Hellfire . . .

DEATH FROM ABOVE. GQ has an article by MatthewPower, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior” that is worth reading. “Drones” have been effective, but there's a human cost paid by the young folks who do the killing. They're good at that, and it gives them nightmares, and no wonder the Taliban have been freaking and using their political influence to get this curtailed.

By the spring of 2011, almost six years after he’d signed on, Senior Airman Brandon Bryant left the Air Force, turning down a $109,000 bonus to keep flying. He was presented with a sort of scorecard covering his squadron’s missions. “They gave me a list of achievements,” he says. “Enemies killed, enemies captured, high-value targets killed or captured, stuff like that.” He called it his diploma. He hadn’t lased the target or pulled the trigger on all of the deaths tallied, but by flying in the missions he felt he had enabled them. “The number,” he says, “made me sick to my stomach.”

Total enemies killed in action: 1,626.

The sum of futility . . .

THE NEW YORK TIMES has a report by Nicholas Kristof, "1 Soldier or 20 Schools?", where the cost of the War on Terror is tabulated. The cost is astounding:

The war in Afghanistan will consume more money this year alone than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War — combined.

A recent report from the Congressional Research Service finds that the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, has been, by far, the costliest war in American history aside from World War II. It adjusted costs of all previous wars for inflation.

Those historical comparisons should be a wake-up call to President Obama, underscoring how our military strategy is not only a mess — as the recent leaked documents from Afghanistan suggested — but also more broadly reflects a gross misallocation of resources. One legacy of the 9/11 attacks was a distortion of American policy: By the standards of history and cost-effectiveness, we are hugely overinvested in military tools and underinvested in education and diplomacy.

. . . for the cost of just 246 soldiers posted for one year, America could pay for a higher education plan for all Afghanistan. That would help build an Afghan economy, civil society and future — all for one-quarter of 1 percent of our military spending in Afghanistan this year.

What a way to run a war.

WWW: World-Wide Warfare

FOREIGN POLICY'S WEB SITE has a photo gallery of 33 current conflicts, called "Planet War", compiled by Kayvan Farzaneh, Andrew Swift and Peter Williams, and taken by some very brave photographers. Worthy of your attention.

From the bloody civil wars in Africa to the rag-tag insurgiences in Southeast Asia, 33 conflicts are raging around the world today, and it’s often innocent civilians who suffer the most.

Onward Christian soldiers

Just when you think that what you know about the George W. Bush administration's depravity, rank hypocracy and sadististic bullying masquerading as patriotic piety has hit the bottom of the barrel, someone comes along and points out that there is a whole other barrel underneath this one. Apparently Donald Rumsfeld, not content to have things like prayer meetings going on at the Pentagon and a chief of Special Forces who make Gen. Jack T. Ripper look like the moderate wing of the GOP/military axis, took it upon himself to make special title pages for the regular top secret briefing he delivered to the president and handful of others. Pages with heroic, glamorous images of America's Heroic Glamorous Defenders of Heroic Freedom Heroically Defending Freedom in Glamorous ways, overlaid with stirring passages from, yep - you guessed it - the Bible.
(Image shamelessly lifted from Jesus' General)

See them all here

Keep in mind that this was not an attempt to play to the religious rubes out there in the hinterlands or a pose adopted to curry favor with the evangelistic electorate. These covers were for super-secret executive level only reports that were circulated only to the most senior people.
One wonders what the "Prince of Peace" would make of that. One also wonders why none of these pictures were included with suitable biblical quotes:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth

Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.

Suffer the little children to come unto me

If you are American, write your president, your congressman, your senator, your newspaper and demand that the people responsible for starting this hideous human meatgrinder on false pretenses for their own selfish reasons be brought to trial.

Gratitude to fellow Fez enthusiast Atta J. Turk, this is all crossposted from the Woodshed.

The price tag and the cost

It's all very nice that Harper has "given his blessing" to the release of a report by Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page on the monetary cost of the Canadian military mission to Afghanistan. In fact, Harper was cornered and any objection to its release would have been viewed as an attempt to hide something far worse than his projected "under $8 billion".

David Perry of Dalhousie University's Centre for Foreign Policy Studies has already accumulated data and produced a study which will soon be released. He pegs the monetary cost at over $22 billion as reported in The Ottawa Citizen.

The Afghan war is going to end up costing the Defence Department more than $22 billion, in actual money spent on the mission and future payments to rebuild equipment and provide long-term care for veterans, a military conference heard yesterday.

This is strictly the military price tag and does not include other aid, development and direct reconstruction expenses. Cutting through a lot of detail, the money breaks down like this:

$7 billion for the cost of the war so far, including everything from ammunition and fuel to salaries.

$11 billion is the estimated bill for Veterans Affairs and DND for long-term care of veterans and related benefits.

$2 billion for the purchase of mission-specific equipment.

$2 billion for refurbishing the military's armoured personnel carrier fleet.

$405 million for repair and overhaul costs.

There was a portion of the Citizen article, quoting Perry, which jumped out and dealt with the level of transparency and the difference between the Liberal government which initially funded the Afghanistan mission and the Harper Conservatives who took it over and then started hiding numbers. Red Tory noticed the same thing, (and he had it posted before I did), so I'll send you there to read the line which tells a huge story.

There is something else which needs to be brought into the light and that is the comment by retired Commodore Eric Lerhe. (My emphasis)

"This is an important work and bang on with the numbers."

Understand that at a gathering of this type the participants are normally practical, realistic people with a tendency to want to improve military and naval contributions by studying and comparing past and present events. When they speak they do so without a view to political ideology and more to filling in the gaps they see in whatever-the-government-of-the-day is missing in terms of defence policy and implementation. Grinding one's own axe will attract opposition from other participants so presentations must be accurate and realistic. Lerhe's statement is based on accepted knowledge and a practical approach.

The cost of the Afghanistan mission is a different thing. It's more than just dollars. It's 98 dead Canadians, shattered families and permanently maimed soldiers. The Enlightened Savage details a major portion of that.

Hat tip Canajun

On the road to national bankruptcy

Remember when the Bush administration, specifically then deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said invading Iraq would "pay for itself"?

That was around the same time that one of Bush's economic advisors, Lawrence Lindsay, in a September 2002 interview with the Wall Street Journal, suggested an invasion of Iraq would cost, at the upper limits of somewhere between $100 billion and $200 billion.

The Bush administration didn't like that much so they had Mitch Daniels, Director of the Office of Budget and Management publicly declare that Lindsay's estimates were "very, very high". Then Donald Rumsfeld jumped in by saying that the OBM had provided an estimate of under $50 billion for the total cost of the war.

They then fired Lindsay.

On Wednesday, this appeared.

The war in Iraq could ultimately cost well over a trillion dollars -- at least double what has already been spent -- including the long-term costs of replacing damaged equipment, caring for wounded troops, and aiding the Iraqi government, according to a new government analysis.

The United States has already allocated more than $500 billion on the day-to-day combat operations of what are now 190,000 troops and a variety of reconstruction efforts.

In a report to lawmakers yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that even under the rosiest scenario -- an immediate and substantial reduction of troops -- American taxpayers will feel the financial consequences of the war for at least a decade.

The calculations include the estimated cost to leave some US forces behind for at least several years to support the Iraqi government, but they also predict other long-term costs, such as extended medical care and disability compensation for wounded soldiers and survivor's benefits for the families of the thousands of combat-zone fatalities.

The percentage of total revenue taken in by the US government which is being spent on the Iraq war:

The cost of the war in Iraq and other military operations has soared to the point where "we are now spending on these activities more than 10 percent of all the government's annually appropriated funds," said Robert A. Sunshine, the budget office's assistant director for budget analysis.

Unlike the figures first produced by the Bush administration, most of which they pulled out of their asses, these ones are extrapolated from known expenses over the past five years.

And then there's the "surge" which was the subject of a lot of bandied-about figures.

Representative James P. McGovern, a Worcester Democrat and a member of the budget panel, said that [Gordon] England [deputy secretary of defense] couldn't give a firm answer when asked how much the Pentagon needed to pay for Bush's decision to dispatch 30,000 more troops to secure Iraq earlier this year. England said the costs the Pentagon anticipated a few months ago for military operations in fiscal year 2008 -- about $142 billion -- will no longer be enough.

Just haul out the credit card and pay for it.

But McGovern said he is worried about the long-term financial impact of the war, adding that his primary concern is that the United States is borrowing money to pay for it. Some leading economists have predicted that, depending on how long troops remain in Iraq, the endeavor could reach several trillion dollars as a result of more "hidden" costs -- including recruiting expenses to replenish the ranks and the lifelong benefits the government pays to veterans.

"It is being paid for on the national credit card," McGovern said. "It is being put on their backs of our kids and grandkids. That is indefensible."

McGovern said he is considering proposing that a "war tax" be levied on all Americans to cover the ballooning expenses.

"We should find a way to pay for it so that when this war is over we are not bankrupt," he said.

Right! A war tax. Why didn't the "war president" think of that?

In case you're having trouble sorting out the massive scale of a trillion dollars, this was written over a year and a half ago.

And where have the players who brushed off any thought of the Iraq war costing anything more than a few billion dollars?

Paul Wolfowitz - Left his post as Deputy Secretary of Defense in January 2005 to become the president of the World Bank. Resigned under a cloud having made particularly outlandish arrangements for his girlfriend, also an employee of the World Bank, to receive a highly paid job working for the State Department while still on the World Bank's books. Now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank.

Mitch "The Blade" Daniels - Resigned as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under the cloud of an investigation into "insider trading" relating to issues with Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals, a company of which he had been a senior vice-president. Ran for and won the governorship of Indiana. Tried to raise taxes on individuals and corporations earning over $100,00 annually and tried to raise taxes on cigarettes by 25 cents per pack. This confused conservatives everywhere. Bush quit calling him "My man Mitch".

Lawrence Lindsey - CEO of the Lindsey Group, writes for the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard. Also a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Had a history of disagreeing with people on economic issues. He was usually right.