IIRC, the argument for this amount of dollars was largely based upon future projection(s) of related expenditures such as: increased military pension obligations, VA benefits, VA ‘benefits’ for wounded vets, replacing equipment that underwent accelerated depreciation due to desert use, debt interest, and probably some other stuff that I’m not remembering ATM.

Most of these costs, obviously, are not likely to be immediately realized and I’m not sure what timeframe they were imagined to be likely to be realized – I’d guess maybe 50 years for the aforementioned, and maybe 100 years for the debt portion.

A lot of these costs aren’t really set in stone, and according to an interview with the author on NPR they had supposedly taken a conservative approach to calculating the likely final costs. However, one obvious flaw to these calculations are the difficulties of projecting such things such as medical/scientific advances in the case of wounded vets; understated real inflation statistics used to calculate pensions, or the fact that replacing (ie updating) military hardware happens regardless of whether old hardware is used up – in which case those costs are already realized.

When you think of $6t, it is roughly half of our current national debt, much (most?) of which is war debt. Perhaps an interesting way to compare final costs would be to compare the length of the current Iraq/Afgan war against the length of previous wars waged, along with perhaps adjusting for some sort of combat/resource intensity measures. I would suspect that even though the current conflict is a “small” war, it is by no means less resource intensive than the past bigger wars we’ve waged, and at the current juncture is longer in duration than WWII. In fact I would argue that wars in general have become more intensive as they’ve become more complex and require resources from more and more segments of the economy (manufacturing, pharmaceuticals/medical, myriad technologies, etc), veterans alike will require more resources – not only due to the commonly talked about ‘lots of wounded, few dead thanks to body armor’ – rather life expectancies are longer and normal social function is growing increasingly complex and requiring more skills that are easily traumatized by combat experiences. I’ve heard that the average combat serviceman in WWII experienced an average of 40 hours/year of combat, in Vietnam this number had increased to 210 days, no idea if this is true or not – but it would certainly have a bearing upon what people are able to do when they come back.

-tid242

Ummm haven’t you heard of the Nobelist Econonomists behind Long Term Capital? Note the Econ prize wasn’t established by Nobel and was added long after…considered largely second rate compared to the physical science Nobel prizes.

Anyway, it doesn’t work out mathematically. He and his co-author [Bilmes who's a lowly lecturer at Kennedy school, not even a real professor] claim current costs are $25B per month including financing costs [and including afghanistan a figure seemingly pulled out of the air for convenience. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/29/exclusive_the_three_trillion_dollar_war }. The current cost without interest is half of this according to them or $12.5B/month. This implies outageously high interest rates or extremely long timescales for payoff. Neither is justified. Why has no one pointed this out? Also they write essentially as if the US would spend $0 on the military without this war. Also as I say, this "$3T" war includes Afghanistan's war [1/3 of Iraq cost or $1T], which even the most ardent Bush hating, Probama liberal concedes is “a just war”.

Generally speaking, we are weak, dumb and lazy and our future looks like more of the same hence our currency is rightly in the crap pile. Isn’t the experiment of “one person, one vote” just playing out? Sorry for the doom/gloom, I am just a slave and the next quarterly tax payment is already on my mind…