Imagining America's War Spending

Spending for the departments of defense and of homeland security — considered together as the national security budget — is almost impossible to calculate. Following the trail of money allocated to them is difficult, because funds are channeled through a variety of agencies. Furthermore, opacity and the absence of detailed accounts of how funds are managed make it difficult to calculate their destination, even for the legislators who appropriate them. Worthy of a banana republic, the Department of Defense has never been subjected to auditing, despite being so obligated by law. Not even threats from legislators — exasperated by the secrecy with which the national security budget is handled — to cap or freeze funding have worked.

The mystery is better explained by remembering that immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, questioning the national security budget was deemed unpatriotic. In contrast with World War I and II, Korea and Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were financed deliberately without an increase in taxes. With no nominal contribution, the average American didn’t connect the deterioration of his personal finances with the costs of the war, nor was he able to see that in the end, he would be the one to pay for it. And so, legislators saw themselves freed from obligation to give better explanations to voters. Moreover, the conflation of interests among media companies and the military-industrial complex is such that facts associating the fiscal burden with military spending could be hidden. In the endless congressional debates between the political parties on the U.S. debt — a comic opera, as described by Noam Chomsky — the issue surfaced, but not to its full extent, and the tea party introduced the colossal lie of social programs being unsustainable into public opinion, a game with which Barack Obama played along.

Nonetheless, independent research groups working with numbers provided by the government have made it possible to estimate the approximate sum total of the national security budget. The National Priorities Project offers three basic pieces of data: $5.9 trillion for the total of the Department of Defense’s annual “base” budget from 2000 until September of this year. This includes, among other expenses, that of the nuclear arsenal — although the Department of Energy also contributes to this — but, crucially: It doesn’t provide for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even without the wars, the annual budget of the Defense Department has grown in the aforementioned period from $302.9 billion to $545.1 billion (44 percent, after adjusting for inflation). Another piece of data is this: $1.36 trillion was spent for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to September of this year. Additionally, a little known fact is that $636 billion has been allocated to the Department of Homeland Security since the agency’s creation after 9/11. This all adds up to almost $8 trillion.* Have we arrived at the total amount?

These calculations, the authors make clear, are based on numbers solicited by the president and approved by Congress. But a Brown University study correctly enlarges the base of calculation for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by considering veterans’ benefits, the cost of care for the wounded and psychologically traumatized and loan interest payments, which raise the total by $3.7 trillion, or $12,000 for every American. Adding this to the previous number, Washington’s national security budget since 2001 gives us an approximate total of $11 trillion. This is close to the figure of $1.2 trillion annually from expert Chris Hellman, which is almost equivalent to the budget approved for the Defense Department for 2011.

Other illustrative numbers include this: The prescription drug benefit for the elderly over 10 years hardly reaches $385 billion, equaling what the Defense Department would spend in 40 months for Iraq and Afghanistan. In these countries, providing air conditioning for the troops costs $20 billion per year, and support costs for each soldier in 2011 will climb to $694,000.

Now that the economic crisis, together with the serious problem of debt and fiscal deficit, is afflicting the United States, for the first time in years, a debate is beginning about the national security budget. Will they include in their calculations restitution for the families of the dead or wounded and the cost of a thorough reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan?

*While translated accurately, it remains unclear how the author has calculated the specific figures above. The National Priorities Project’s most recent figures are available at http://nationalpriorities.org/en/publications/2011/us-security-spending-since-911/