So far the federal government has spent $600 billion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (government accounts make it hard to separate the two). However this figure is just the “burn rate” spent on combat operations, such as transportation, equipment, supplementary combat stipends, and paying the 100,000 contractors employed to support the war effort.
That $600 billion figure ignores four major costs. First, there are additional war-related costs buried in places such as the non-Iraq defense budget. That budget has grown by $500 billion cumulatively since the beginning of the war. An estimated one-quarter of that growth is indirectly related to Iraq, including the increased costs of dealing with manpower shortages - recruiting and retaining soldiers and Marines.
No comments:
Post a Comment