Through September 2011, about 740,000 veterans from overseas contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan had been treated by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). That number is slightly more than half of all recent veterans eligible for care by VHA.

VHA spent about $2 billion in fiscal year 2010 to provide medical care to all recent combat veterans.

One in Four Recent Combat Veterans Treated at VHA from 2004 to 2009 Had a Diagnosis of PTSD; 7 Percent Had a Diagnosis of TBI

Using data for recent veterans treated by VHA from 2004 to 2009, CBO found that:

• 21 percent were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but not traumatic brain injury (TBI),
• 2 percent were diagnosed with TBI but not PTSD,
• An additional 5 percent had both PTSD and TBI, and
• The remaining 72 percent had neither diagnosis.

Treating Recent Combat Veterans Diagnosed with PTSD, TBI, or Both Was Much More Expensive Than Treating Other Recent Veterans

Read all:    http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42969

THIS MONTH, after nearly nine years, the American war in Iraq is finally drawing to a close. At its peak, 170,000 Americans were stationed in more than 500 military bases across the country. In total, more than 2 million US troops have served in Iraq; now we are down to the last 18,000, with hundreds leaving every day.

With the end of the war looming, we can say for certain that the total cost will be at least $4 trillion. This figure could climb much higher, depending on the number of veterans who require long-term care, the cost of replacing equipment, and the full social and economic impact of the war. The human toll has been equally high: 4,486 Americans have been killed in Iraq, 32,000 wounded in action, and tens of thousands seriously injured. More than one-third of recent veterans report having a service-connected disability.

Despite a concerted effort to train Iraqi forces and help reconstruct the country, Iraq remains insecure and politically unstable, with constant threats from Shi’ite militias loyal to Iran, as well as Sunni militants such as Al Qaeda. Millions of Iraqis are still displaced from their homes, either living in exile outside the country or unable to return to their old neighborhoods after the sectarian violence of 2005 to 2007. Meanwhile, the balance of power in the region, which President Bush hoped to tip in favor of the West, is precarious and depends on many factors outside US control. Amid this gloomy picture it is timely to ask what lessons the war should hold for America.

Read More ]]> http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/2011/12/07/what-have-we-learned-from-iraq/feed/ 0 http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/2011/11/25/five-painful-lessons-from-the-iraq-war/ http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/2011/11/25/five-painful-lessons-from-the-iraq-war/#comments Sat, 26 Nov 2011 03:23:21 +0000 Linda http://threetrilliondollarwar.org/?p=456 After nearly nine years of war, the US is withdrawing from Iraq.  More than two million American troops have been deployed to the Iraq theater.  At its peak the US had more than 500 military bases across the country.  We are now down to our last 18,000 troops, who are leaving by the hundreds every day. We are moving 3 million pieces of equipment out of the country, although hundreds of thousands of items will remain.   Thousands of young Americans have been killed in this war, and hundreds of thousands have been wounded or injured or afflicted in some way.

We estimate that the final cost of the war will reach $4 to $6 trillion — once you add up the $2 trillion we have already spent, the $1 trillion we owe to our veterans, the costs of replacing and replenishing military and National Guard equipment,  the cost of paying interest on the money we have borrowed to pay for the war, and the economic costs of factors such as reservists losing their jobs, and spouses and parents who have been forced to become caregivers for wounded veterans.  The war was more expensive than it needed to be — due to US decisions about how to wage it.  These included decisions that lowered the upfront costs, but increased the long-term costs (like scrimping on body armor for troops, which increased injury rates) and decisions to rely heavily on contractors, reservists, and cost-plus contracts.

Beyond the price tag, what are the lessons for America?

1.  Going to war is messy, complicated and expensive — and difficult to extricate oneself from it once you go in, or to have the final say in the outcome. In Iraq, what began as a quick mission to bring “regime change”  produced a civil war and terrible loss of life for Iraqis and Americans.   Millions of Iraqis have been displaced internally and outside the country. Despite years of effort and a massive US effort to train Iraqi forces and help reconstruct the country, it is still a volatile and dangerous place, with frequent bombings in open air markets and other places that target civilians. Violence has dropped since the worst year  of the insurgency, but there are still enormous threats from Shi’ite militias (loyal to Iran)  with loyalties to Iran, as well as Sunni militants such as Al-Qaeda.   Meanwhile, the balance of power in the region, which President Bush hoped to tip in favor of the west through US intervention in Iraq,  is precarious and depends on many factors outside of US control.

2. The US does not have a functioning system for tracking war costs.  Throughout the years of this war, those who have attempted to tally the costs (the GAO, Congressional Research Service, Congressional Budget Office, Pentagon Inspector Generals, and others) have complained loudly that the US lacks the basic accounting systems for understanding where money is spent.  This has resulted in vast war profiteering for defense contractors, cost overruns, and co-mingling of funds appropriated for war and for other purposes.   Meanwhile the Pentagon continues to be the only department in the US federal government that cannot be audited (it does not merely “flunk” its audit –  its accounting systems are so flawed, there is simply no way to perform an audit).

3.  We made no provision to fund the long-term care of those who fought in this war.  To date, the Department of Veterans Affairs has treated more than 600,000 returning men and women; most of whom qualify to receive disability compensation for the rest of their lives.  In today’s dollars, the cost of providing this care equals nearly $1 trillion — money that has not been set aside for this purpose.   While the mood in Washington today is that veterans should be a priority, there is no guarantee that we will not turn our backs on this commitment in the future.  We have proposed that Congress establish a “Veterans Trust Fund”, in which we appropriate money for caring for veterans at the same time that money is appropriated for war.   But so far, Congress has not adopted this idea.

4.  The economic costs of war are extremely high, and unpredictable.  The war in Iraq set off a chain of  events that has had far-reaching consequences.  The US invasion was one of  the factors that led to pressure on oil prices, which increased from $25 barrel in 2003 to $140 in 2008.  These oil prices were one of the factors that contributed to the Federal Reserve’s policy of injecting liquidity and lowering interest rates; which in turn played a role in the housing bubble and rising consumer debt.   Meanwhile, the US decision to finance the war entirely through borrowing added $2 trillion to the national debt,  at a time when the US could have been paying for the war directly.  It is impossible to determine how much these policies contributed to the financial crisis, it is likely they worsened the situation considerably.

5.    The time and attention that senior military leaders devoted to Iraq was not available to spend on Afghanistan, with serious consequences.   Following on lesson 1:   What began as a quick mission in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and eradicate Al-Qaeda bases has led to a decade of terrible war in that country, with mixed results and limited progress on the ground.   History suggests that Afghanistan would have been challenging even without the distraction of Iraq;  but after 2003, the Pentagon became preoccupied with the Iraq conflict where it was deploying five times the number of troops and 5x the money.  The lack of attention to Afghanistan was one of the factors that allowed the situation there to deteriorate and the Taliban to regroup.  We may never know what might have happened if Afghanistan if the US had not invaded Iraq, but it is clear that the US underestimated the difficulty of waging two wars, not just militarily,  but in the amount of  intellectual capital that was available to focus on the original effort.

The Department of Defense has flunked its audit every year, and today has the dubious distinction of being the ONLY remaining federal government to still fail to be able to track where its money is spent.  The Pentagon’s lack of auditable financial records is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to estimate  the true costs of war.

Read the OMB press release:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/18/audits-records-broken

http://youtu.be/zBX_D80_oFQStanley McCrystal on 10th anniversary of US invasion of Afghanistan

Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz

September 18, 2011

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.

To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.

How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, the George W. Bush administration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.

Read full article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe–bilmes-war-cost-20110918,0,999206.story?track=rss

Linda Bilmes writes in the Christian Science Monitor that the costs of military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq account for well over one-quarter of the increase in US national debt since 2001. Financing wars and defense build-ups in this way is an historical aberration. Americans have typically paid for wars through higher taxes.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0908/US-response-to-9-11-contributed-to-causes-of-current-debt-crisis

The Price of Lost Chances

David Sanger of  The New York Times puts a stark price tag on the cost of reacting — and overreacting — to the Sept. 11 attacks. The New York Times provides an interactive graphic showing war costs, based on the work of Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html

Other articles:

Posted:  Anthony Gregory writes about the cost of the wars in the Huffington Post:  9/9/11 08:29 PM ET http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-gregory/post-9-11-defense-spending_b_956346.html

It is worth recalling that Afghanistan has proved intractable for millennia.  Reviewing Peter Tomsen’s excellent new book, “The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers” , Jonas Blank writes in Foreign Policy Magazine:

” [Tomsen]  summarizes 3000 years of Afghan history, during which the Greeks, the Romans, the White and the Black Huns, the Mongols, the Moguls, the Persians, and the Turkmens all tried to dominate the land.  Every campaign eventually came to naught, either because the invader paid insufficient attention to local culture or because he sought to impose centralized control on ferociously independent tribes and clans.  The pattern was basically the same each time: a brutally competent conqueror sweeps through Afghanistan, wreaking enough carnage to terrify all his enemies into submission, but he soon finds himself mired in a swamp of tribal customs and feuds that he does not begin to comprehend. When he loses enough in men and gold, he retreats — not infrequently with fewer limbs than he had when he arrived”.

The escalating carnage of the past few months, which has included attacks on senior government officials, NATO troops, Afghan police and security forces, and civilians,  should raise serious questions about the US strategy in the country.   The surge in U.S. deaths comes as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces, and some 10,000 U.S. troops are scheduled to depart by year’s end.  But  U.S. military personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014. To date, the US “surge” in Afghanistan does not appear to have reduced violence or assisted in securing the country.   If we leave 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan for the next three years, what can we hope to achieve?  Or do we risk falling into the same quagmire that has ensnared empires for the past 3000 years?

Stuart Bowen, Special Inspector General for Iraq,  characterizes Iraq as “less safe than one year ago”. As Mr. Bowen points out,  June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in more than two years.  Attacks on civilians and government military and police installations have also increased, including a number of deadly suicide attacks. Read Mr. Bowen’s comments: http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/07/30/iraq.us.report/index.html#

Meanwhile, the Pentagon confirms that that much of the money from the $2 billion US contract for transportation is being diverted to the Taliban.  Afghanistan trucking contractors are paying tens of millions of dollars annually to local warlords across Afghanistan in exchange for guarding their supply convoys.  Read more:  http://newsfeedresearcher.com/data/articles_n31/military-contracts-afghanistan.html

Also this week, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued an audit showing that an insurance program for injured contract workers in Afghanistan potentially lost tens of millions of US taxpayer dollars due to faulty billing methods.  The audit blames the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for failing to exercise strong oversight of its Defense Base Act workers compensation insurance program in Afghanistan, which led to higher insurance costs than necessary.  See: http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/PressRelease/PressRelease_20July2011_Audit11-15.pdf

FINALLY,  A bipartisan Congressional panel is expected to report that the U.S. has wasted or misspent $34 billion contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a draft report by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq, which was established in 2008 to investigate the overall cost of a decade of battlefield contracting in America’s two big wars.  The report will be issued in the next few weeks. See: http://www.wartimecontracting.gov/

The study focused particularly on war costs that have occurred (or been incurred but not yet paid) during the past decade since September 11, 2011.  It features important new work on the casualties and costs to defense contractors, and the social impact on military families.   The section by Winslow Wheeler analyzes the increases in the defense base budget over the past decade.  Portions of the report focus on costs to Iraq and to the region.   The website includes a range of charts and tables.    The study covers overlapping, but somewhat different ground, from the Stiglitz-Bilmes study.

SEE: http://costsofwar.org/