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It's not at all, at least from a financial standpoint: http://cironline.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/June2010CRScostofuswars.pdf http://cironline.org/s

• harryh 11y ago
  Not in terms of % of GDP which is the only measure that actually matters.
  • angersock 11y ago
    It doesn't strike you as, I don't know, a little odd, that we have paid for a Vietnam and a WW1 without noticing it? Yes, the sheer performance of the rest of the economy has enabled the % GDP to be smaller than previously, but that doesn't make the scale of the thing any less impressive.
    • harryh 11y ago
      It doesn't strike me as odd at all. We are vastly richer now than we were in the 1970s. When I was 12 years old $10 was a huge amount of money for me. Now it's lunch. You've gotta look at things relatively, not on an absolute scale.
    • clarky07 11y ago
      it doesn't strike me as odd that 1% is less than 13%. We have a lot more money now. WWI had 116k deaths. Vietnam had 58k deaths. Post 9/11 wars have had about 6500. All of them are tragic, but the fact that we spent a similar amount of inflation adjusted money is not really that important. 1. the human loss of life isn't remotely comparable. 2. as a % of GDP, it's still significantly less. I think it would be hard to grow up during WWI and not notice. I've been an adult for most of the post 9/11 wars, and it's only had a small effect on my life as I've had close friends who have gone to Iraq and Afghanistan (and thankfully returned). If not for those few friends, it would have had almost no effect on me.