Associated Press
How much are American efforts against ISIS costing U.S. taxpayers?
I’ll attempt to answer that question shortly but first, answer me this: How much do you think the recent American wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq and other War on Terror-related expenses will have cost taxpayers, all told? Was it (a) $1 trillion; (b) $1.6 trillion; (c) $4 trillion; or (d) $6 trillion?
If you said $1 trillion, too low Joe! If you guessed $1.6 trillion, you would be on target as of Fiscal Year 2014 according to a generally reliable Congressional Research Service (CRS) report. If you guessed $4 or $6 trillion, you are not outside the realm of possibility, according to a new and troubling report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
CSIS explains that while CRS made a good effort to find the numbers, it had to do too much conservative estimating because “The Administration and the Congress have never reported any figures on the costs of either war, or shown any indication of a concern over public accountability.”
In fact, according to CSIS, “Outside academic estimates put the total costs – including medical payments through the life of wounded veterans over the next 40 years – at $4 to $6 trillion.”
Part of that spending is actually good news. American field medicine and support have gotten so much better in the last few decades that tens of thousands of troops who would have died on battlefields in the past lived through the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but their medical costs going forward — care they more than earned through their noble service — will not be zero dollars but, in some cases, millions of dollars apiece.
So that good news costs us money and lots of it. The back end costs of military conflicts, especially where there are American combat boots on the ground, has risen significantly. The VA is straining to deal with this new and expensive reality.
And now, ISIS. The point to remember is that any numbers we can nail down right this minute will be way too low. This is the least that fighting ISIS will cost us. And also, estimates will vary.
According to the Defense Department’s own figures, anti-ISIS efforts in Iraq and Syria come to $11.5 million per day, starting in August of 2014. That puts the figure at over $7.2 billion today and climbing.
The Center for National Priorities (CNP) has a higher estimate, which it illustrates with a running tracker. “Every hour taxpayers in the United States are paying $615,482” — a little over $14.7 million a day – “for cost of military action against ISIS,” reports CNP.
According to the CNP tracker, that puts anti-ISIS spending at over $9.3 billion so far. It rose from $9,361,290,023 to $9,363,174,302 from the beginning of the writing to this point in the article. (If only I could get a word rate that high!)
These numbers will be chump change as the Obama Administration sneaks more and more American boots onto the ground and Congress comes under pressure to formally authorize this undeclared war in two countries, and perhaps in others as well.
How much will that cost us? Take any government estimate and triple it, for starters, to account for taking care of our war wounded.
We may not know the true and full cost of fighting ISIS for years, decades even. Which is a shame. Voters ought to have a better idea of just how much blood and treasure our elected representatives are looking to spend.
