I am glad that somebody has finally done this basic piece of arithmetic, and I am saddened, infuriated, that it is coming from Afghanistan rather than from the US media or political spheres.
We had basically the same problem in Vietnam. There, each Vietcong cost something like $50,000 in real 1960’s US dollars to kill. Great cartoon of the time pointed out that each Vietnameses killed by US airstrikes alone cost $20,000 in ordnance—cartoon had two GI’s saying that it’d be cheaper to bomb North Vietnam with Cadillacs. How sadly true.
I direct your attention to my piece, now four years old, posted on the Dandelion Salad weblog—"Our Defeat Is Certain, and it is Soon". The only thing stupider than the cost of our wars in the region is the insane strategic position and strategic vulnerability the US forces in the region are in. It would cost the US a whole lot less to have someone pull this card out of the deck and use it against us and force us to leave than our continuing the war would. The wars will wreck the US economy, and most all of us here’s economic futures. But I don’t think we’ll be taught that necessary lesson on the battlefield; we’ll be taught it through bankruptcy. Nor can we learn the obvious lesson from this article—one that has been on display for a very long time to anyone who can do the arithmetic about US military expenditures—that war, as fought by the US in its current forces structures, is an economic disaster and impossibility. For that matter, so is maintaining the US military at its current level of expenditures. But we here are blind to that obvious fact, and we will suffer for it, and no one should have sympathy for us because of that fact.
My congratulations to the author. Keep up the good work.
I am glad that somebody has finally done this basic piece of arithmetic, and I am saddened, infuriated, that it is coming from Afghanistan rather than from the US media or political spheres.
We had basically the same problem in Vietnam. There, each Vietcong cost something like $50,000 in real 1960’s US dollars to kill. Great cartoon of the time pointed out that each Vietnameses killed by US airstrikes alone cost $20,000 in ordnance—cartoon had two GI’s saying that it’d be cheaper to bomb North Vietnam with Cadillacs. How sadly true.
I direct your attention to my piece, now four years old, posted on the Dandelion Salad weblog—"Our Defeat Is Certain, and it is Soon". The only thing stupider than the cost of our wars in the region is the insane strategic position and strategic vulnerability the US forces in the region are in. It would cost the US a whole lot less to have someone pull this card out of the deck and use it against us and force us to leave than our continuing the war would. The wars will wreck the US economy, and most all of us here’s economic futures. But I don’t think we’ll be taught that necessary lesson on the battlefield; we’ll be taught it through bankruptcy. Nor can we learn the obvious lesson from this article—one that has been on display for a very long time to anyone who can do the arithmetic about US military expenditures—that war, as fought by the US in its current forces structures, is an economic disaster and impossibility. For that matter, so is maintaining the US military at its current level of expenditures. But we here are blind to that obvious fact, and we will suffer for it, and no one should have sympathy for us because of that fact.
My congratulations to the author. Keep up the good work.
Daniel N. White