True Cost of US Wars Unknown

[Raymond]

True Cost of US Wars Unknown
By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers
16 August 11

The Pentagon says it spends about $9.7 billion per month, but its
cryptic accounting system hides the true price tag of the two wars. --
JPS/RSN

The Pentagon's base budget has grown every year for the past 14 years,

When congressional cost-cutters meet later this year to decide on
trimming the federal budget, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could
represent juicy targets. But how much do the wars actually cost the US
taxpayer?

Yes, Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through
fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department. There are long
Pentagon spreadsheets that outline how much of that was spent on
personnel, transportation, fuel and other costs. In a recent speech,
President Barack Obama assigned the wars a $1 trillion price tag.

But all those numbers are incomplete. Besides what Congress
appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its
$5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent
Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost
the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.

Lawmakers remain sharply divided over the wisdom of slashing the
military budget, even with the United States winding down two long
conflicts, but there's also a more fundamental problem: It's almost
impossible to pin down just what the US military spends on war.

To be sure, the costs are staggering.

According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan - including everything from personnel and
equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying
intelligence-gathering drones - had cost an average of $9.7 billion a
month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan. That total is
roughly the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection
Agency.

To compare, it would take the State Department - with its annual
budget of $27.4 billion - more than four months to spend that amount.
NASA could have launched its final shuttle mission in July, which cost
$1.5 billion, six times for what the Pentagon is allotted to spend
each month in those two wars.

What about Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush's 2003 expansion
of prescription drug benefits for seniors, which cost a Congressional
Budget Office-estimated $385 billion over 10 years? The Pentagon
spends that in Iraq and Afghanistan in about 40 months.

Because of the complex and often ambiguous Pentagon budgeting process,
it's nearly impossible to get an accurate breakdown of every operating
cost. Some funding comes out of the base budget; other money comes
from supplemental appropriations.

But the estimates can be eye-popping, especially considering the
logistical challenges to getting even the most basic equipment and
comforts to troops in extremely forbidding terrain.

In Afghanistan, for example, the US military spent $1.5 billion to
purchase 329.8 million gallons of fuel for vehicles, aircraft and
generators from October 2010 to May 2011. That's a not-unheard-of
$4.55 per gallon, but it doesn't include the cost of getting the fuel
to combat zones and the human cost of transporting it through hostile
areas, which can hike the cost to hundreds of dollars a gallon.

Just getting air-conditioning to troops in Afghanistan, including
transport and maintenance, costs $20 billion per year, retired Brig.
Gen. Steve Anderson told National Public Radio recently. That's half
the amount that the federal government has spent on Amtrak over 40
years.

War spending falls behind tax cuts and prescription drug benefits for
seniors as contributors to the $14.3 trillion federal debt. The
Pentagon's base budget has grown every year for the past 14 years,
marking the longest sustained growth period in US history, but it
seems clear that that era is ending.

Since the US government issued war bonds to help finance World War II,
Washington has asked taxpayers to shoulder less and less of a burden
in times of conflict. In the early 1950s Congress raised taxes by 4
percent of the gross domestic product to pay for the Korean War; in
1968, during the Vietnam War, a tax was imposed to raise revenue by
about 1 percent of GDP.

No such mechanism was imposed for Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the
early years of the wars Congress didn't even demand a true accounting
of war spending, giving the military whatever it needed. Now, at a
time of fiscal woes and with the American public weary of the wars,
the question has become how much the nation's largest bureaucracy
should cut.

"The debt crisis has been a game changer in terms of defense
spending," said Laura Peterson, a national security analyst at
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog.

"It used to be that asking how much the wars cost was unpatriotic. The
attitude going into the war is you spend whatever you cost. Now maybe
asking is more patriotic."

Still, deep cuts to the Pentagon remain unpalatable to many lawmakers.
The debt limit deal that Congress passed earlier this month calls for
$350 billion in "defense and security" spending cuts through 2024, but
that's expected to be spread across several government agencies,
sparing the Pentagon much of the blow.

However, if the 12-member bipartisan "super-committee" of lawmakers
can't agree on further federal budget cuts later this year, the law
mandates across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years, with
half of that coming from the Pentagon. The prospect of such deep
defense cuts is thought to provide a strong incentive for deficit
hawks to compromise and spread the pain more broadly.

Politics aside, finding defense savings is complex, even with the
Obama administration trying to wind down two wars. For one thing,
reducing troop levels doesn't necessarily yield commensurate cost
reductions, given the huge amount of infrastructure the military still
maintains in each country.

In Afghanistan, the cost per service member climbed from $507,000 in
fiscal year 2009 to $667,000 the following year, according to the
Congressional Research Service. Fiscal year 2011 costs are expected to
reach $694,000 per service member, even as the US military begins
drawing down 33,000 of the 99,000 troops there.

In Iraq, even with the overall costs of the war declining and the US
military scheduled to withdraw its remaining 46,000 troops by the end
of this year, the cost per service member spiked from $510,000 in 2007
to $802,000 this year.

In fiscal year 2011, Congress authorized $113 billion for the war in
Afghanistan and $46 billion for Iraq. The Pentagon's 2012 budget
request is lower: $107 billion for Afghanistan and $11 billion for
Iraq.

In the more austere fiscal climate, the Pentagon has tried to be
proactive, proposing cuts to some major military programs such as the
controversial and hugely expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
has called the national debt the biggest threat to US national
security. Before leaving office last month as defense secretary,
Robert Gates ordered his department to find ways to cut $400 billion
from the defense budget over 12 years, under Obama's orders.

Among the challenges of determining the costs of war is defining what
to include. Rising health care costs for veterans? The damage done to
Iraqi and Afghan families, cities and institutions? Holding tens of
thousands of detainees at US military prisons in those two countries
and others around the world? The massive interest on war-related debt,
which some experts say could reach $1 trillion by 2020?

"The ripple effects on the US economy have also been significant,
including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have
been underappreciated," wrote a team of Brown University experts who
authored a June report called "Costs of War."

Critics of the defense budget process note that the US already has
paid a heavy cost for the wars, spending billions to wind up with
older equipment and troops receiving less training.

Winslow Wheeler, who worked on national security issues on Capitol
Hill for 30 years, said the Navy and Air Force fleets were smaller
after a decade of war. The Army has been left with run-down,
overworked vehicles and equipment.

"The danger of that is that as we blithely go on not paying attention,
things happen that we don't notice, like the older, less trained
forces," Wheeler said. Because the cost of replacing equipment has
risen dramatically over the past decade, "what we are paying is a
higher cost for a smaller force." He likened it to replacing a
Lamborghini with a Volkswagen.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/323-95/7054-focus-true-cost-of-us-wars-unknown

On the Web:

Brown University's Costs of War project

CRS: Cost of the global war on terrorism since 9/11