The 3 Trillion $ War

[daftandbarmy]

The Three Trillion Dollar War by Stiglitz and Bilmes

Newsnight 25 Feb 08, 03:32 PM The Three Trillion Dollar War by Nobel award-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes of Harvard University is an attempt to put a price on how much was spent invading Iraq.

Stiglitz and Bilmes try to put numerical values not only on the damage to the world's economy but also on the more personal costs of the war. The book counts direct spending by the US and UK before going on to cost everything from lives lost and damage done in the Middle East to replacing military hardware and caring for veterans in the West.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2008/02/the_three_trillion_dollar_war_by_stiglitz_and_bilm_1.html>you

 

[Sherwood4459]

Didn't the same article say that World War Two cost about $5trillion dollars.  Is it just me or does that sound just nuts?  I have no doubt that the Iraq war is costing more than the Bush Administration PR said it would, by a wide margin.  But I find it hard to believe that it would be in the same ballpark as a war that had full scale field armies and fleets conducting world wide opertions that ended with 400,000 American KIA and I don't know how many wounded.  I could be wrong but it seems like one of those numbers that are thrown out for shock value

 

[George Wallace]

Didn't the same article say that World War Two cost about $5trillion dollars.  Is it just me or does that sound just nuts?   I have no doubt that the Iraq war is costing more than the Bush Administration PR said it would, by a wide margin.   But I find it hard to believe that it would be in the same ballpark as a war that had full scale field armies and fleets conducting world wide opertions that ended with 400,000 American KIA and I don't know how many wounded.   I could be wrong but it seems like one of those numbers that are thrown out for shock value

Two different wars.  Then there is inflation.  In the WW II case, troops went off for four or five years, while now they are being flown in and out every six, nine, twelve months.  Wages today are much higher than in the 1940's.  Beer no longer costs $0.05 a bottle.  The price of oil is $100 a barrel.  So if you keep crunching the numbers, they will all add up and $5 Trillion may be a very conservative number.

 

[FascistLibertarian]

Isnt the cost to train and equip 1 soldier today equal to something like what it cost to train and equip an infantry company in ww2 accounting for inflation?
I read something ages ago which looked at the cost per us infantry soldier for ww1, ww1, vietnam, and Iraq and even vietnam was like 1/10th of what it now costs if I recall.