While President Donald Trump has yet to initiate any new wars, the United States is still mired in wars all over the world, though it’s mainly concentrated in the Middle East. And it’s costing taxpayers plenty.
Since former President George W. Bush commenced the War on Terror in fiscal year 2019, and later escalated by his successor, President Barack Obama, the U.S. government has spent $5.9 trillion.
This includes nearly $1 trillion for homeland security spending, $2 trillion in overseas contingency operations, and another $353 billion in medical and disability care.
If you factor in interest on this money borrowed from China and other countries, then the War on Terror, if victorious today, would cost plenty for the next several decades.
Is the U.S. better off?
From Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan foreign-policy organization focused on promoting security, stability and peace, via Yahoo.
The never-ending war on terrorism, of course, has also twisted the U.S. Armed Forces into a pretzel. With the United States operating in 40 percent of the world’s countries and leading sixty-five separate security training programs from the jungles of Columbia to the jungles of Thailand, is it any wonder why defense-minded think tanks, the Pentagon leadership and the armed services committees continue to talk about a readiness crisis? Washington is deploying troops, trainers and advisers to so many places that even America’s elected representatives are frequently in the dark about how the military is being used, what it is doing and where it is operating. Indeed, when four U.S. special forces troops were ambushed and killed by a small group of Islamic State-affiliated tribal fighters during a joint U.S. raid near the Niger-Mali border, lawmakers in Washington were aghast that American soldiers were in Niger to begin with. In a televised admission about how out-of-the-loop lawmakers were, Sen. Lindsey Graham commented that “[w]e don’t know exactly where we’re at in the world, militarily, and what we’re doing.”
Presumably, all of this expenditure of monetary and military resources should buy Americans at least a decent level of security. The high investment would be worth it if the United States was any safer from terrorism. Yet the opposite would appear to be the case. An October 2017 Charles Koch Institute/RealClearDefense survey found that a plurality of Americans (43 percent) and veterans (41 percent) believe U.S. foreign policy over the last twenty years has actually made the country less safe—a result not exactly conducive to what U.S. policymakers are looking for.
End the wars now, bring the troops home, and leave the fighting to those in the region.
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