The Horrific Costs of War
by
Ron Paul
Recently
by Ron Paul: Penny
Unwise, Dollar Insane
This
month Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the
addition of some 1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists,
and social workers to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health
staff in attempt to get a handle on the epidemic of suicides among
combat veterans. Unfortunately, when presidents misuse our military
on an unprecedented scale – and Congress lets them get away
with it – the resulting stress causes military suicides to
increase dramatically, both among active duty and retired service
members. In fact, military deaths from suicide far outnumber combat
deaths. According to an article in the Air Force Times this month,
suicides among airmen are up 40 percent over last year.
Considering
the multiple deployments service members are forced to endure as
the war in Afghanistan stretches into its second decade, these figures
are sadly unsurprising.
Ironically,
the same VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was forced to retire from the
Army by President Bush for daring to suggest that an invasion and
occupation of Iraq would not be the cakewalk that neoconservatives
promised. Then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who is
not a military veteran, claimed that General Shinseki was “wildly
off the mark” for suggesting that several hundred thousand
soldiers would be required to secure post-invasion Iraq. Now we
see who was right on the costs of war.
In addition
to the hidden human costs of our seemingly endless wars are the
economic costs. In 2008, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
wrote The
Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.
Stiglitz illustrates that taking into account the total costs of
the war, including replacing military equipment and caring for thousands
of wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, the Iraq war will
cost us orders of magnitude greater than the 50 billion dollars
promised by the White House before the invasion. Add all the costs
of Afghanistan into the mix, wrote Stiglitz, and the bill tops $7
trillion.
Is it any wonder
why our infrastructure at home crumbles, healthcare is more expensive
and harder to come by, and unemployment together with inflation
continue their steady rise? Imagine the productive power of that
seven trillion dollars in our private sector. What could it have
done were it in private hands; what may have been discovered, what
diseases might have been cured, what might have been built, how
many productive jobs created?
With
the bills coming due for our decade of reckless military action,
the cuts rarely come from the well-connected military industrial
complex with their lobbyists and powerful political allies. In President
Obama’s 2013 budget, troop strength is to be cut significantly while
enormously expensive and largely superfluous weapons systems emerge
essentially unscathed. As defense analyst Winslow Wheeler wrote
this month, costs of the “next generation” fighter, the
F-35, will increase by another $289 million. This despite the fact
that the fighter is badly designed and already outdated, a “virtual
flying piano” writes Wheeler.
The military
contractors building monstrosities like the F-35 are politically
connected and thus protected. Unfortunately, returning military
veterans are less so. In the same 2013 budget, the White House proposes
to increase medical and pharmaceutical costs paid by veterans while
reducing their cost of living increases. And how many years of increasingly
alarming mental illness and suicide statistics has it taken for
the modest increase in resources to be made available?
Those who predicted
the real costs of our decade of global military conquest were ridiculed,
scoffed at, and fired. History has now shown us that much of what
they warned was correct. America is clearly less secure after a
decade of unnecessary wars. It is more vulnerable and closer to
economic collapse. Its military is nearly broken from years of abuse.
Will we come back to our senses?
May
1, 2012
Dr. Ron
Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.