How much war cost

This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.

T he scale of spending alone make s it hard to grasp. P ublic und erstanding of the budgetary costs of war is further limited by secrecy, faulty ac counting , and the deferral of current costs. To embed the Interest on War Debt counter on your website, blog, etc, follow these simple instructions:. To embed the Military Costs of War on Terror counter on your website, blog, etc, follow these simple instructions:.

To embed the State Department in War on Terror counter on your website, blog, etc, follow these simple instructions:. To embed the Total Cost of War on Terror counter on your website, blog, etc, follow these simple instructions:. Trade-Offs: What else could these dollars buy? Why are these numbers different from the numbers in our Trade-Offs tool?

The numbers in Trade-Offs are projected total costs for a federal program in a given year. But that will boost the cost of their care for decades to come. The Department of Homeland Security, which the government cobbled together from existing agencies in , was padded out with its own bureaucracy. The State Department and the U. Agency for International Development got their own off-budget accounts too.

And the federal government began borrowing money to pay for all this. You might think, as a taxpayer, that you could just wander over to defense. So outsiders have had to step in to make cents of how much our recent wars have cost. Even more amazingly after nearly 20 years of war, keeping track of how much the U. A more complete accounting will add in additional military spending routinely ladled into Pentagon coffers during wartime. If the government were simply sloppy and slipshod, its estimates would be both low and high.

Yet once the war or hardware has achieved escape velocity, its price begins escalating. Likewise, war costs soar because of mission creep—rebuilding Afghanistan instead of simply ousting the Taliban following the attacks of September 11, , for example—and concern that pulling out before achieving victory would mean the lives of those Americans already killed in the effort would have been wasted.

Of course, no one can predict the final cost of a war before it has begun.