President George W. Bush speaking at the dedication ceremony for the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 (AP photo)
Trillions of dollars spent on two major wars. An unknown amount of money dedicated to global military intervention and counterterrorism activities. Over half a trillion dollars spent on “homeland security.” The numbers are startling.
As America marks ten years since the 9/11 attacks this weekend, these figures are what has come to represent the legacy of that event, and raises the question of whether the “overreaction” of the United States government to 9/11 has become more of a disaster than that terrible day itself.
Two new reports created specifically to look at the cost of 9/11 ten years on from 2001 have done the great service of calculating the costs of the aftermath and the collective response of two presidential administrations, from the cost in lives and treasure of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the taxpayer dollars pumped into what has been broadly defined as “homeland security.”
A team from Brown University has put together a groundbreaking study that has done the unenviable task of calculating a “price tag” for the two major wars launched since 9/11 as well as the counterterrorism efforts put in place in the wake of the attacks. Nothing combats political rhetoric better than hard data, and the “Costs of War” report obliterates the myth that the US invasions and subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been either cheap or successful.
The tally for post-9/11 military costs is staggering. More than 8,300 American service members or contractors dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 200,000 civilians killed in those two wars. An estimated final financial cost of up to $4 trillion. And the only “benefits” of these human and monetary outlays, according to the Brown researches, are “democracy” and “greater rights for women.”
The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken 225,000 lives and will ultimately cost more than $3 trillion, according to a one-of-a-kind study by Brown University that aims to put a price tag on the U.S. response to 9/11.
The “Costs of War” study brings together the work of more than 20 economists, political scientists, legal scholars and anthropologists in what its authors say is the most comprehensive accounting of the fiscal and human toll of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the nation’s counterterrorism efforts.
“There has been a tremendous loss involved whether you’re talking about lives or money,” said Catherine Lutz, professor of anthropology and international relations at Brown and a leader of the project. “The public needs to know these numbers, and sometimes they’re difficult to find. These aren’t the kinds of numbers that just pop up on Google.”
The project, available at costsofwar.org, is written not only for researchers, but also for the public. It breaks down its findings into human, economic, social, political and environmental costs.
Among its findings:
More than 2.2 million American military personnel have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. More than 6,000 of them, as well as 2,300 U.S. contractors, have died in the two wars. Some 150,000 U.S. soldiers and contractors have been wounded. Another 20,000 soldiers from U.S. allies and Iraqi and Afghani security forces have died.
The wars have claimed the lives of at least 172,300 civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and turned another 7.8 million into refugees.
The wars will cost U.S. taxpayers between $3.2 trillion and $4 trillion, including the cost of assisting veterans for decades to come. The U.S. has already paid $185 billion on interest on the loans used to finance the wars.
The researchers list only two possible benefits from the wars: democracy and greater rights for women in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Even the best cost estimate is going to be an educated guess, according to American University international relations professor Gordon Adams, who was the top White House official for national security budgets in the 1990s. That’s because it’s almost impossible to know how history would have unfolded otherwise. . . . “We overreacted and we spent too much money,” he said. “War has consequences, ripple effects. We don’t hear that enough.”
The findings of the indispensable “Costs of War” study are publicly available online via a fantastic website. Please check it out…
Equally important to the post-9/11 narrative is the unprecedented implementation of a completely new government initiative that is a direct result of the attacks; “homeland security.”
Not simply the creation of a new branch of the federal government, the “Department of Homeland Security,” the formation almost overnight of a broad domestic counterterrorism strategy on the federal level leads to perhaps the most stunning financial consequence of September 11, 2001.
Another study timed to the 9/11 anniversary looks solely at federal spending on “domestic homeland security” in the ten years after the attacks and whether the bloated and expensive bureaucracy created for that purpose has been worth the costs. In short, no.
Australian academic Mark Stewart and Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller have put together another report that details the total financial costs associated with domestic homeland security and anti-terror measures since 9/11. They calculated at least $580 billion in government expenditures along with private costs that bring the cumulative total to well over one trillion dollars. And this specifically excludes the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the nearly 10 years since 9/11 a lot of money has been spent in America — and elsewhere — on reducing the risk of another major terrorist attack. But what has all that spending achieved, could it have been used more effectively and would the money have saved more lives if it had been spent on something else? These are tough questions to ask and no one wants to take anything away from the awfulness of what happened or the tragedy of lives lost on that terrible day. But at some point someone needs to make a — not to put it crudely — cost benefit study of counter terrorism spending. The key question is: are the gains in security worth the funds expended? That’s the question we’ve tried to answer.
As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, United States government expenditures on domestic homeland security have risen by $580 billion over those in place in 2001. When we add in private sector costs and opportunity costs of delays and inconveniences associated with enhanced security regulations — but leaving out the costs of the terrorism-related wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the increase in expenditures on domestic homeland security in the US in the decade exceeds one trillion dollars.
As for whether such “extravagant spending” has been cost effective, the researches discovered that the trillions of dollars dedicated to security would have only been financially “worth” the costs if more than one terror attack equivalent to or greater than 9/11 had occurred every single year since. Of course, nothing like that has occurred.
For a terrorist attack, or set of attacks, that, like those of September 11, 2001, caused $200 billion of destruction (something that has only occurred once in all of history), enhanced expenditures would be cost-effective only if that sort of attack would have occurred more than once a year without them. Moreover, it is not clear that other 9/11-like attacks would trigger the extreme economic reaction engendered by the original intensely shocking event.
Such massive amounts of government money devoted to the murky world of “homeland security” is bound to generate waste, fraud ands abuse. It has, costing taxpayers billions of dollars while propping up profits of major government defense and security contractors. It is safe to say that these corporations have benefited richly from the 9/11 tragedy.
Failed projects launched by the Department of Homeland Security like installing radiation detectors at some of the nation’s ports and building a “virtual fence” along the borders have funneled billions of dollars to companies like Raytheon and Boeing, two of the US government’s top private contractors.
In July, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security quietly scuttled a multi-billion dollar program to install high-tech radiation detectors at the nation’s ports. A top priority of the Bush administration, the advanced spectroscopic portal (ASP) devices that the Raytheon Company was being paid to build weren’t just way behind schedule and enormously over budget — they didn’t actually appear to work. The failed project cost taxpayers well over $230 million.
DHS had already pulled the plug on its SBInet program — an effort to build a “virtual fence” of sensors, cameras and radar along the nation’s border — in January, after paying more than $1.1 billion. The Government Accountability Office, among others, had concluded that poor management and an over-reliance on the prime contractor, Boeing, had caused staggering delays and cost overruns while producing inadequate results.
And earlier in July, DHS had scrapped its unfinished and dysfunctional Risk Assessment Management Program, a computer application intended to help officials distribute their small army of private security guards between federal buildings, based on the chances of those buildings becoming terror targets. DHS had already shelled out $35 million over three years for a project that contractor Booz Allen had promised to complete in one year for $21 million. With the program axed, some eight years after DHS was founded, the department still isn’t able to do something as basic as assess which federal buildings are more vulnerable to attack than others.
Your government at work; spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt — not to mention billions of pork barrel spending — since September 2001. For nothing.
DHS is a cancer growing on the face of America. It SO needs to be dismantled and consigned to the trash heap of history.
The fact that America spends 43% of the.world total on “defense” tells you just how insane our leaders are and anyone who buys their BS. We have to be the biggest damned cowards in the world to spend 43% of the worlds total military spending.
I can’t help imagining a tomorrow’s America (Near future), where we have the most powerful military in the world to protect the most heavily armed third world shit hole in the western world: America. It’s so oxymoronic, it hurts. We have to spend, spend, spend, to have the worlds most powerful military while not investing at home. It’s like a giant Maginot Line, only it’s a circle, but what’s inside is dead from neglect.
I’m not going to sit here and say we aren’t spending too much. However, we need to take into account how psychology impacts the economy. Let’s say a few terrorists set off explosives in a few malls that do very little long-term damage. What’s the economic affect of that? Very little. What if people stop going to malls out of fear?