US war machine a ‘moral hazard’
LIKE everything else, war is a lot more expensive than it used to be.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost Americans a staggering $US1 trillion to date, second only in inflation-adjusted dollars to the $US4 trillion price tag for World War II, when the United States put 16 million men and women into uniform and fought on three continents.
The statistics come from a recent report by the Congressional Research Service on the costs of all major US wars since the American Revolution.
Twenty-first century technology is an obvious explanation for why two relatively small (although long) wars in developing societies such as Iraq and Afghanistan are so expensive.
As Stephen Daggett, a specialist in defence policy and budgets, writes in the report, in the Revolutionary War ”the most sophisticated weaponry was a 36-gun frigate that is hardly comparable to a modern $US3.5 billion destroyer”.
In 2008, the peak year so far of war spending for Iraq and Afghanistan, the costs amounted to only 1.2 per cent of US gross domestic product. During the peak year of spending on World War II, 1945, the costs came to nearly 36 per cent of American GDP.
To some historians, that difference is troubling.
”The army is at war, but the country is not,” said David Kennedy of Stanford University. ”We have managed to create and field an armed force that can engage in very, very lethal warfare without the society in whose name it fights breaking a sweat.”
The result, he said, is ”a moral hazard for the political leadership to resort to force in the knowledge that civil society will not be deeply disturbed”.
A corollary is that taxes have not been raised to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan – the first time that has happened in an American war since the Revolution, when there was not yet a country to impose them.
A last story in the numbers: a quick calculation shows that the United States has been at war for 47 of its 230 years, or 20 per cent of its history.
”You know, it’s a surprise to me that it’s that high,” said Mr Daggett, who has focused on the cost, not length, of wars. ”You think of war as not being the usual state.”
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