah but this argument I always hear that "our economy needs the military to survive" is utterly ridiculous; if you take it down to the simplest possible alternative, we could just keep paying all the same military employees and contractors the same amounts but tell them to do nothing, and if they "sure did need to get paid that day" well then fine, at least now we've solved that problem without causing a bunch of pointless death and destruction. Now take it a step further. Imagine if instead of paying all those people to do nothing, you paid them to do useful jobs that actually help the world instead of attacking it. We could all be so much better off than we are now.
- spamizbad 8y ago
  America by definition can not be a 3rd-world country: we were part of NATO. But less pendantically, The US would probably be stronger economically, long term, if it phased out much of its war spending and focused it instead on infrastructure, education, healthcare, and R&D. Unfortunately, in the United States, our politicians like to frame non-military spending as some sort of luxury... its all butter, bread, and circus even if its providing boring but essential services to American citizens.
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    The 10's of thousands of families living on skid row don't get anything from NATO membership. The millions of people with zero healthcare: same. (Unless they're in the military, which of course at least feeds them and keeps them healthy, because 'NATO'-like reasons...)
- gammatrigono 8y ago
  How much money could reasonably be spent on Skid Row, and why is it in the same sentence as Mars?
justin66 8y ago
It is a large enough amount of money that a person cannot really fathom it without some serious thought. I expect many people read that and think "well, yeah, it's expensive."
prolikewh0a 8y ago
Looks like the total cost, including new domestic programs as well as treating veterans is $5.6 trillion. https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/11/costssummary https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/11/costssummary
- otalp 8y ago
  That averages to 330 billion annually...
  - dmschulman 8y ago
    $900,000,000 per day
    - mcny 8y ago
      Maybe we can write this on a bus : We spend $900M a day on war. Lets fund our medicare instead. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-news-vote-leave-director-dominic-cummings-leave-eu-error-nhs-350-million-lie-bus-a7822386.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest... https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8c92ccc4-ff8d-4620-82b7-9f4158d3e710.jpg https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8c92ccc... https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/ea01efb7-082b-4130-8ebd-ad910e68b075.jpg https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/ea01efb...
      - onomonomono 8y ago
        You do realize we spend $1,500M ($1.5 billion) on Medicare a day, yes?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        prolikewh0a 8y ago
        That $1.5 billion goes to saving lives and curing people, the $900 million goes to ending lives illegally. We could funnel that $900 million into Medicare and help a whole lot more people.
kldavis4 8y ago
I can see strong parallels between this and the fall of the Roman Empire: "Maintaining an army to defend the border of the Empire from barbarian attacks was a constant drain on the government. Military spending left few resources for other vital activities, such as providing public housing and maintaining quality roads and aqueducts. Frustrated Romans lost their desire to defend the Empire. The empire had to begin hiring soldiers recruited from the unemployed city mobs or worse from foreign counties. Such an army was not only unreliable, but very expensive. The emperors were forced to raise taxes frequently which in turn led again to increased inflation." Source: https://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/ https://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/
- qaq 8y ago
  It's actually pretty complicated. Pretty much whole tech ecosystem originally got bankrolled by mil. spending. Some mil. spending is basically subsidies to Boeing etc. which in turn competes with Airbus which basically gets direct subsidies. So it would be pretty complicated to figure out all the effects.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    For certain, the US couldn’t just skip the wars and pocket exactly $1.5T, but we definitely could’ve avoided spending most of that, or spent it in more economically useful ways, even if subsidies to Boeing to compete with airbus is one of them.
- jbattle 8y ago
  Of course - the fall of Rome was a dynamic phase of ups and downs that lasted for literally centuries - the phase described above was operative for longer than the US has been around. I hesitate to draw overstrong conclusions from history, the wise words of Santayana not withstanding
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- digianarchist 8y ago
  Chris Hedges thinks the same: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-death-of-the-republic/ https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-death-of-the-republic/
almost_usual 8y ago
If it wasn’t spent overseas it’d be spent somewhere else. This country’s foundation is defense and war. There’s a reason why engineering schools have plenty of resources.
kailuowang 8y ago
it's just one and a half apple.
desdiv 8y ago
"All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the Mujahedin bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."[0] -Osama bin Laden [0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov1.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov...
- almost_usual 8y ago
  I’m skeptical Russia’s financial woes were solely caused by this strategy.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Well it most definitely didn't help their situation at all.
  - iooi 8y ago
    You're right, there were at most 2000 Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan during that war. The afghan resistance did most of the work, and most of the damage was done thanks to US-provided Stinger missiles -- they managed to shoot down 100 aircraft and 300 helicopters.
  - Brockenstein 8y ago
    Yeah, Bin Laden was engaging in a bit of PR with those statements. In such circumstances people always try to take as much credit as they can, no matter how exaggerated it is. And for Bin Laden that war was probably center of his universe. For the USSR it might have been kind of a big deal, but probably not the only issue they were dealing with worldwide and domestically. Bin Laden was probably never that concerned with representing that accurately, you know, because who's going to set him straight?
1ba9115454 8y ago
Enough to end world poverty? To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion. This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world.
- lbriner 8y ago
  If the only problem in the world is lack of finance then great but we have seen plenty of examples of money being spent and then mislaid/stolen/injected into private companies and politicians pockets etc. so the figure is largely meaningless.
- slavik81 8y ago
  In the past 30 years, extreme poverty has dropped from ~50% of the world population to ~10%. Maybe we could do better, but it looks like we are on track. It's worth noting that ending extreme poverty is only part of ending world poverty. We're talking about ensuring people have at least $1.90/day to live on. You get a lot of bang for your buck helping people below that line.
cirgue 8y ago
For some perspective on this sum, the (edit: annual) GDP of the US went from around 11 trillion to around 18 trillion during this same time period.
- qeternity 8y ago
  The annual gdp...
  - apexalpha 8y ago
    All gdp is annual.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  ... and the US national debt overtook it.
kibwen 8y ago
The usual thought experiment for framing the magnitudinal difference between millionaires and billionaires, extended to trillions: One million seconds ago was Thursday, August 30 (11 days). One billion seconds ago was Saturday, January 3, 1987 (31 years). One trillion seconds ago was back during the Pleistocene geological epoch and the Paleolithic era of prehistory (31,689 years). The quantity of American resources that have been wasted on war is shameful. For my own mental health I try not to dwell too long upon all the infrastructure, research, and social programs that money could have been better spent on.
- rfinney 8y ago
  What about the contrarian view that the Pax Americana has brought the greatest era of peace, wealth and standard of living to the world? Our forefathers paid a higher price. Security and liberty are not without costs.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    That only works if the massive resources spent on Afghanistan and Iraq helped with the Pax Americana. I see no reason to think it did, and a multitude of reasons to think the opposite. How many millions have now died because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath?
    - CWuestefeld 8y ago
      because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath And Libya and Syria...
      - 09bjb 8y ago
        And Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan again back in the 80s...the interventionist policy has always been about U.S. corporate interests abroad, not about democracy or peace. https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--America-s-Century-of-Regime-Change-from-Hawaii-to-Iraq-9780805082401 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--A... ^^ Not completely without bias, but probably contains a lot of inarguable historical facts that you weren't even close to being taught in high school or even college.
spurgu 8y ago
You can't put a price on FREEDOM. /s
photos_victim 8y ago
I worked out in 2005 that the money spent on these wars is enough to have bought all of non-urbanized Canada, which seems like a better investment.
onomonomono 8y ago
For perspective, we spend about $1 trillion on means-tested welfare programs every year. So 17 years of war would cover about 18 months of welfare spending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_States#Means-tested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...
- citation_please 8y ago
  Made me think: if we cut corporate taxes, raised the minimum wage, and reduced means-tested welfare, where would we end up? Same position but with less bureaucracy? Something tells me that the welfare safety net has more societal benefits than a wage floor, but right now we don't really have a respectable form of either compared to 20 years ago.
apo 8y ago
It's very hard for anyone who wasn't fully aware in the months following 9-11 to understand just how much support there was for both wars. - American flags flying everywhere. - Bumper stickers everywhere. - Americans demanding that "something be done" everywhere. - Nonstop media barrage favoring both wars. - Utter lack of skepticism and rush to believe whatever was being put out by the Administration. - Unshakable faith that the military would make everything right. As a dissenter, I was afraid to voice my opinions (retribution, being labeled a traitor) and felt utterly helpless to change anything about the direction things were headed. It's one thing to look back and wonder how we ended up in such a mess. It's another thing to see the conviction on the faces of nearly every person you talk with that the war would be over within a few weeks and a military response was the right course. From what I've read about the early history of US involvement in Vietnam, my experience is far from unique. That part about the war being over within a few weeks in particular seems to repeat itself with disturbing regularity: the Civil War, WWI, Vietnam, Gulf Wars, Afghanistan.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I agree about Afghanistan, but both wars? There was a ton of opposition to Iraq. Not enough, but a lot.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    Of course there was a bunch of opposition. But IMHO it was contained to people who were willing to be "political", and then only in our social enclaves. The "average person" was somewhere between tacit acceptance and virtue signaling by putting "support the troops" stickers on their car - a great example of dog whistle politics. Of course [0], promulgating that feeling of the "average person" is precisely one of the ways propaganda works. [0] in retrospect for me personally.
- wrs 8y ago
  It’s also hard at this point to remember the sympathy that poured in from around the world. The US got a free pass to do nearly anything in the days following 9/11. Instead of doing something useful with that leverage, we betrayed that global support by doing something monumentally stupid and irrelevant, invading Iraq — made even more stupid by having no realistic plan for the aftermath. All of which was probably according to plan (or even better than expected) as far as Bin Laden was concerned.
codyb 8y ago
I see a lot of talk here about what we could have done with the money instead, which is fine. It's good to be able to reason about your mistakes and missteps. My question is, now that we're here, what do we do now? Pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan seems, irresponsible to say the least. Certainly surrending the whole country of Afghanistan back to the Taliban would be an incredible blemish, and no citizen of another nation would ever risk their lives to help a nation who so callously discarded those who did the same. And certainly abandoning the Kurds in Iraq would be another tragedy, as well as opening up that nation to another horrific power vacuum situation. And that's the lower bound of what we could do. We could unilaterally pull out our forces from all over the world, abandoning our commitments to the incredibly succesful NATO and to other allies including Israel, Japan, and S. Korea. I'm not a big fan of prolonged war. I think Afghanistan was more justified than the incredible shit show that was Iraq. I think the Taliban and Isis and Assad (where the US gets criticized both for not doing enough and doing too much) and Hussein are horrific people and entities. But these articles, while important for highlighting the incredible drain on national treasure we've subjected ourselves to seem to me to avoid very important questions about where to go from here and instead just assign a number to matters of geopolitics which affect billions of lives the world over. Of course, as geopolitics is such an incredibly vast and complicated topic perhaps that is beyond the scope of these stories. Still... where do we go from here?
- mateus1 8y ago
  I'm not in the US and I can't help but be astounded as to how little debate there is on the effectiveness of the war machine. I'm not pro war but I can see how just up and leaving Afghanistan would be extremely problematic. However, it seems to me Americans are ok with the apparent lack of results in these wars. I'm not an expert but it seems both pointless and ineffective in any front.
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    It's politically unpopular to vote against defense spending or to decrease defense spending, also military service is fetishized to a high degree. It's generally a winning political strategy to put forward nationalism as patriotism. There is so much defense spending it's like welfare spread out to all the states in the form of defense manufacturing, and we have military bases in economically otherwise not very useful areas. This entrenched political base has proved to be impossible to reform due to the outsized political influence of those rural, thinly populated areas in the Congress and presidential elections.
omarforgotpwd 8y ago
not only that but the latest iPhone event has been delayed by one day. Thanks a lot terrorists...
coding123 8y ago
This should probably be flagged before it ends up a flamewar in here.
- berbec 8y ago
  It's actually stating fairly sane. I'm suprise we haven't gotten any rage faces yet.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  It seems pretty civilised so far, fortunately this isn't Reddit.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
motiw 8y ago
I think the main story here is the mismangnent of this funds
dandare 8y ago
I am surprised that $1.5 trillion does not look as big as I expected in the perspective of 1 year US federal budget https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016
jjcc 8y ago
A few of observation/speculation: 1. Most American/European (with a few exceptions [1]) only focus on the spending cost of their own countries but less concern about the cost of the nations that the wars involved. i.e. Iraq, Libya, etc. Breaking an exiting stable eco systems have huge impact on local people. In Iraq, 200k - 600k direct or indirect death. It translated to 2 million - 6 million American if we put population into account. In Libya with a chaos satiation waves of illegal immigrants have a chance to go to Europa from the country , which changed the political scenery of many Eurapean countries. Again the cost is not counted into the war. 2.Perception defect of modern human let the war criminals being defined to only those who kill innocent people. For example Hitler is considered to be responsible for deaths of millions so he is a war criminal. This is visible to modern human mind. But most Iraqi deaths were not caused by US bombing but their killing with each other or indirect slow deaths by some other reasons , say sudden disrupt of power in a hospital. Not many modern human being consider US is responsible. I would praised the old Bush stopping the first gulf war to let Saddam survive and avoid unpredictable risk of destroying stable eco system which has worse result that more distributed deaths happen with no visible war criminals 3.(Omitted) Sorry, will be down voted so just to be brief: Assange said "Journalists are war criminals". I didn’t understand the meaning initially. But seeing so many comments here being down voted because they are not aligned with public belief, I realize that how easily the mass population can be fooled. The reason that Journalists can fool public opinion is they really report truth but only when things can be verified. Otherwise they are very likely just selling their beliefs and some time they fabricate stories to support their beliefs. [1] https://williamblum.org/books/americas-deadliest-export https://williamblum.org/books/americas-deadliest-export
InclinedPlane 8y ago
The money seems to be the smallest cost of these wars. We've normalized hideous drone bombing campaigns undertaken on the slightest justifications. On paper drone attacks are precise and backed by meticulous research, in reality they are backed by often dubious intelligence and executed without sufficient care for collateral damage, resulting in at least a 50% rate of innocent/civilian casualties. By that measure they are hardly better than car bombs, but they are high tech so somehow they escape (for us in the west anyway) the negative connotation of terrorism. Yet by any rational measure they are terrorism. There are countless children in territories we've terrorized who fear sunny skies because good weather means drones operate. And we've carried that horrid tradition forward in our participation in Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign in Yemen, among others. Meanwhile, we've also normalized the most horrid perversions of our democracy, our values, and the rule of law at home. We've grown comfortable with indefinite detention. We had a hot and heavy flirtation with systematized torture. We've created monsters like ICE and the DHS who are given ridiculous powers in a "border zone" that includes 2/3 of the entire US population. All in all, I don't think history will be kind in its assessment of our reaction to the September 11th attacks.
trumped 8y ago
Does that include the black budget?
spurgu 8y ago
My previous comment got flagged. Maybe the /s was a mistake on my part. Lots of unenlightened Americans(?) ITT trying to justify the numbers. Baffling how accepted it is and how that money could've instead been spent in other ways. Yes, that money might have helped out the American economy as a whole, but so would buying back scratchers and RPi's (instead of RPG's) for the rest of the world as well. Or just not getting deeper in the the trillion dollar deficit trench. Fucking maniacs. Now go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.
conrmahr 8y ago
“Mission Accomplished”
msiyer 8y ago
There are evil forces. We need to protect ourselves. We need military. However, it is naive to think that we, as citizens in a democracy, have any say in the wars we engage in. If we have no say, who does? If we have no say, is the one who does accountable to us? If we have no say and the one who does is not accountable to us, then is this a democracy? Too much power in the hands of too few. We sacrifice our hard earned money, our kith and kin... so that a few psychopaths can stroke their egos.

161 points by mfrw 8y ago

crickets Nobody seems to care. I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now. EDIT: you can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the innocent victims. This will get you downvotes - nobody likes to think of their military as anything less than 100% honourable and invulnerable to such error. Nobody wants to know about the maimed kids and utterly evil destruction of civilisation at the hands of America's Thug Warrior Class... You can't discuss America's illegal wars from the perspective of the cost to Americans - nobody likes to think what those $Trillions could have done, to improve American society - and there is much it could have done (e.g. Healthcare, Skid Row, colony on Mars, etc.). So, how can we get Americans to see the idiocy of their military-industrial-pharmaceutical-complex? What methods, perhaps extreme, might gain their decadent attention to the issue of their out of control state? One wonders ..

prolikewh0a 8y ago
>I guess its because, without that spending, America would be a third-world country by now. Care to explain how this is true?
- mmjaa 8y ago
  American (military-industrial workers) need to eat too, yo. Its poor uneducated thug classes, currently serving in the military, need something worthwhile to justify their existence and continued participation in what can, in all fairness, be described as a Death Cult.
  - sremani 8y ago
    The leeches are not the poor uneducated thug classes. Its the over-educated test-taking class that has no real world skills other than paper pushing and mistaking maps for real location, while occupying positions of high authority in DC.
- qaq 8y ago
  Well the effects are hard to calculate but hard to argue that having worlds top military gives one a lot of negotiation leverage.
  - vibrio 8y ago
    Does it? Can that leverage be disentangled from being the largest economy? Economics is a much more effective tool.
    - qaq 8y ago
      Yes it can imagine there is no US mil and Saddam Hussein actually took over Quatar Kuweit and UAE and Saudi Arabia and than made a deal with Russia. Whant to calculate effects on US ecomony?
      - vibrio 8y ago
        We did prevent that scenario. The discussion did shift from "having the worlds top military" to "imagine there is no US military". I don't advocate US military disarmament or blind pacifism, but there is some room for enhancing efficiency and still maintaining the world's top military (and economy).
        qaq 8y ago
        I think I worded the example poorly but my understanding is that there is a mil. doctrine of what kind of resources US mil. needs to be able to have X silm. engagements it's hard to say how much you can scale back and keep the same capability. I would imagine that it includes handling Russia and China at the same time for example.
bairrd 8y ago
Can you explain why you think $1.5 trillion in defense spending stopped the US from being a third world country? With the state of infrastructure & healthcare in this country, and the absolute lack of over-site in military spending because of a blind 'support the troops/cops' mindset that leads to trillion dollar F-35s and small regional police departments having the capital to buy road-destroying APCs, I honestly can't fathom how spending $1.5 trillion to drop white phosphorus on random Yemenis is anything close to justifiable.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  Its not justifiable, thats the point. But those folks who assembled the white phosphorous bombs that were dropped on innocent people, and who live in Americas 'heartland' in safety, surety and comfort, sure did need to get paid that day. Does that help you understand the situation?
  - NickM 8y ago
    Yeah but this argument I always hear that "our economy needs the military to survive" is utterly ridiculous; if you take it down to the simplest possible alternative, we could just keep paying all the same military employees and contractors the same amounts but tell them to do nothing, and if they "sure did need to get paid that day" well then fine, at least now we've solved that problem without causing a bunch of pointless death and destruction. Now take it a step further. Imagine if instead of paying all those people to do nothing, you paid them to do useful jobs that actually help the world instead of attacking it. We could all be so much better off than we are now.
spamizbad 8y ago
America by definition can not be a 3rd-world country: we were part of NATO. But less pendantically, The US would probably be stronger economically, long term, if it phased out much of its war spending and focused it instead on infrastructure, education, healthcare, and R&D. Unfortunately, in the United States, our politicians like to frame non-military spending as some sort of luxury... its all butter, bread, and circus even if its providing boring but essential services to American citizens.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  The 10's of thousands of families living on skid row don't get anything from NATO membership. The millions of people with zero healthcare: same. (Unless they're in the military, which of course at least feeds them and keeps them healthy, because 'NATO'-like reasons...)
gammatrigono 8y ago
How much money could reasonably be spent on Skid Row, and why is it in the same sentence as Mars?

justin66 8y ago

It is a large enough amount of money that a person cannot really fathom it without some serious thought. I expect many people read that and think "well, yeah, it's expensive."

prolikewh0a 8y ago

Looks like the total cost, including new domestic programs as well as treating veterans is $5.6 trillion. https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/11/costssummary https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/11/costssummary

otalp 8y ago
That averages to 330 billion annually...
- dmschulman 8y ago
  $900,000,000 per day
  - mcny 8y ago
    Maybe we can write this on a bus : We spend $900M a day on war. Lets fund our medicare instead. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-news-vote-leave-director-dominic-cummings-leave-eu-error-nhs-350-million-lie-bus-a7822386.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest... https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8c92ccc4-ff8d-4620-82b7-9f4158d3e710.jpg https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/8c92ccc... https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/ea01efb7-082b-4130-8ebd-ad910e68b075.jpg https://screenshotscdn.firefoxusercontent.com/images/ea01efb...
    - onomonomono 8y ago
      You do realize we spend $1,500M ($1.5 billion) on Medicare a day, yes?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - prolikewh0a 8y ago
        That $1.5 billion goes to saving lives and curing people, the $900 million goes to ending lives illegally. We could funnel that $900 million into Medicare and help a whole lot more people.

kldavis4 8y ago

I can see strong parallels between this and the fall of the Roman Empire: "Maintaining an army to defend the border of the Empire from barbarian attacks was a constant drain on the government. Military spending left few resources for other vital activities, such as providing public housing and maintaining quality roads and aqueducts. Frustrated Romans lost their desire to defend the Empire. The empire had to begin hiring soldiers recruited from the unemployed city mobs or worse from foreign counties. Such an army was not only unreliable, but very expensive. The emperors were forced to raise taxes frequently which in turn led again to increased inflation." Source: https://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/ https://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/

qaq 8y ago
It's actually pretty complicated. Pretty much whole tech ecosystem originally got bankrolled by mil. spending. Some mil. spending is basically subsidies to Boeing etc. which in turn competes with Airbus which basically gets direct subsidies. So it would be pretty complicated to figure out all the effects.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  For certain, the US couldn’t just skip the wars and pocket exactly $1.5T, but we definitely could’ve avoided spending most of that, or spent it in more economically useful ways, even if subsidies to Boeing to compete with airbus is one of them.
jbattle 8y ago
Of course - the fall of Rome was a dynamic phase of ups and downs that lasted for literally centuries - the phase described above was operative for longer than the US has been around. I hesitate to draw overstrong conclusions from history, the wise words of Santayana not withstanding
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digianarchist 8y ago
Chris Hedges thinks the same: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-death-of-the-republic/ https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-death-of-the-republic/

almost_usual 8y ago

If it wasn’t spent overseas it’d be spent somewhere else. This country’s foundation is defense and war. There’s a reason why engineering schools have plenty of resources.

kailuowang 8y ago

it's just one and a half apple.

desdiv 8y ago

"All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we alongside the Mujahedin bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."[0] -Osama bin Laden [0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov1.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16990-2004Nov...

almost_usual 8y ago
I’m skeptical Russia’s financial woes were solely caused by this strategy.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Well it most definitely didn't help their situation at all.
- iooi 8y ago
  You're right, there were at most 2000 Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan during that war. The afghan resistance did most of the work, and most of the damage was done thanks to US-provided Stinger missiles -- they managed to shoot down 100 aircraft and 300 helicopters.
- Brockenstein 8y ago
  Yeah, Bin Laden was engaging in a bit of PR with those statements. In such circumstances people always try to take as much credit as they can, no matter how exaggerated it is. And for Bin Laden that war was probably center of his universe. For the USSR it might have been kind of a big deal, but probably not the only issue they were dealing with worldwide and domestically. Bin Laden was probably never that concerned with representing that accurately, you know, because who's going to set him straight?

1ba9115454 8y ago

Enough to end world poverty? To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be about $175 billion. This represents less than one percent of the combined income of the richest countries in the world.

lbriner 8y ago
If the only problem in the world is lack of finance then great but we have seen plenty of examples of money being spent and then mislaid/stolen/injected into private companies and politicians pockets etc. so the figure is largely meaningless.
slavik81 8y ago
In the past 30 years, extreme poverty has dropped from ~50% of the world population to ~10%. Maybe we could do better, but it looks like we are on track. It's worth noting that ending extreme poverty is only part of ending world poverty. We're talking about ensuring people have at least $1.90/day to live on. You get a lot of bang for your buck helping people below that line.

cirgue 8y ago

For some perspective on this sum, the (edit: annual) GDP of the US went from around 11 trillion to around 18 trillion during this same time period.

qeternity 8y ago
The annual gdp...
- apexalpha 8y ago
  All gdp is annual.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
... and the US national debt overtook it.

kibwen 8y ago

The usual thought experiment for framing the magnitudinal difference between millionaires and billionaires, extended to trillions: One million seconds ago was Thursday, August 30 (11 days). One billion seconds ago was Saturday, January 3, 1987 (31 years). One trillion seconds ago was back during the Pleistocene geological epoch and the Paleolithic era of prehistory (31,689 years). The quantity of American resources that have been wasted on war is shameful. For my own mental health I try not to dwell too long upon all the infrastructure, research, and social programs that money could have been better spent on.

rfinney 8y ago
What about the contrarian view that the Pax Americana has brought the greatest era of peace, wealth and standard of living to the world? Our forefathers paid a higher price. Security and liberty are not without costs.
- mikeash 8y ago
  That only works if the massive resources spent on Afghanistan and Iraq helped with the Pax Americana. I see no reason to think it did, and a multitude of reasons to think the opposite. How many millions have now died because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath?
  - CWuestefeld 8y ago
    because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath And Libya and Syria...
    - 09bjb 8y ago
      And Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan again back in the 80s...the interventionist policy has always been about U.S. corporate interests abroad, not about democracy or peace. https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--America-s-Century-of-Regime-Change-from-Hawaii-to-Iraq-9780805082401 https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--A... ^^ Not completely without bias, but probably contains a lot of inarguable historical facts that you weren't even close to being taught in high school or even college.

spurgu 8y ago

You can't put a price on FREEDOM. /s

photos_victim 8y ago

I worked out in 2005 that the money spent on these wars is enough to have bought all of non-urbanized Canada, which seems like a better investment.

onomonomono 8y ago

For perspective, we spend about $1 trillion on means-tested welfare programs every year. So 17 years of war would cover about 18 months of welfare spending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_States#Means-tested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...

citation_please 8y ago
Made me think: if we cut corporate taxes, raised the minimum wage, and reduced means-tested welfare, where would we end up? Same position but with less bureaucracy? Something tells me that the welfare safety net has more societal benefits than a wage floor, but right now we don't really have a respectable form of either compared to 20 years ago.

apo 8y ago

It's very hard for anyone who wasn't fully aware in the months following 9-11 to understand just how much support there was for both wars. - American flags flying everywhere. - Bumper stickers everywhere. - Americans demanding that "something be done" everywhere. - Nonstop media barrage favoring both wars. - Utter lack of skepticism and rush to believe whatever was being put out by the Administration. - Unshakable faith that the military would make everything right. As a dissenter, I was afraid to voice my opinions (retribution, being labeled a traitor) and felt utterly helpless to change anything about the direction things were headed. It's one thing to look back and wonder how we ended up in such a mess. It's another thing to see the conviction on the faces of nearly every person you talk with that the war would be over within a few weeks and a military response was the right course. From what I've read about the early history of US involvement in Vietnam, my experience is far from unique. That part about the war being over within a few weeks in particular seems to repeat itself with disturbing regularity: the Civil War, WWI, Vietnam, Gulf Wars, Afghanistan.

mikeash 8y ago
I agree about Afghanistan, but both wars? There was a ton of opposition to Iraq. Not enough, but a lot.
- mindslight 8y ago
  Of course there was a bunch of opposition. But IMHO it was contained to people who were willing to be "political", and then only in our social enclaves. The "average person" was somewhere between tacit acceptance and virtue signaling by putting "support the troops" stickers on their car - a great example of dog whistle politics. Of course [0], promulgating that feeling of the "average person" is precisely one of the ways propaganda works. [0] in retrospect for me personally.
wrs 8y ago
It’s also hard at this point to remember the sympathy that poured in from around the world. The US got a free pass to do nearly anything in the days following 9/11. Instead of doing something useful with that leverage, we betrayed that global support by doing something monumentally stupid and irrelevant, invading Iraq — made even more stupid by having no realistic plan for the aftermath. All of which was probably according to plan (or even better than expected) as far as Bin Laden was concerned.

codyb 8y ago

I see a lot of talk here about what we could have done with the money instead, which is fine. It's good to be able to reason about your mistakes and missteps. My question is, now that we're here, what do we do now? Pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan seems, irresponsible to say the least. Certainly surrending the whole country of Afghanistan back to the Taliban would be an incredible blemish, and no citizen of another nation would ever risk their lives to help a nation who so callously discarded those who did the same. And certainly abandoning the Kurds in Iraq would be another tragedy, as well as opening up that nation to another horrific power vacuum situation. And that's the lower bound of what we could do. We could unilaterally pull out our forces from all over the world, abandoning our commitments to the incredibly succesful NATO and to other allies including Israel, Japan, and S. Korea. I'm not a big fan of prolonged war. I think Afghanistan was more justified than the incredible shit show that was Iraq. I think the Taliban and Isis and Assad (where the US gets criticized both for not doing enough and doing too much) and Hussein are horrific people and entities. But these articles, while important for highlighting the incredible drain on national treasure we've subjected ourselves to seem to me to avoid very important questions about where to go from here and instead just assign a number to matters of geopolitics which affect billions of lives the world over. Of course, as geopolitics is such an incredibly vast and complicated topic perhaps that is beyond the scope of these stories. Still... where do we go from here?

mateus1 8y ago
I'm not in the US and I can't help but be astounded as to how little debate there is on the effectiveness of the war machine. I'm not pro war but I can see how just up and leaving Afghanistan would be extremely problematic. However, it seems to me Americans are ok with the apparent lack of results in these wars. I'm not an expert but it seems both pointless and ineffective in any front.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  It's politically unpopular to vote against defense spending or to decrease defense spending, also military service is fetishized to a high degree. It's generally a winning political strategy to put forward nationalism as patriotism. There is so much defense spending it's like welfare spread out to all the states in the form of defense manufacturing, and we have military bases in economically otherwise not very useful areas. This entrenched political base has proved to be impossible to reform due to the outsized political influence of those rural, thinly populated areas in the Congress and presidential elections.

omarforgotpwd 8y ago

not only that but the latest iPhone event has been delayed by one day. Thanks a lot terrorists...

coding123 8y ago

This should probably be flagged before it ends up a flamewar in here.

berbec 8y ago
It's actually stating fairly sane. I'm suprise we haven't gotten any rage faces yet.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
It seems pretty civilised so far, fortunately this isn't Reddit.
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motiw 8y ago

I think the main story here is the mismangnent of this funds

dandare 8y ago

I am surprised that $1.5 trillion does not look as big as I expected in the perspective of 1 year US federal budget https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016

jjcc 8y ago

A few of observation/speculation: 1. Most American/European (with a few exceptions [1]) only focus on the spending cost of their own countries but less concern about the cost of the nations that the wars involved. i.e. Iraq, Libya, etc. Breaking an exiting stable eco systems have huge impact on local people. In Iraq, 200k - 600k direct or indirect death. It translated to 2 million - 6 million American if we put population into account. In Libya with a chaos satiation waves of illegal immigrants have a chance to go to Europa from the country , which changed the political scenery of many Eurapean countries. Again the cost is not counted into the war. 2.Perception defect of modern human let the war criminals being defined to only those who kill innocent people. For example Hitler is considered to be responsible for deaths of millions so he is a war criminal. This is visible to modern human mind. But most Iraqi deaths were not caused by US bombing but their killing with each other or indirect slow deaths by some other reasons , say sudden disrupt of power in a hospital. Not many modern human being consider US is responsible. I would praised the old Bush stopping the first gulf war to let Saddam survive and avoid unpredictable risk of destroying stable eco system which has worse result that more distributed deaths happen with no visible war criminals 3.(Omitted) Sorry, will be down voted so just to be brief: Assange said "Journalists are war criminals". I didn’t understand the meaning initially. But seeing so many comments here being down voted because they are not aligned with public belief, I realize that how easily the mass population can be fooled. The reason that Journalists can fool public opinion is they really report truth but only when things can be verified. Otherwise they are very likely just selling their beliefs and some time they fabricate stories to support their beliefs. [1] https://williamblum.org/books/americas-deadliest-export https://williamblum.org/books/americas-deadliest-export

InclinedPlane 8y ago

The money seems to be the smallest cost of these wars. We've normalized hideous drone bombing campaigns undertaken on the slightest justifications. On paper drone attacks are precise and backed by meticulous research, in reality they are backed by often dubious intelligence and executed without sufficient care for collateral damage, resulting in at least a 50% rate of innocent/civilian casualties. By that measure they are hardly better than car bombs, but they are high tech so somehow they escape (for us in the west anyway) the negative connotation of terrorism. Yet by any rational measure they are terrorism. There are countless children in territories we've terrorized who fear sunny skies because good weather means drones operate. And we've carried that horrid tradition forward in our participation in Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign in Yemen, among others. Meanwhile, we've also normalized the most horrid perversions of our democracy, our values, and the rule of law at home. We've grown comfortable with indefinite detention. We had a hot and heavy flirtation with systematized torture. We've created monsters like ICE and the DHS who are given ridiculous powers in a "border zone" that includes 2/3 of the entire US population. All in all, I don't think history will be kind in its assessment of our reaction to the September 11th attacks.

trumped 8y ago

Does that include the black budget?

spurgu 8y ago

My previous comment got flagged. Maybe the /s was a mistake on my part. Lots of unenlightened Americans(?) ITT trying to justify the numbers. Baffling how accepted it is and how that money could've instead been spent in other ways. Yes, that money might have helped out the American economy as a whole, but so would buying back scratchers and RPi's (instead of RPG's) for the rest of the world as well. Or just not getting deeper in the the trillion dollar deficit trench. Fucking maniacs. Now go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.

conrmahr 8y ago

“Mission Accomplished”

msiyer 8y ago

There are evil forces. We need to protect ourselves. We need military. However, it is naive to think that we, as citizens in a democracy, have any say in the wars we engage in. If we have no say, who does? If we have no say, is the one who does accountable to us? If we have no say and the one who does is not accountable to us, then is this a democracy? Too much power in the hands of too few. We sacrifice our hard earned money, our kith and kin... so that a few psychopaths can stroke their egos.