Escalating Military Spending: Income Redistribution in Disguise

April 16, 2007

By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH

Critics of the recent U.S. wars of choice have long argued that they are all about oil. "No Blood for Oil" has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war.

It can be demonstrated, however, that there is another (less obvious but perhaps more critical) factor behind the recent rise of U.S. military aggressions abroad: war profiteering by the Pentagon contractors. Frequently invoking dubious "threats to our national security and/or interests," these beneficiaries of war dividends, the military-industrial complex and related businesses whose interests are vested in the Pentagon's appropriation of public money, have successfully used war and military spending to justify their lion's share of tax dollars and to disguise their strategy of redistributing national income in their favor.

This cynical strategy of disguised redistribution of national resources from the bottom to the top is carried out by a combination of (a) drastic hikes in the Pentagon budget, and (b) equally drastic tax cuts for the wealthy. As this combination creates large budget deficits, it then forces cuts in non-military public spending as a way to fill the gaps that are thus created. As a result, the rich are growing considerably richer at the expense of middle- and low-income classes.

Despite its critical importance, most opponents of war seem to have given short shrift to the crucial role of the Pentagon budget and its contractors as major sources of war and militarism-a phenomenon that the late President Eisenhower warned against nearly half a century ago. Perhaps a major reason for this oversight is that critics of war and militarism tend to view the U.S. military force as primarily a means for imperialist gains-oil or otherwise.

The fact is, however, that as the U.S. military establishment has grown in size, it has also evolved in quality and character: it is no longer simply a means but, perhaps more importantly, an end in itself-an imperial force in its own right. Accordingly, the rising militarization of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is driven not so much by some general/abstract national interests as it is by the powerful special interests that are vested in the military capital, that is, war industries and war-related businesses.


The Magnitude of U.S. Military Spending

Even without the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast surpassing half a trillion dollars, U.S. military spending is now the largest item in the federal budget. Officially, it is the second highest item after Social Security payments. But Social Security is a self-financing trust fund. So, in reality, military spending is the highest budget item.

The Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year (2007) is about $456 billion. President Bush's proposed increase of 10% for next year will raise this figure to over half a trillion dollars, that is, $501.6 billion for fiscal year 2008. A proposed supplemental appropriation to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "brings proposed military spending for FY 2008 to $647.2 billion, the highest level of military spending since the end of World War II-higher than Vietnam, higher than Korea, higher than the peak of the Reagan buildup."[1]

Using official budget figures, William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, provides a number of helpful comparisons:

Proposed U.S. military spending for FY 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined.

At $141.7 billion, this year's proposed spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. Total U.S. military spending for FY2008 is roughly ten times the military budget of the second largest military spending country in the world, China.

Proposed U.S. military spending is larger than the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The FY 2008 military budget proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.

The FY 2008 military budget is over 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.

The FY 2008 military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs: education, health, housing assistance, international affairs, natural resources and environment, justice, veterans' benefits, science and space, transportation, training/employment and social services, economic development, and several more items.[2]

Although the official military budget already eats up the lion's share of the public money (crowding out vital domestic needs), it nonetheless grossly understates the true magnitude of military spending. The real national defense budget, according to Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, is nearly twice as much as the official budget. The reason for this understatement is that the official Department of Defense budget excludes not only the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a number of other major cost items.[3]

These disguised cost items include budgets for the Coast Guard and the Department of Homeland Security; nuclear weapons research and development, testing, and storage (placed in the Energy budget); veterans programs (in the Veteran's Administration budget); most military retiree payments (in the Treasury budget); foreign military aid in the form of weapons grants for allies (in the State Department budget); interest payments on money borrowed to fund military programs in past years (in the Treasury budget); sales and property taxes at military bases (in local government budgets); and the hidden expenses of tax-free food, housing, and combat pay allowances.

After adding these camouflaged and misplaced expenses to the official Department of Defense budget, Higgs concludes: "I propose that in considering future defense budgetary costs, a well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it. You may overstate the truth, but if so, you'll not do so by much."[4]


Escalation of the Pentagon Budget and the Rising Fortunes of Its Contractors

The Bush administration's escalation of war and military spending has been a boon for Pentagon contractors. That the fortunes of Pentagon contractors should rise in tandem with the rise of military spending is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the fact that these profiteers of war and militarism have also played a critical role in creating the necessary conditions for war profiteering, that is, in instigating the escalation of the recent wars of choice and the concomitant boom of military spending.[5]

Giant arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman have been the main beneficiaries of the Pentagon's spending bonanza. This is clearly reflected in the continuing rise of the value of their shares in the stock market: "Shares of U.S. defense companies, which have nearly trebled since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq, show no signs of slowing down. . . . The feeling that makers of ships, planes and weapons are just getting into their stride has driven shares of leading Pentagon contractors Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp. to all-time highs."[6]

Like its manufacturing contractors, the Pentagon's fast-growing service contractors have equally been making fortunes by virtue of its tendency to shower private contractors with tax-payers' money. These services are not limited to the relatively simple or routine tasks and responsibilities such food and sanitation services. More importantly, they include "contracts for services that are highly sophisticated [and] strategic in nature," such as the contracting of security services to corporate private armies, or modern day mercenaries. The rapid growth of the Pentagon's service contracting is reflected (among other indicators) in these statistics: "In 1984, almost two-thirds of the contracting budget went for products rather than services. . . . By fiscal year 2003, 56 percent of Defense Department contracts paid for services rather than goods."[7]

The spoils of war and the devastation in Iraq have been so attractive that an extremely large number of war profiteers have set up shop in that country in order to participate in the booty: "There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield," reported The Washington Post in its 5 December 2006 issue.

The rise in the Pentagon contracting is, of course, a reflection of an overall policy and philosophy of outsourcing and privatizing that has become fashionable ever since President Reagan arrived in the White House in 1980. Reporting on some of the effects of this policy, Scott Shane and Ron Nixon of the New York Times recently wrote: "Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does."[8]


Redistributive Militarism: Escalation of Military Spending Redistributes Income from Bottom to Top

But while the Pentagon contractors and other beneficiaries of war dividends are showered with public money, low- and middle-income Americans are squeezed out of economic or subsistence resources in order to make up for the resulting budgetary shortfalls. For example, as the official Pentagon budget for 2008 fiscal year is projected to rise by more than 10 percent, or nearly $50 billion, "a total of 141 government programs will be eliminated or sharply reduced" to pay for the increase. These would include cuts in housing assistance for low-income seniors by 25 percent, home heating/energy assistance to low-income people by 18 percent, funding for community development grants by 12.7 percent, and grants for education and employment training by 8 percent.[9]

Combined with redistributive militarism and generous tax cuts for the wealthy, these cuts have further exacerbated the ominously growing income inequality that started under President Reagan. Ever since Reagan arrived in the White House in 1980, opponents of non-military public spending have been using an insidious strategy to cut social spending, to reverse the New Deal and other social safety net programs, and to redistribute national/public resources in favor of the wealthy. That cynical strategy consists of a combination of drastic increases in military spending coupled with equally drastic tax cuts for the wealthy. As this combination creates large budget deficits, it then forces cuts in non-military public spending (along with borrowing) to fill the gaps thus created.

For example, at the same time that President Bush is planning to raise military spending by $50 billion for the next fiscal year, he is also proposing to make his affluent-targeted tax cuts permanent at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years, or an average yearly cut of $160 billion. Simultaneously, "funding for domestic discretionary programs would be cut a total of $114 billion" in order to pay for these handouts to the rich. The targeted discretionary programs to be cut include over 140 programs that provide support for the basic needs of low- and middle-income families such as elementary and secondary education, job training, environmental protection, veterans' health care, medical research, Meals on Wheels, child care and HeadStart, low-income home energy assistance, and many more.[10]

According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, "if the President's tax cuts are made permanent, households in the top 1 percent of the population (currently those with incomes over $400,000) will receive tax cuts averaging $67,000 a year by 2012. . . . The tax cuts for those with incomes of over $1 million a year would average $162,000 a year by 2012."[11]

Official macroeconomic figures show that, over the past five decades or so, government spending (at the federal, state and local levels) as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) has remained fairly steady-at about 20 percent. Given this nearly constant share of the public sector of national output/income, it is not surprising that increases in military spending have almost always been accompanied or followed by compensating decreases in non-military public spending, and vice versa.

For example, when by virtue of FDR's New Deal reforms and LBJ's metaphorical War on Poverty, the share of non-military government spending rose significantly the share of military spending declined accordingly. From the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s, the share of non-military government spending of GNP rose from 9.2 to 14.3 percent, an increase of 5.1 percent. During that time period, the share of military spending of GNP declined from 10.1 to 5.8 percent, a decline of 4.3 percent.[12]

That trend was reversed when President Reagan took office in 1980. In the early 1980s, as President Reagan drastically increased military spending, he also just as drastically lowered tax rates on higher incomes. The resulting large budget deficits were then paid for by more than a decade of steady cuts on non-military spending.

Likewise, the administration of President George W. Bush has been pursuing a similarly sinister fiscal policy of cutting non-military public spending in order to pay for the skyrocketing military spending and the generous tax cuts for the affluent.

Interestingly (though not surprisingly), changes in income inequality have mirrored changes in government spending priorities, as reflected in the fiscal policies of different administrations. Thus, when the share of non-military public spending rose relative to that of military spending from the mid 1950 to the mid 1970s, and the taxation system or policy remained relatively more progressive compared to what it is today, income inequality declined accordingly.

But as President Reagan reversed that fiscal policy by raising the share of military spending relative to non-military public spending and cutting taxes for the wealthy, income inequality also rose considerably. As Reagan's twin policies of drastic increases in military spending and equally sweeping tax cuts for the rich were somewhat tempered in the 1990s, growth in income inequality slowed down accordingly. In the 2000s, however, the ominous trends that were left off by President Reagan have been picked up by President George W. Bush: increasing military spending, decreasing taxes for the rich, and (thereby) exacerbating income inequality (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Income Inequality in the U.S. (Gini Index), 1913-2004
Source: Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer.

Leaving small, short-term fluctuations aside, Figure 1 shows two major peaks and a trough of the long-term picture of income inequality in the United States. The first peak was reached during the turbulent years of the Great Depression (1929-1933). But it soon began to decline with the implementation of the New Deal reforms in the mid 1930s. The ensuing decline continued almost unabated until 1968, at which time we note the lowest level of inequality.

After 1968, the improving trend in inequality changed course. But the reversal was not very perceptible until the early 1980s, after which time it began to accelerate-by virtue (or vice) of Reaganomics. Although the deterioration that was thus set in motion by the rise of neoliberalism and supply-side economics somewhat slowed down in the 1990s, it has once again gathered steam under President George W. Bush, and is fast approaching the peak of the Great Depression.

It is worth noting that even at its lowest level of 1968, income inequality was still quite lopsided: the richest 20 percent of households made as much as ten times more than the poorest 20 percent. But, as Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer points out, "that looks almost Swedish next to today's ratio of fifteen times."[13]

The following are some specific statistics of how redistributive militarism and supply-side fiscal policies have exacerbated income inequality since the late 1970s and early 1980s-making after-tax income gaps wider than pre-tax ones. According to recently released data by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), since 1979 income gains among high-income households have dwarfed those of middle- and low-income households. Specifically:

The average after-tax income of the top one percent of the population nearly tripled, rising from $314,000 to nearly $868,000-for a total increase of $554,000, or 176 percent. (Figures are adjusted by CBO for inflation.)

By contrast, the average after-tax income of the middle fifth of the population rose a relatively modest 21 percent, or $8,500, reaching $48,400 in 2004.

The average after-tax income of the poorest fifth of the population rose just 6 percent, or $800, during this period, reaching $14,700 in 2004.[14]

Legislation enacted since 2001 has provided taxpayers with about $1 trillion in tax cuts over the past six years. These large tax reductions have made the distribution of after-tax income more unequal by further concentrating income at the top of the income range. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, as a result of the tax cuts enacted since 2001:

In 2006, households in the bottom fifth of the income spectrum received tax cuts (averaging $20) that raised their after-tax incomes by an average of 0.3 percent.

Households in the middle fifth of the income spectrum received tax cuts (averaging $740) that raised their after-tax incomes an average of 2.5 percent.

The top one percent of households received tax cuts in 2006 (averaging $44,200) that increased their after-tax income by an average of 5.4 percent.

Households with incomes exceeding $1 million received an average tax cut of $118,000 in 2006, which represented an increase of 6.0 percent in their after-tax income.[15]

Concluding Remarks: External Wars as Reflections of Domestic Fights over National Resources

Close scrutiny of the Pentagon budget shows that, ever since the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, opponents of social spending have successfully used military spending as a regulatory mechanism to cut non-military public spending, to reverse the New Deal and other social safety net programs, and to redistribute national/public resources in favor of the wealthy.

Close examination of the dynamics of redistributive militarism also helps explain why powerful beneficiaries of the Pentagon budget prefer war and military spending to peace and non-military public spending: military spending benefits the wealthy whereas the benefits of non-military public spending would spread to wider social strata. It further helps explain why beneficiaries of war dividends frequently invent new enemies and new "threats to our national interests" in order to justify continued escalation of military spending.

Viewed in this light, militaristic tendencies to war abroad can be seen largely as reflections of the metaphorical domestic fights over allocation of public finance at home, of a subtle or insidious strategy to redistribute national resources from the bottom to the top.

Despite the critical role of redistributive militarism, or of the Pentagon budget, as a major driving force to war, most opponents of war have paid only scant attention to this crucial force behind the recent U.S. wars of choice. The reason for this oversight is probably due to the fact that most critics of war continue to view U.S. military force as simply or primarily a means to achieve certain imperialist ends, instead of having become an end in itself.

Yet, as the U.S. military establishment has grown in size, it has also evolved in quality and character: it is no longer simply a means but, perhaps more importantly, an end in itself, an imperial power in its own right, or to put it differently, it is a case of the tail wagging the dog-a phenomenon that the late President Eisenhower so presciently warned against.

Accordingly, rising militarization of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is driven not so much by some general/abstract national interests, or by the interests of Big Oil and other non-military transnational corporations (as most traditional theories of imperialism continue to argue), as it is by powerful special interests that are vested in the war industry and related war-induced businesses that need an atmosphere of war and militarism in order to justify their lion's share of the public money.

Preservation, justification, and expansion of the military-industrial colossus, especially of the armaments industry and other Pentagon contractors, have become critical big business objectives in themselves. They have, indeed, become powerful driving forces behind the new, parasitic U.S. military imperialism. I call this new imperialism parasitic because its military adventures abroad are often prompted not so much by a desire to expand the empire's wealth beyond the existing levels, as did the imperial powers of the past, but by a desire to appropriate the lion's share of the existing wealth and treasure for the military establishment, especially for the war-profiteering contractors. In addition to being parasitic, the new U.S. military imperialism can also be called dual imperialism because not only does it exploit defenseless peoples and their resources abroad but also the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens and their resources at home. (I shall further elaborate on the historically unique characteristics of the Parasitic, dual U.S. military imperialism in another article.)

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is a professor of economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of the newly published book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism His Web page is http://www.cbpa.drake.edu/hossein-zadeh


Notes

[1] William D. Hartung, "Bush Military Budget Highest Since WW II," Common Dreams (10 February 2007).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Robert Higgs, "The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think," antiwar.com (25 January 2004).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ismael Hossein-zadeh, "Why the US is Not Leaving Iraq,".

[6] Bill Rigby, "Defense stocks may jump higher with big profits," Reuter (12 April 2006).

[7] The Center for Public Integrity, "Outsourcing the Pentagon" (29 September 2004).

[8] Scott Shane and Ron Nixon, "In Washington, Contractors Take On Biggest Role Ever," The New York Times (4 February 2007).

[9] Faiz Shakir et al., Center for American Progress Action Fund, "The Progress Report" (6 February 2007).

[10] Robert Greenstein, "DESPITE THE RHETORIC, BUDGET WOULD MAKE NATION'S FISCAL PROBLEMS WORSE AND FURTHER WIDEN INEQUALITY," Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (6 February 2007).

[11] Ibid.

[12] Richard Du Boff, "What Military Spending Really Costs," Challenge 32 (September/October 1989), pp. 4-10.

[13] Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer, No. 114 (31 December 2006), p. 4.

[14] Congressional Budget Office, Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2004, December 2006; as reported by Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

[15] See Tax Policy Center tables T06-0273 and T06-0279 at.

Cost Of Iraq War Filters Down To States And Cities

Apr 8, 2007 3:33 pm US/Mountain

by Steven K. Paulson, AP Writer

(AP) DENVER The cost of the Iraq war is filtering down to state and local budgets, forcing cuts in transportation funding, Medicaid, education and other federally subsidized programs, according to analysts and lawmakers.

Just how big that impact has been is unclear. What state lawmakers do say is that the $456 billion already spent or appropriated for the war could have gone a long way toward helping them balance their own budgets.

In Colorado, lawmakers expect to lose about $200 million in federal funding for the next fiscal year, forcing the state to cut back on programs that receive federal money.

"These are funds that we aren't going to receive. Low Energy Assistance Program, $9.8 million, gone. Head Start, $3.7 million, gone. Child Care and Development Block Grant, $1.1 million. Community Development Block Grant, $13.5 million. Special Ed, $8.8 million," House Majority Leader Alice Madden, D-Boulder, said during a debate Thursday over a state resolution opposing the escalation of the war in Iraq.

"Also, we're not going to get the Criminal Alien Assistance Program to house criminal aliens, $5 million that was promised and now isn't coming," Madden said. "This is why it's important to take a stand. The more money that's spent over there means our citizens in this state aren't going to get services they need."

Joy Wilson, director of health policy for the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington, D.C., said the war in Iraq is affecting state and local government spending, but it's impossible to tell how much. She said other factors are influencing the federal budget, including President Bush's pledge to balance the budget by 2012, rising health care and fuel costs, and tax cuts that Bush has refused to rescind.

"That said, Iraq is certainly a part of the mix," Wilson said, noting other states are also being forced to cut back because domestic spending has been almost flat for the past two years.

According to the Colorado Municipal League, Bush's proposed 2008 budget includes only a 1 percent increase in nonmilitary and homeland security programs. The league said the budget proposal cuts Community Development Block Grants nationwide by $735 million, education by $1.5 billion, the Individuals with Disabilities Education act by $291 million, and $107 million from Head Start. Social Services block grants would be cut nearly in half to $1.2 billion, and Low Income Heating and Energy Assistance would see a $400 million cut.

The league said funding for the Department of Homeland Security would be slashed, including a 63 percent cut for training and exercises, while federal assistance to state and local law enforcement would be cut by more than half. The Clean Water State Revolving Fund would be cut $312 million over the previous year.

Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge, said 24 hospitals in Colorado risk losing federal funding after Bush issued an executive order changing the definition of public hospitals to reduce Medicaid spending, cutting $128 million in federal aid that could force a major hospital in Denver to close. The Colorado Legislature is debating a resolution asking Bush to restore that funding.

Keller said the state also is losing about $48 million in federal funds for transportation, money the state was promised.

She said the cost of the war is trickling down to local governments, with cuts to federal funding for homeland security.

"We're bearing the brunt of the federal cuts. There's no other reason than the war," Keller said.

House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker, disagreed.

"She can't draw a direct connection to that. Federal funds go up and down every year," May said.

May said transportation funding is based on a formula, and funds for homeland security were cut because huge startup grants were no longer needed.

He said every department in state government had an increase in federal funding and that it was the increases that were cut back.

(© 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Tacoma to Send Pentagon the Bill for Policing Antiwar Port Protests

Last updated April 2, 2007 10:20 p.m. PT

Anti-war protests cost Tacoma $500,000

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

TACOMA -- Tacoma police say last month's 12-day anti-war protests cost the city an unbudgeted $500,000 to provide a large-scale law enforcement presence.

The rough estimate covers overtime, regular compensation, equipment and food for hundreds of workers from Tacoma police and other agencies, Assistant Chief Bob Sheehan said.

The city plans to ask the Port of Tacoma and the military to cover some of the costs.

"That's a tremendous hit on our budget -- a half-million dollars of unexpected expense," said Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma, adding that the military would get the first invoice.

"I think our request is justifiable," Baarsma said. "I would expect that we would be reimbursed. I would be surprised if we weren't."

Police increased law enforcement at the Port of Tacoma during the convoying and storage of Army Stryker vehicles from March 3 until a ship carrying the military equipment left for Iraq on March 14.

Protesters were there each night.

General says U.S. Army has lost 130 helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan

International Herald Tribune
The Associated Press
Friday, March 23, 2007

WASHINGTON: The U.S. Army has lost 130 helicopters in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about a third to shoot-downs, its aviation director said Friday. He complained that industry is not replacing them fast enough.

"While the military may be on a war footing, our nation's industry is not on a war footing," said Brig. Gen. Stephen Mundt.

He said it takes 24 months to get replacement aircraft built and delivered and that replacements for the early losses are just now arriving.

"The U.S. is not at war, the military is at war," he told a group of Defense Department reporters, also complaining about the timing of how money flows from the government to pay for the purchases. "Industry, you have got to get to the point of where you're producing ... faster

--MORE--

The Costs of War

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

As a liberal who is strongly and actively opposed to the war in Iraq, I've been challenged many times as to why I didn't serve in the military. Although I've never shared my story before, and it's difficult for me to write this now, it is perhaps the appropriate time. Today marks the 4th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and it seems only now are many of the physical and mental costs paid by those who have fought in Iraq becoming apparent to the American people. But all wars extract a similar toll, and my tale is that of the terrible price paid by an American soldier, and his family, in another unnecessary and immoral war a generation ago.

If you've been following the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal you've probably seen the following quote by George Washington:

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation."

Powerful words. They've been engraved on memorials and cited by dozens of veterans groups, members of congress, and US senators, including presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. They have a very personal meaning for me.

I'm an Army brat. Both my parents were in the military, and my father was a major in the US Army Special Forces, a Green Beret. He served on and off for nearly ten years in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, starting in the late 1950s, and during that time he developed a progressive psychosis that today would probably be diagnosed as PTSD. But back then there was an unwillingness, particularly among elite forces, to accept that combat stress often causes mental illness, and there was a severe stigma attached to any service member who sought or accepted what little treatment was available. Symptoms were often ignored or discounted, and you pretty much just had to deal with it and get better on your own.

Or not. Despite the best efforts of my mother, who spent a couple of years trying to get the Army to recognize that my father was slowly deteriorating mentally, they refused to even evaluate him. My father, of course, denied there was anything wrong, because admitting to it would have ended his beloved military career. As long as he was more or less able to do his job the Army could, and did, pretend that he couldn't possibly be mentally ill, and therefore the problem was really just my mother, who was upset that he was being sent on so many combat tours away from his family.

The result was sadly predictable. When I was eight years old the whole facade crumbled. After a series of increasingly violent incidents involving my father, incidents that were intentionally covered up or minimized by the Army, something finally happened that they couldn't brush aside. First-degree attempted murder, three counts.

My father's intended victims? My mother and two other family members.

The Army, no longer able to deny or hide the fact that my father had become dangerous and unpredictable, took him into custody and then institutionalized him. They finally accepted that my mother had been right all along, but it was far too late for any sort of happy ending. My father's illness was by then so advanced, and he was considered such a threat to medical staff, that the "treatment" they recommended for him was a lobotomy followed by indefinite confinement. Although my mother was able to block the lobotomy, at that time there was very little that could be done to help someone in my father's condition, and he remained institutionalized for many years. Our family was devastated, and I never saw my dad again after his arrest on that winter's night in 1967.

By neglecting to respond to my father's clear symptoms of developing mental illness, and continuing to send him back into combat despite all the warning signs, the Army destroyed a great man. A man who proudly and willingly dedicated his life to serving our country. A man who, in return, deserved not only the appreciation of his county, as Washington said, but also the concern and care that might possibly have prevented his descent into insanity and all the suffering that resulted.

No matter how you feel about the war in Iraq, we have a sacred obligation to care for those we send to fight and die for us. We can afford to lose in Iraq, but we can't afford to let this war break our military. In part because we've succeeded so well in using technology to improve the survival rate of severely wounded soldiers, the single largest cost of this and all future wars will be medical care for soldiers and veterans. If we are not willing to accept and pay that price, and to do whatever is humanly possible to heal our sick and make whole our injured, then we have no right to ask our military men and women to risk their lives on our behalf. And if we ask anyway, the day may come when they no longer answer.

My life has been shaped by the failure of our country to fulfill its responsibility to one particular soldier forty years ago. The personal cost of that failure to my father, my mother, my brothers and sister, and to me, has been quite high. But there was also a cost to our country. A cost that is particularly relevant today as we scrape the bottom of the barrel to find more troops to send to Iraq.

Because of the way I saw my father treated, I did not follow his footsteps into the military, nor did any of my siblings. Our proud heritage as a military family came to an end. Washington's prophetic words, spoken more than two hundred years ago, had proven true.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

More about the quote from George Washington in a later post.

White House Document Dump: An Iraq War shell-game

Sunday, March 11, 2007

George Bush pulled another fast one on Friday, though so far the whole thing has gone unnoticed. It's a classic Bush & Co. document dump, with a twist.

Bush is traveling abroad, while his administration is rocked by one major scandal after another, and the escalation in Iraq just rescalated. What better time then to get some Awkward News out? This Awkward News happens to concern the military budget.

The twist here is that in the letter Bush sent to Nancy Pelosi asking Congress to give the DOD more money, he gave a seriously misleading account of what he planned to do with it all. In the letter, Bush claims that the money is needed for base closures. The truth of the matter emerges only once you examine a document sent along with that letter.

And the truth is that Bush wants to cut billions of dollars from domestic programs partly in order to pay for troop deployments in Iraq.

Here is the first letter from Bush to Pelosi, regarding proposed cuts to domestic programs, from 3/9/07 (emphasis mine):

I ask the Congress to consider the enclosed FY 2007 request to cancel $3.1 billion of funding from lower-priority Federal programs and excess funds. This request would offset fully the funds needed to address the $3.1 billion FY 2007 funding shortfall for the Department of Defense to implement the recommendations of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission. The proposed cancellations would affect the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, and Transportation, as well as the Corps of Engineers.

The details of this request are set forth in the enclosed letter from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

I'll return to the grisly details of what Bush proposes to cut from domestic programs in order (as he claims here) to fully fund the base closures that were rammed through in 2005. You'll recall that this was another of Rumsfeld's hare-brained schemes. Rumsfeld claimed improbably that the military could save nearly $50 billion by closing military bases en masse. Instead, these closures are turning out to be of dubious value, as more credible people had predicted.

In questioning the Pentagon's estimate on savings, the commission has pointed to its own analysis as well as a report by the Government Accountability Office that found upfront costs will total $24 billion.

That report said eliminating jobs held by military personnel would make up about half of the Pentagon's projected annual recurring savings. It also said much of that money would not be available for other uses because the jobs — and salaries — simply would be relocated.

"It doesn't appear to us the savings are real," Phillip Coyle, a commissioner and former assistant secretary of defense, told officials.

The DOD has in fact been budgeting billions every year to pay for the initial base closings:

The Defense Department's proposed $379.9 billion fiscal 2004 budget suggests the Pentagon will close or realign as many as 25 percent of all bases during the next round of base closures in 2005.

The proposed budget lays out a six-year spending plan that calls for spending $2.97 billion on base closures in fiscal 2006, $5.26 billion in fiscal 2007, and $2.25 billion in fiscal 2008.

But now, Bush tells Pelosi, DOD needs another $3.1 billion dollars alone for 2007...just to supplement the base-closure budget.

~~~

As it turns out, though, that's not quite the whole truth. Wander on over to the Office of Management and Budget, and you'll find a copy of the enclosure that Bush directed OMB to send along with the letter to Pelosi (PDF).

Submitted for your consideration is an FY 2007 request to cancel $3.1 billion of funding from lower-priority Federal programs and excess funds. These proposals would offset fully funds needed to address the $3.1 billion FY 2007 funding shortfall for the Department of Defense (DOD) to implement the recommendations of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission. These funds are necessary for DOD to continue scheduled redeployments of military personnel and their families from overseas stations to the United States and support the training, mobilization and deployment of military forces in support of the Global War on Terror. In addition, these funds are required to maintain the legislated schedule for BRAC realignments and closures, which is important to communities that have already made specific plans and commitments.

The statement is clear as mud, don't you know, but my understanding of the phrase I've emphasized is that the administration is slipping an additional purpose into the package. Some of this will be used for BRAC (presumably), but the big pot of $3.1 billion is also going to be siphoned off to pay for the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Funny that the President didn't mention that in his letter to Pelosi.

~~~

So what domestic programs does the OMB suggest taking an ax to? The document goes on to list them. I'll highlight a few of the suggested cuts, to give you an idea of what this endless war in the Middle East is doing for America. Remember that the administration considers these things to be 'excess'.

Proposed cuts (in millions of dollars)

• Dept. of Agriculture, $245.3, including cuts from the Rural Business Enterprise Grants and Hatch Act Formula Funds (given to State Agricultural Experiment Stations)
• Dept. of Commerce, $79.1, from the Advanced Technology Program
• Dept. of Education, $891.7, including cuts from Career and Technical Education State Grants, from Tech-Prep State Grants, and from the family literacy program Even Start
• Dept. of Energy, $200 from the Environmental Management program
• HHS, $118 from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention
• HUD, $740 from Community Development Block Grants
• Dept. of Interior, $77.3, including cuts from the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Education Construction program and from the Land and Water Conservation Fund State Grants program
• Dept. of Transportation, $670, mostly in cuts from grants for passenger rail service

These cuts show you clearly where this administration's priorities are, and they are not where people live, and work, and strive to make better lives for themselves. With bird flu a looming threat, it's time to cut funds from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. With states' budgets sinking under the weight of unfunded educational mandates imposed by the 'education President', the way to pay for deployments to Iraq is to cut close to a billion dollars from educational grant programs. With oil and gasoline prices soaring, the rational way to plan for the nation's energy and transportation needs is to cut back on passenger rail service.

How does the Bush administration justify these cuts? Not very persuasively, I suppose I'd say. Here for example is its reasoning for cutting Hatch Act funds:

The proposal would cancel $130.0 million from the Hatch Act formula grant program, which provides funding to land grant universities...The Administration has consistently emphasized that funding through peer-reviewed competitive research programs generates the highest quality research, and therefore believes that providing significant amounts of additional funding to statutorily-derived formula programs is not the most effective use of taxpayer dollars.

You get the impression that nobody at the upper reaches of this administration attended a land-grant university. There's an awful lot of 'because-we-say-so' in these justifications.

The proposal would cancel $740.0 million from the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. This program was proposed to be reduced in the President's FY 2007 and FY 2008 Budgets, and P.L. 110-5 provides funding significantly above these requests. The current CDBG program is not well-targeted and program results have not been adequately demonstrated or reported. The Administration continues to support CDBG legislative reforms, similar to the CDBG Reform Act, which was transmitted to the Congress in May 2006.

And get a load of what people who own rambling estates think of publicly-owned parks:

The proposal would cancel $28.0 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund State grants program in the National Park Service. The program provides grants to States for land acquisition and improvements to State and local parks. No funds for this program were requested in the FYs 2006, 2007, or 2008 President's Budgets on the grounds that paying to improve State and local parks are decisions better left to State and local taxpayers.

In its details and overall, this is an obnoxious proposal from OMB, but it drives home exactly what this foolish invasion of Iraq has meant to our common wealth. No wonder this stinker from Bush came as a Friday document dump. It will be interesting to see whether Congressional Democrats even treat it as meriting serious discussion.

~~~

As I suggested above, there was a second letter from Bush to Pelosi on Friday, this one requesting that an unspecified amount of money be reallocated within the pending DOD budget. As the OMB enclosure (PDF) with that letter reveals, Bush is asking to shift $3.2 billion around, the great majority to fund operations in Iraq and to a lesser extent, Afghanistan. A relatively small amount, $50 million, will go toward improving the health care for veterans.

The $3.2 billion is to come from a variety of less important lines in the DOD budget—that is to say, things "not associated with Iraq and Afghanistan".

In addition, Bush asks for permission to raise the ceiling by $3.5 billion in what he is authorized to transfer within the DOD budget. The purpose, again, is to fund the Iraq war.

All of this goes to underline the point that emerges from the first letter to Pelosi: That the Iraq War is bankrupting the US and increasingly desperate budgetary measures have to be employed just to maintain the appearance that the Bush administration has things under control.

The long-term damage to our military's readiness, both in personnel and in materiel, will be profound. The drain upon our finances, regrettably, may be even more difficult to repair. And if this administration has any say in the matter, all of this will be cloaked from the public for as long as possible.

• OMB
• Bush
• Iraq

Posted by smintheus ,: smintheus at entermail dot net, at 23:05:06. Filed under: war

• Go ahead: say your piece

Iraq: the hidden cost of the war

Published 12 March 2007

America won't simply be paying with its dead. The Pentagon is trying to silence economists who predict that several decades of care for the wounded will amount to an unbelievable $2.5 trillion.

They roar in every day, usually direct from the Landstuhl US air-force base in the Rhineland: giant C-17 cargo planes capable of lifting and flying the 65-tonne M1 Abrams tank to battlefields anywhere in the world. But Landstuhl is the first staging post for transporting most of the American wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan back to the United States, and these planes act as CCATs ("critical care air transport") with their AETs - "aeromedical evacuation teams" of doctors, nurses and medical technicians, whose task is to make sure that gravely wounded US troops arrive alive and fit enough for intensive treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, just six miles up the road from me in Washington.

These days it is de rigueur for all politicians, ranging from President Bush and Ibrahim al-Jaafari (Iraq's "prime minister") to junior congressmen, to visit the 113-acre Walter Reed complex to pay tribute to the valour of horribly wounded soldiers. Last Christmas, the centre was so overwhelmed by the 500,000 cards and presents it received for wounded soldiers that it announced it could accept no more.

Yet the story of the US wounded reveals yet another deception by the Bush administration, masking monumental miscalculations that will haunt generations to come. Thanks to the work of a Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist named Linda Bilmes, and some other hard-working academics, we have discovered that the administration has been putting out two entirely separate and conflicting sets of numbers of those wounded in the wars.

This might sound like chicanery by George W Bush and his cronies - or characteristic incompetence - but Bilmes and Professor Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist from Columbia University, have established not only that the number wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is far higher than the Pentagon has been saying, but that looking after them alone could cost present and future US taxpayers a sum they estimate to be $536bn, but which could get considerably bigger still. Just one soldier out of the 1.4 million troops so far deployed who has returned with a debilitating brain injury, for example, may need round-the-clock care for five, six, or even seven decades. In present-day money, according to one study, care for that soldier alone will cost a minimum of $4.3m.

However, let us first backtrack to 2002-2003 to try to establish why the administration's sums were so wildly off-target. Documents just obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show how completely lost the Bush administration was in Neverland when it came to Iraq: Centcom, the main top-secret military planning unit at Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, predicted in its war plan that only 5,000 US troops would be required in Iraq by the end of 2006.

Rummy's deputy Paul Wolfowitz was such a whizz at the economics of it all that he confidently told us that Iraq would "really finance its own reconstruction". Rumsfeld himself reported that the administration had come up with "a number that's something under $50bn" as the cost of the war. Larry Lindsey, then assistant to the president on economic policy at the White House, warned that it might actually soar to as much as $200bn - with the result that Bush did as he habitually does with those who do not produce convenient facts and figures to back up his fantasies: he sacked him.

From official statistics supplied by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, we now know that the Iraq war is costing roughly $200m a day, or $6bn every month; the total bill so far is $400bn. But, in their studies, Bilmes and Stiglitz consider three scenarios that were not even conceivable to Bush, Rummy, Wolfowitz et al back in 2003. In the first, incurring the lowest future costs, troops will start to be withdrawn this year and be out by 2010. The second assumes that there will be a gradual withdrawal that will be complete by 2015. The third envisages the participation of two million servicemen and women, with the war going on past 2016.

Estimating long-term costs using even the second, moderate scenario, Bilmes tells me: "I think we are now approaching a figure of $2.5 trillion." This, she says, "includes three kinds of costs. It includes the cash costs of running the combat operations, the long-term costs of replenishing military equipment and taking care of the veterans, and [increased costs] at the Pentagon. And then it includes the economic cost, which is the differential between reservists' pay in their civilian jobs and what they're paid in the military - and the macroecono mic costs, such as the percentage of the oil-price increase."

Let me pause to explain those deceptive figures. Look at the latest official toll of US fatalities and wounded in the media, and you will see something like 3,160 dead and 23,785 wounded (that "includes 13,250 personnel who returned to duty within 72 hours", the Washington Post told us helpfully on 4 March). From this, you might assume that only 11,000 or so troops, in effect, have been wounded in Iraq. But Bilmes discovered that the Bush administration was keeping two separate sets of statistics of those wounded: one (like the above) issued by the Pentagon and therefore used by the media, and the other by the Department of Veterans Affairs - a government department autonomous from the Pentagon. At the beginning of this year, the Pentagon was putting out a figure of roughly 23,000 wounded, but the VA was quietly saying that more than 50,000 had, in fact, been wounded.

Casualty conspiracy

To draw attention to her academic findings, Bilmes wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times of 5 January 2007 in which she quoted the figure of "more than 50,000 wounded Iraq war soldiers". The reaction from the Pentagon was fury. An assistant secretary there named Dr William Winkenwerder phoned her personally to complain. Bilmes recalls: "He said, 'Where did you get those numbers from?'" She explained to Winkenwerder that the 50,000 figure came from the VA, and faxed him copies of official US government documents that proved her point. Winkenwerder backed down.

Matters did not rest there. Despite its independence from the Pentagon, the VA is run by Robert James Nicholson, a former Republican Party chairman and Bush's loyal political appointee. Following Bilmes's exchange with Winkenwerder - on 10 January, to be precise - the number of wounded listed on the VA website dropped from 50,508 to 21,649. The Bush administration had, once again, turned reality on its head to concur with its claims. "The whole thing is scary," Bilmes says. "I have never been conspiracy-minded, but watching them change the numbers on the website - it's extraordinary."

What Bilmes had discovered was that the tally of US fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan included the outcome of "non-hostile actions", most commonly vehicle accidents. But the Pentagon's statistics of the wounded did not. Even troops incapacitated for life in Iraq or Afghanistan - but not in "hostile situations" - were not being counted, although they will require exactly the same kind of medical care back home as soldiers similarly wounded in battle. Bilmes and Stiglitz had set out, meantime, to explore the ratio of wounded to deaths in previous American wars. They found that in the First World War, on average 1.8 were wounded for every fatality; in the Second World War, 1.6; in Korea, 2.8; in Vietnam, 2.6; and, in the first Gulf war in 1991, 1.2. In this war, 21st-century medical care and better armour have inflated the numbers of the wounded-but-living, leading Bilmes to an astounding conclusion: for every soldier dying in Iraq or Afghanistan today, 16 are being wounded. The Pentagon insists the figure is nearer nine - but, either way, the economic implications for the future are phenomenal.

So far, more than 200,000 veterans from the current Iraq or Afghanistan wars have been treated at VA centres. Twenty per cent of those brought home are suffering from serious brain or spinal injuries, or the severing of more than one limb, and a further 20 per cent from amputations, blindness or deafness, severe burns, or other dire conditions. "Every person injured on active duty is going to be a long-term cost of the war," says Bilmes. If we compare the financial ramifications of the first Gulf war to the present one, the implications become even more stark. Despite its brevity, even the 1991 Gulf war exacted a heavy toll: 48.4 per cent of veterans sought medical care, and 44 per cent filed disability claims. Eighty-eight per cent of these claims were granted, meaning that 611,729 veterans from the first Gulf war are now receiving disability benefits; a large proportion are suffering from psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

More than a third of those returning from the current wars, too, have already been diagnosed as suffering from similar conditions. But although the VA has 207 walk-in "vet centres" and other clinics and offices throughout the US, it is a bureaucracy under siege. It has a well-deserved reputation for providing excellent healthcare for America's 24 million veterans, but is quite unable to cope with a workload that the Bush administration did not foresee.

The unknown unknowns

There is now a backlog of 400,000 claims from veterans and waiting lists of months, some of which "render . . . care virtually inaccessible", in the words of Frances Murphy, the VA's own deputy under-secretary for health. Claims are expected to hit 874,000 this year, 930,000 in 2008. Casualties returning from Iraq meanwhile outnumber other patients at Walter Reed 17 to one, and many have to be put up at nearby hotels and motels rather than in the hospital beds they desperately need. Suicide attempts are frequent; often the less wounded end up having to care for the more seriously wounded.

Since I researched this piece, the Washington Post has published a series of articles outlining the chaos at Walter Reed and elsewhere. Undercover reporters found soldiers suffering from schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress and other brain injuries, occupying rooms infested with mice and cockroaches. The ensuing furore resulted in the sacking of the general in charge. Even Bush says he is "deeply troubled" by these "unacceptable" conditions at Walter Reed, but his government has carefully avoided the issue of how much it will cost to put right these wrongs. The failure to look after returning, often traumatised troops leads to yet further hidden costs to the US economy: the consequences of unemployment, family violence, crime, alcoholism and drug abuse, for example.

The projected $2.5trn price tag also includes the costs of replacing and replenishing military equipment in use. Nearly 40 per cent of the army's equipment, according to the Washington Post, is currently deployed in Iraq; as long ago as March 2005, Rumsfeld conceded that tanks, fighting vehicles and helicopters were wearing out at six times the normal rate.

Significant quantities of equipment are being destroyed, too. The Washington Post reported last December that the army alone has lost more than 280,000 major pieces of equipment in the combat zones; the Army Times reported as long ago as February last year that 20 M1 Abram tanks, 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles, 20 M113 armoured personnel carriers, 250 Hum vees, hundreds of mine-clearing vehicles and the like - plus more than a hundred aircraft, most of them helicopters - have been lost. Those figures have increased considerably since then as fighting has intensified. Add something between $125bn and $300bn for these unanticipated long-term costs, say Bilmes and Stiglitz.

Yet another gargantuan White House miscalculation was over the price of oil. Before his departure, Larry Lindsey told the Wall Street Journal in September 2002 that "the successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy"; the WSJ echoed his thoughts in an editorial the same day, arguing that "the best way to keep oil prices in check is a short, successful war on Iraq". In 2002, the average cost of a barrel of oil was $23.71; today, it is hovering around $50. Dick Cheney's chums in firms such as his own Halliburton - or ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron - have profited enormously, but Bilmes estimates that even if only $5 of the oil-price increase can be attributed to the Iraq war, that alone adds $150bn to the cost of war.

There are also countless imponderables that add to the bill. The deployment of hundreds of thousands of reservists depletes the economy. At present, 44 per cent of US police forces, for example, have members deployed as reservists in Iraq, and their duties have to be performed by others in America; the same goes for firefighters, medical staff, prison wardens.

Then there are the future illnesses that may well unfold. For instance, nobody knew that the notorious Agent Orange defoliant, used by the US in Vietnam from 1961-71, would turn out to have had carcinogenic and other effects on US troops. Today, there is mounting evidence that exposure to depleted uranium - used for firing anti-tank rounds from US M1 tanks and A-10 attack aircraft - can cause cancer, diabetes and birth defects. Many veterans are returning to the US with their health apparently in ruins from adverse reactions to anti-anthrax injections and/or consumption of experimental pills to counter chemical warfare agents. The long-term costs of looking after the likes of them make the cost of the actual war dead pale by comparison: spouses of deceased soldiers receive a "death gratuity" of $100,000. Troops are also given the opportunity to take out subsidised life insurance policies for up to $500,000 for dependants. In the dispassionate way economists assess such things, Bilmes and Stiglitz estimate the additional cost to the economy of the death of a young soldier - typically 25 years old - to be $6.5m.

Bilmes has become a marked woman to the Bush administration. She was invited to participate in a VA seminar on the cost of war, to be held on the last day of this month - but then was suddenly uninvited. She is no raving lefty, though, and her economic credentials are unimpeachable: she was responsible for an annual budget of $9bn in the Clinton-era commerce department. Like none other than George W Bush, she, too, holds an MBA from Harvard.

It is sobering to think how the money going down the drain in Iraq could otherwise have been spent. "For this amount of money, we could have provided health insurance for the uninsured of this country," Bilmes tells me. "We could have made social security solvent for the next three generations, and implemented all the 9/11 Commission's recommendations [to tighten domestic security]."

That kind of list goes on: the annual cost of treating all heart disease and diabetes in the United States would amount to a quarter of what the Iraq war is costing. Pre-school for every child in America would take just $35bn a year. In their main paper, Bilmes and Stiglitz come up with an even more intriguing possibility: "We could have had a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, or the developing countries, that might have succeeded in winning hearts and minds."

What a historic triumph that would have been for Bush. Instead, his legacy to generations of Americans will be a needless debt of at least $2.5trn, what his own defence secretary describes as a four-way civil war in Iraq, dangerous instability in the Middle East, and increasingly entrenched hatred of the United States throughout the world. Alas, we are likely to hear the daily roar of those C-17s as they approach Andrews Air Force Base for years to come.

The unknown price that Britain is paying

No one is counting the long-term costs of caring for injured British troops, reports Sam Alexandroni

The cost to Britain of the Iraq war, according to the Ministry of Defence, will hit £5bn at the end of this financial year. This is the figure given for direct spending on fuel, ammunition, repairs and transport; the real bill is certainly much bigger. The greatest of the uncounted costs is the financial and human toll the war is taking on the mental and physical health of British personnel serving in Iraq.

The government has not attempted to calculate the long-term cost of caring for the injured, and official statistics offer little guidance. Four thousand eight hundred personnel have been evacuated from Iraq on medical grounds but only 144 were classified as "seriously" or "very seriously" injured. What about the rest? Nobody in the MoD or NHS was able to say how many personnel who served in Iraq are being treated in Britain, or how many will require long-term medical care. The treatment costs of servicemen at NHS hospitals such as Selly Oak in Birmingham - home to the Royal Centre of Defence Medicine - are passed on to the MoD, which in turn bills the Treasury Reserve, but once a patient leaves the armed forces, ongoing treatment is paid for by the NHS.

Mental health offers similar uncertainties. So far, 2,123 troops who served in Iraq have been diagnosed with mental health problems, 328 with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); but cases take 12 years on average to surface and there is no sure cure. "We won't know for many years after the Iraq war is over how many former servicemen are suffering from psychological problems," says Toby Elliot, chief executive of the charity Combat Stress. "The MoD doesn't provide all the funds we need by a long way. We have to make up 40 per cent of our funding ourselves, and that's a problem."

Nor has anyone tried to quantify the indirect economic effects. The surge in the price of Brent crude oil from $31 a barrel at the start of 2003 to $60 today has been driven largely by increased demand, but Middle East instability affects the market and "Iraq has been factored in for years", according to the oil analyst Jean-Luc Amos. The extent to which the Iraq war has exacerbated the domestic threat of terror and made Britain less safe remains similarly ungauged. Then there are other costs barely considered. In 2002 a study commissioned by Ken Livingstone, the city's mayor, estimated that war in Iraq would cost the London economy £1bn in lost tourism alone, though there has been no post-invasion follow-up.

That no one in the British government has even attempted these calculations is worrying, but perhaps any cost-benefit analysis of the war misses the point. "In the end, if the Iraq war had brought the Iraqis a better life and us greater security, then - whatever the costs - it would seem 'worth it'," says Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College London. "Because it has been such a screw-up, then, even at a lower level of calculated costs, it seems like a waste."

Iraq War: Key Dates
Research by Sarah O'Connor

20 March 2003 US and Britain invade
1 May 2003 Bush announces "mission accomplished"
13 December 2003 Saddam Hussein is captured
28 April 2004 Images of US troops abusing prisoners emerge from Abu Ghraib
November 2004 US assault on Fallujah insurgents
30 January 2005 Eight million Iraqis vote in elections
July 2006 Deadliest month in Iraq: 3,438 civilians are killed
30 December 2006 Saddam Hussein is executed
10 January 2007 Bush announces 21,500 troop surge to Iraq
21 February 2007 Blair announces the withdrawal of 1,600 British troops

Iraq 2007 by numbers
Research by Rebecca Bundhun

l57,805 minimum number of Iraqi civilians reported killed since the 2003 invasion, according to the Iraq Body Count website
33% of Americans in a March 2007 poll approved of George Bush's Iraq policy
80 US soldiers killed in Iraq last month
7,100 number of UK troops currently in Iraq
135,000 number of US troops currently in Iraq
134 number of British soldiers killed in Iraq
21,500 additional troops Bush plans to deploy in the "troop surge"
28 percentage of Americans in the March poll who said the US will probably or definitely win the war

Andrew Stephen

Democrats Beginning to Pay a Political Price for Failing to End the War

March 10, 2007

By Kevin Zeese

It is no longer enough to oppose the war, now it is time to end it

Tina Richards son, Cloy, is a corporal in the U.S. Marines. He is facing his third tour of duty in Iraq. He and his mother oppose the war. Ms. Richards is living in Maryland lobbying Congress to end the war. She has joined Maryland voters who are occupying the office of Maryland’s senior senator, Barbara Mikulski.

Tina saw Sen. Mikulski leaving a hearing recently going to the women’s room. She followed her and mentioned that protesters were occupying her office to protest the war. Mikulski said she did not understand why they were protesting her saying “I voted against the war.” Tina answered “That is no longer enough.”

She’s right. Now, as we approach the fourth anniversary of the war it is time for the Congress to end it. Senator Barbara Mikulski, like most Democrats, has been a critic of President Bush, describing him as a reckless and irresponsible commander in chief. But she has voted to give this reckless commander in chief more than $420 Billion, as have almost all Democrats.

That is the problem – Democrats like Mikulski say they are opposed to the war but keep appropriating more money for the war. They need to realize that if they pay for it, it’s theirs.

Maryland voters have occupied the office of Senator Mikulski twice so far in what will be a series of efforts to convince Mikulski to lead efforts to end the Iraq War. At the second occupation Sen. Mikulski had four of her constituents arrested after they occupied her offices for three hours placing photographs of all the Maryland soldiers who had died around her office, and reading the names of soldiers and Iraqis killed in the war. (Links to videos of the two occupations are at the bottom of this article.)

Her constituents are holding Sen. Mikulski accountable for her actions. When she votes to fund the war she is putting U.S. troops in harms way and adding to the quagmire of the Iraq War. If Mikluski votes for this next supplemental she will be sending under-trained troops with inadequate equipment and an unclear purpose into an unwinnable quagmire. Real support for the troops requires more than criticizing Bush, it requires acting to remove the troops from harms way.

It would take only 41 votes to stop the war in the U.S. Senate. A filibuster of Iraq funding would not even require all of the 51 Democrats in the Senate to support it in order to succeed. If the Senate filibustered the president’s $99 billion request it could then pass an alternative that would really support the troops by bringing them home safely, reduce the violence in Iraq by providing funds to allow Iraqis to re-build their own country and underwrite a regional peace keeping force. If this exit were combined with a diplomatic surge in the region the U.S. could bring greater stability to the Middle East. Those steps would restore U.S. leadership and prevent further U.S. and Iraqi casualties. This approach would also save tax payers tens of billions of dollars in 2007 alone.

The Iraq war has resulted in more than 50,000 U.S. casualties and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, but it has also cost more than $420 billion, $8.8 billion of which has been paid for by Mikulski’s constituents – Maryland’s taxpayers. This comes at a time when our citizens cannot afford health care, school systems are failing and there is an affordable housing crisis. What could that $8.8 billion have bought for Maryland? Four million children could have received a full year of health insurance, more than 122,000 public school teachers could have been hired, 342,000 students could have received four year scholarships to public universities or 63,000 public housing units could have been built. (Link below to find out what the Iraq War has cost your community.)

Sadly, Senator Mikulski’s voting record forces us to ask whether her inconsistent position – voting to fund the war while saying she opposes it – are because of campaign contributions. To date, she’s received $369,000 in contributions from the defense industry and her third and fourth largest campaign donors are Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Further, she received more than $362,000 from the hard right Israeli lobby that supported the Iraq War and currently supports military action against Iran.

Her funding reflects the funding of the Democratic Party. The Defense industry has donated $110.6 million in campaign contributions since 1990, $43.7 million to Democrats. And, the pro-Israel lobby has donated $55.2 million, $37.4 to Democrats.

Is the conflict between the interests of their donors and the views of their voters who oppose the war making it difficult for Democrats like Sen. Mikulski to take action to end the war?

In a sign of how widespread support is for ending the war – polls show a majority of Americans want troops out within the year as do the vast majority of soldiers. Jean Athey one of those arrested in Sen. Mikulski’s office reported a policeman stopped by to talk while they were incarcerated. He said, “Anyone who thinks that the war is wrong and people are being killed needlessly, has a moral imperative to do everything in their power to stop it.” And, on one of the van trips the prisoners saw some police standing outside, one of them, an African-American policeman, came over and gave them a power salute. At first, Jean was not sure of his intent. Then, he said to them, “I really respect what you guys are doing.”

When I was in law school, then Congresswoman Mikulski co-sponsored a bill I was working on regarding the advertising and labeling of contraceptives. I want the old Barbara Mikulski back – one who was more consistent and reflected her values. That Barbara Mikulski would say to President Bush – “Not one more dime, not one more death for your reckless war. It is time to support the troops by bringing them home.”

Kevin Zeese is Director of Democracy Rising ( www.DemocracyRising.US ) and a founder of VotersForPeace.US.

For more information:

Videos of the occupation of Senator Mikulski’s office are at:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=165649651173410173&hl=en (this is the second occupation that results in the arrests of four of her constituents, it is 9 minutes long).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4819300510808318190&hl=en (this is the first occupation, it is 12 minutes long).

The Mikulski action is part of a nationwide campaign to end the occupation. Visit the Occupation Project at http://vcnv.org/project/the-occupation-project to see similar actions occurring around the United States and to join this effort.

To get information about what the Iraq War is costing us at the national, state and local levels visit: www.CostOfWar.com a project of the National Priorities Project.

Tina Richards website is http://grassrootsamerica4us.org/.

The Scandal at Walter Reed

HON. RON PAUL OF TEXAS
Before the U.S. House of Representatives

March 7, 2007

The scandal at Walter Reed is not an isolated incident. It is directly related to our foreign policy of interventionism.

There is a pressing need to reassess our now widely accepted role as the world’s lone superpower. If we don’t, we are destined to reduce our nation to something far less powerful.

It has always been politically popular for politicians to promise they will keep us out of foreign wars, especially before World War I. That hasn’t changed, even though many in Washington today don’t understand it.

Likewise it has been popular to advocate ending prolonged and painful conflicts like the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and now Iraq.

In 2000, it was quite popular to condemn nation building and reject the policy of policing the world, in the wake of our involvement in Kosovo and Somalia. We were promised a more humble foreign policy.

Nobody wins elections by promising to take us to war. But once elected, many politicians greatly exaggerate the threat posed by a potential enemy-- and the people too often carelessly accept the dubious reasons given to justify wars. Opposition arises only when the true costs are felt here at home.

A foreign policy of interventionism costs so much money that we’re forced to close military bases in the U.S., even as we’re building them overseas. Interventionism is never good fiscal policy.

Interventionism symbolizes an attitude of looking outward, toward empire, while diminishing the importance of maintaining a constitutional republic.

We close bases here at home-- some want to close Walter Reed-- while building bases in Arab and Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia. We worry about foreign borders while ignoring our own. We build permanent outposts in Muslim holy lands, occupy territory, and prop up puppet governments. This motivates suicide terrorism against us.

Our policies naturally lead to resentment, which in turn leads to prolonged wars and increased casualties. We spend billions in Iraq, while bases like Walter Reed fall into disrepair. This undermines our ability to care for the thousands of wounded soldiers we should have anticipated, despite the rosy predictions that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.

Now comes the outrage.

Now Congress holds hearings.

Now comes the wringing of hands. Yes, better late than never.

Clean it up, paint the walls, make Walter Reed look neat and tidy! But this won’t solve our problems. We must someday look critically at the shortcomings of our foreign policy, a policy that needlessly and foolishly intervenes in places where we have no business being.

Voters spoke very clearly in November: they want the war to end. Yet Congress has taken no steps to defund or end a war it never should have condoned in the first place.

On the contrary, Congress plans to spend another $100 billion or more in an upcoming Iraq funding bill-- more even than the administration has requested. The 2007 military budget, $700 billion, apparently is not enough. And it’s all done under the slogan of “supporting the troops,” even as our policy guarantees more Americans will die and Walter Reed will continue to receive casualties.

Every problem Congress and the administration create requires more money to fix. The mantra remains the same: spend more money we don’t have, borrow from the Chinese, or just print it.

This policy of interventionism is folly, and it cannot continue forever. It will end, either because we wake up or because we go broke.

Interventionism always leads to unanticipated consequences and blowback, like:

A weakened, demoralized military;

Exploding deficits;

Billions of dollars wasted;

Increased inflation;

Less economic growth;

An unstable currency;

Painful stock market corrections;

Political demagoguery;

Lingering anger at home; and

Confusion about who is to blame.

These elements combine to create an environment that inevitably undermines personal liberty. Virtually all American wars have led to diminished civil liberties at home.

Most of our mistakes can be laid at the doorstep of our failure to follow the Constitution.

That Constitution, if we so desire, can provide needed guidance and a roadmap to restore our liberties and change our foreign policy. This is critical if we truly seek peace and prosperity.

Quote of the Day

One thought alone preocupies the submerged mind of Empire: how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

-- J. M. Coetzee

41% Percent of Your 2006 Taxes Go to War

Issues: Budget Priorities and Tax Policy

Updated: 2/15/2007

Posted: 2/15/2007

This chart shows FCNL's calculations of how much of your 2006 tax dollars go to pay for current and past military activities.

	2006 (In millions of dollars)	2006 Percent (Of federal funds budget)
Current Military Spending	571,558	28%
Cost of Past Wars	263,542	13%
Total Percent		41%
Interest on Non-Military Share of Federal Debt	211,462	10%
Health Research & Services	393,547	19%
Responses to Poverty	241,012	12%
General Government	84,609	4%
Community & Economic Development	112,125	5%
Social Programs	97,716	5%
Science, Energy, & Environment	50,815	2%
Non-Military International Programs	29,764	1%

More on Budget Priorities and Tax Policy

Money for Nothing: Iraq War Funding, 2004-2007

Feb 15, 2007

What is it that the US military is doing so differently in Iraq today than it was last year or the year before that would justify such a tremendous leap in spending on Operations & Maintenance? Asks Jeff Leys.

On February 5, President Bush submitted his war budget for 2007 and 2008 to Congress. He is seeking an additional $93 billion in funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the period that ends on September 30 of this year, as well as another $142 billion for the coming fiscal year which runs from October 1, 2007 through September 30, 2008. The February 8 hearing of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee suggested little hope that Congress will cut funding for the Iraq war. Representative John Murtha (Chair of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee) and Representative Dave Obey (Chair of the House Appropriations Committee) each emphasized that they will pass all funds necessary to "ensure the troops have all they need" (a paraphrase). Each stated he has worked to increase levels of funding for the war above and beyond what the White House asked for in prior spending bills, most notably in the so-called "bridge fund" passed last fall which provided $70 billion for the wars in this fiscal year. Murtha emphasized that he and Obey are committed to ensuring a vote on the bill by the full House of Representatives by March 14 or 15.

At the same hearing, General Peter Schoomaker stated that units which are deployed to Iraq are fully equipped. He stated that the problem which the military encounters is Unit A "borrows" the equipment of Unit B when Unit A deploys to Iraq and Unit B remains at home. The deficiency then becomes that Unit B is not able to adequately train. The issue is explicitly NOT that Unit A enters the war in Iraq without sufficient equipment, weapons, etc.

In this article, I aim to lay out an overview of the growth of war spending between 2004 and 2007, up to and including the current request for $93 billion more in supplemental war spending. I'll focus upon the three main categories of funding: Personnel; Operations and Maintenance; and Procurement. Within the Operations and Maintenance section I'll focus upon those funds appropriated or requested for use by U.S. military forces (including active duty as well as Guard and Reserve units), as opposed to those funds appropriated for such items as the Iraq Security Forces fund and the Afghanistan Security Forces fund. In doing so, I hope to maintain a control of sorts on the dollar amounts and categories discussed in the following analysis-comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges.

In the following discussion, the dollar amounts given for FY 2007 include funds provided in the "bridge fund" passed last fall and the funds sought by President Bush in the supplemental spending request. Dollar amounts are derived from the various House - Senate Conference Committee reports that accompanied prior war funding bills and the current supplemental request submitted by President Bush.

PROCUREMENT

The "Procurement" category covers the cost of buying new equipment, ammunitions, weapons systems, etc. The amount budgeted to buy new items grew from FY 2004 to FY 2006, but is now slated to take a gigantic leap in FY 2007.

FY 2004 -- $5.5 billion

FY 2005 -- $18.8 billion

FY 2006 -- $23 billion

FY 2007 - $44.6 billion

When Congress appropriates Procurement funds, it specifies that the money will be available for expenditure over the following three years. This is the standard life cycle of the procurement process, as it takes time to bid out the contracts; to produce the item; and to get the item shipped to the field. Indeed, at the February 9, 2007 hearing of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, General Peter Schoomaker and Secretary of the Army Frances Harvey both stated that it takes at least 18 months for equipment to be secured once funds have been appropriated for the purchase of an item, giving the example of an 18 month lag time for obtaining a vehicle transmission.

Because Procurement money is carried over from one fiscal year to the next, it becomes difficult to determine exactly how much money is available in a given fiscal year for Procurement. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that as of June 2006, $2.17 billion remained to be spent of the $6.8 billion appropriated in the fall of 2005 for FY 2006. In June 2006, Congress appropriated an additional $14.7 billion for FY 2006. This means that, as of June 2006, $16.8 billion remained to be spent of funds appropriated for procurement during FY 2006. The GAO concluded that the bulk of this $16.8 billion would most likely be rolled over into and spent in FY 2007. If indeed most of this $16.8 billion rolled over into the current year, it would mean that the Department of Defense would have upwards of $61.4 billion to spend on Procurement alone this year (the $16.8 billion carry over, plus the $44.6 billion to be appropriated for Procurement for FY 2007).

Now, let's take a look at the incredible increase in procurement monies being appropriated by Congress-a stunning 94% increase from FY 2006 to FY 2007, or $21.6 billion more this year than last year if the supplemental spending bill is passed.

If the supplemental war funding bill is passed, Congress will have approved $44.6 billion for Procurement this year alone-nearly as much as the $47.3 billion approved by Congress for the past three years combined.

While details are very sketchy about what these funds will be used for, some limited information is available within the supplemental request. The Army will receive the lion's share of these funds. For example, the subcategory for "weapons and tracked combat vehicles" is slated to receive $6.9 billion this year-compared to $5.3 billion total for the last 3 fiscal years combined. "Army aircraft" is to be funded at $2 billion this year-compared to $1.1 billion the past 3 fiscal years combined. "Army other" is to be funded at $14.9 billion this year-compared to $17.1 billion for the past 3 fiscal years combined. This "other" category includes the acquisition of such items as tactical and support vehicles; communications and electronics equipment; and other support equipment.

Spending on procurement of Air Force aircraft is also slated to leap in 2007, with $4.9 billion total being appropriated if the supplemental spending bill is passed. This compares to the $1.1 billion total appropriated in the last three fiscal years.

Again, it is important to stress that just because the funds are appropriated now does not mean that the equipment and weapons systems will automatically appear in the field for use by soldiers tomorrow. A one to three year lag time exists between the time funds are appropriated and the time an item is available to soldiers in the field. The funds being appropriated now are not to provide for soldiers in the field today. The funds being appropriated now for procurement purposes are to provide material for soldiers fighting the war in Iraq one to three years in the future.

PERSONNEL

The funding levels for personnel costs have remained remarkably consistent, despite fluctuations in levels of personnel deployed to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, personnel costs for FY 2007 (the current fiscal year) will be almost identical to personnel costs in FY 2004 (the first full fiscal year during the Iraq war):

2004 -- $17.8 billion

2005 -- $18.6 billion

2006 -- $16.5 billion

2007 -- $17.5 billion

Items included in this category are: special pays like foreign language proficiency; costs associated with stop-loss orders (forcing people to serve beyond their original end-date for enlistment); hazardous duty pay; increased life insurance payouts; and the like. Personnel costs do include the base rate of pay plus any special pays for members of the Reserves and National Guards who are on active duty.

Congress also made the political decision to fund the build up of the military through supplemental spending rather through the regular appropriations process. Each branch of the military is funded through the regular appropriations process for a set number of positions. Throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has exceeded this number-called "over strength". Congress decided politically to fund this "over strength" through supplemental spending bills rather than including it in the baseline Department of Defense budget.

OPERATION & MAINTENACE (O & M)

The Operation & Maintenance portion of the budget continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Assuming the supplemental spending bill is approved, spending on O & M will be $77 billion this year-a 29.2% increase over last year and an astounding 108% increase over the 2004 cost.

Here's the growth in spending on O & M since 2004:

FY 2004 - $37.2 billion

FY 2005 -- $46.5 billion

FY 2006 -- $59.6 billion

FY 2007 -- $77 billion

As in past years, the Department of Defense's justification materials fail to provide much in the way of concrete and detailed information on how these funds will be expended. Nor does it give any indication of why the costs are growing so exponentially yet again.

This is a common critique of the funding process, especially as it relates to the area of Operations and Maintenance. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office each issued reports or testimony in the past year which are critical of the accounting process. Each asserts that it is simply impossible to determine the purposes for which monies are spent.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in November 2006 that "…in fiscal year 2005, close to 26 percent of obligations reported in the operation and maintenance account were in 'other supplies and equipment' and 'other services and miscellaneous contracts.' This trend has continued in fiscal year 2006."

In testimony given on February 6, 2007 before the Senate Budget Committee, J. Michael Gilmore, Assistant Director for National Security of the Congressional Budget Office stated that according to reports of the Defense Finance and Accounting Services of the Department of Defense, "…about $98 billion was obligated for military operations in Iraq and the war on terrorism in fiscal year 2006. Of that amount, almost 25 percent ($23 billion) was allocated for purposes described as 'other'. Little information was provided to suggest how those 'other' funds were obligated."

Absent any concrete justification materials or line item accounting of expenditures, it is indeed impossible to determine why the costs of Operations and Maintenance are skyrocketing. Is it the cost of fuel? Are more bombing runs being flown by the Air Force? Has the cost of food risen that dramatically? What is it that the U.S. military is doing so differently in Iraq today than it was last year or the year before that would justify such a tremendous leap in spending on Operations & Maintenance?

Jeff Leys is Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org) and a national organizer with the Occupation Project campaign of sustained civil disobedience to end Iraq war funding. He can be reached via email, jeffleys@vcnv.org