Cost of Post-9/11 Wars Expected to Top $6 Trillion
12/24/2019
By Jon Harper
The U.S. government has already appropriated trillions of dollars for post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts, and the price tag is expected to increase by an additional $1 trillion or more in the coming decades, according to a recent study.
Neta Crawford, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, tallied up counterterrorism-related spending in a report titled, “United States Budgetary Costs and Obligations of Post-9/11 Wars through FY 2020: $6.4 Trillion.â€
Estimated expenditures from fiscal years 2001 to 2020 totaled approximately $5.4 trillion including: $1.96 trillion for U.S. military overseas contingency operations; $131 billion for State Department OCO; $925 billion in interest on borrowing for Defense and State OCO; $803 billion in war-related spending in the Pentagon’s base budget; $100 billion in the “OCO for base†spending category for fiscal years 2019 and 2020; $437 billion for medical and disability care for post-9/11 veterans; and $1.05 trillion for counterterrorism-related homeland security spending, according to the report.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/12/24/cost-of-post-911-wars-expected-to-top-6-trillion
