Through Fiscal Year 2020, the United States federal government has spent or obligated $6.4 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic
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https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US Budgetary Costs of Wars November 2019.pdf
In U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower Cross of Iron speech, he explains the exchange rate for war:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
And to bounce off of this, look at colonial wars of conquest, from early civilization to our last ones. It's always a dominant group asserting their power over another or many others by all means necessary. Most often, decades or centuries later those subjugated rebelled and reclaimed their identity. Empires have formed and disappeared, cultures have completely disappeared under the thumb of ruthless dominance, while others bonded and morphed into hybrid integrative cultures.Stop comparing the military might of the U.S. to the Taliban..... we sent a couple of thousand troops to fight on someone else's unfriendly terrain without speaking the language or understanding the culture and putting in a puppet government and troops who had no loyalty to anything. The taliban were fighting for their God and for their homeland and were willing to live in caves and fight for decades. Military power means nothing on foreign soil against a determined adversary protecting their homeland. They beat us planting IEDs and hiding in plain sight and simply waiting.
U.S. v. British in Revolutionary War....
Russia in Afghanistan
U.S. in Vietnam
U.S. in Korea
U.S. in Iraq
Anyone surprised is not a student of history and does not understand....
You either occupy and dominate a country 100% or you get out, there is no middle ground and the middle ground has been losing for hundreds of years no matter how much military might...
We might not be around to witness the prosperity of Afghanistan.
It seems like God did not design the earth to cope with a population of > 6 billion people.
Through Fiscal Year 2020, the United States federal government has spent or obligated $6.4 trillion dollars on the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.
The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $6.5 trillion by the 2050s.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic
View attachment 266042
View attachment 266044
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/US Budgetary Costs of Wars November 2019.pdf
In U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower Cross of Iron speech, he explains the exchange rate for war:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.