Where did the $5tn spent on Afghanistan and Iraq go?

Guardian article by EPS Board Member Linda Bilmes identifies the recipients of America’s most costly wars

While Washington bickers about what, if anything, has been achieved after 20 years and nearly $5tn spent on “forever wars”, there is one clear winner: the US defense industry.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the American military relied to an unprecedented degree on private contractors for support in virtually all areas of war operations. Contractors supplied trucks, planes, fuel, helicopters, ships, drones, weapons and munitions as well as support services from catering and construction to IT and logistics. The number of contractors on the ground outnumbered US troops most years of the conflicts. By the summer of 2020, the US had 22,562 contractor personnel in Afghanistan – roughly twice the number of American troops.

The gravy train for the defense industry was also fueled by the way the wars were budgeted and paid for. Congress used “emergency” and “contingency” funding that circumvented the normal budget process. For the first decade of the conflict, the US used emergency appropriations, which are typically reserved for one-off crises such as floods and hurricanes. Detailed spending oversight was minimal. And because this type of spending is excluded from budget projections and deficit estimates, it enabled everyone to sustain the pretense that the wars would be over shortly.

The result was what former defense secretary Robert Gates termed a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon. 

Read the full story in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/11/us-afghanistan-iraq-defense-spending

Professor Linda J Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan chair in public policy and public finance at Harvard University, and a former US assistant secretary of commerce. She is co-author (with Joseph E Stiglitz) of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict