- War costs way more than political leaders are gonna say at the beginning.

We have already spent probably at $1 trillion on this war.

These are credit card wars.

Then post-9/11 wars and this war in Iran are wars that don't touch Americans in part because we are passing the cost to future generations.

- Welcome to "One-on-One" I'm Ian Donnis.

Rhode Islanders know how gas prices are surging due to the war in Iran.

There's upward pressure on inflation too.

So what is the true cost of the war?

Stephanie Savell, director of Brown University's Cost of War Project joins us for some answers.

Stephanie Savell, director of the Cost of War Project at Brown University, welcome to "One-on-One" - Thank you so much for having me.

- Let's start with how Americans view and experience the ongoing war in Iran.

For a lot of people, it's about the surging price of gasoline up to about 439 a gallon, an increase of 31 cents over the last week.

What else should they know and understand about the cost of war?

- One of the things we always have to remember is that war costs way more than political leaders are gonna say at the beginning.

And it is a consistent thing.

In the past, you know, since 9/11, that political leaders have said war would be quick and efficient and cheap.

And that has been the opposite of the case.

So when you hear the Pentagon's recent claims, for example, that the war in Iran has cost $25 billion, that is just the very smallest tip of the iceberg.

That's basically the value of munitions used so far.

But there are so many other costs that come into calculating the true costs of war, and that's just the dollar figure.

Of course, I think we have to really remember that, you know, people have died in this war.

People in Iran, people in Lebanon.

There have been, you know, there was a school hit.

So we just have to always keep the human costs in mind as well.

- To your point, can you put a figure on how much the war to this point in early May has cost the typical Rhode Islander?

- Oh, Rhode Islander, no.

But in terms of, you know, the, it's basically impossible right now to say exactly how much the war has cost.

And let me just explain that in a bigger sense before I get to your question of what it means for you and I. So when you think about the dollar cost of a war, there are short-term, medium-term, and long-term.

Okay?

So the 25 billion that the Pentagon is claiming, they're talking about munitions.

Well, you also have to take into consideration other short-term costs.

So there's the cost of maintaining, for example, an aircraft carrier strike group near Iran.

I think there's two.

And those cost something on the order of, you know, 9 million a day just in kind of basic operations, right?

There's personnel costs, there's fuel costs.

And then you have to think about things like medium-term, like repairing the bases that have been hit.

There've been about 20 facilities in the broader Middle East that have been hit actually in- - Replenishing weapons.

- So replenishing weapons stores, rebuilding, reconstruction, combat pay.

You have to think about the fact that personnel are gonna be earning increased pay for being in an active war zone.

And then you have to think about long-term costs.

So that's by far and away the biggest cost.

My colleague, Linda Bilmes, she's a public finance expert at Harvard, and she thinks a lot about all of these.

A lot of her calculations are where I'm drawing a lot of these costs.

And one of her fields of expertise is actually in veterans costs.

So there's just a huge amount that the United States owes.

For example, post-9/11 war veterans in disability and healthcare costs.

And those have to be factored into the costs of war as well.

There are increases to the base budget at the Pentagon, so that that's things like, you know, when the extra combat pay, for example, get ends up getting built into the annual baseline budget.

- Sure.

- That never goes back down.

- Let me stop you there, 'cause we've got a lot of ground to cover to pull back and look at the big picture.

It seems like the Trump administration didn't really take into account Iran's ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and that's something the administration is still dealing with, but Iran has been considered an outlaw state by the west, and its conventional weapons have largely been destroyed.

From your perspective, does that make us safer in the US?

- From my perspective, I think we really have to think about what does safety really mean to you and me and to most Americans?

Does it mean that Iran... You know, never had the capacity to kind of reach the US soil and to begin with.

And so, you know, I think we need to think about, what actually does security and insecurity mean?

You know, people want the security of having a good job and a salary that will keep them with food on the table, like healthcare taken care of.

We have to think about, you know, a pandemic, for example, is another potential huge source of insecurity.

There's climate insecurity, right?

So what does safety mean?

And then we can weigh the costs and benefits.

I'm not a strategy expert.

I'm not the one to ask about, you know, what are we doing in Iran?

Is that accomplishing military objectives?

But I am an expert in the cost of war.

And what that involves is thinking about like, how do we reframe what safety really means?

And is there a non-military way of getting to that goal of protection for Americans and for other people?

- What about the argument from the administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who testified before Congress that he sees these costs including the potential cost of a nuclear armed Iran.

Is that something that the figures documented by your center take into account?

- We don't talk about the, you know, you hear that a lot, right?

The costs of not going to war is the claim that is often made.

But I think we have to think about, you know, that that's where the strategy experts come in.

And you know, there's a lot of questions being raised about whether or not a war has been an efficient strategy in the first place.

But I think the bigger point for me is we are incurring an enormous amount of economic cost, and that's something that we're not gonna see the tail end of.

And Linda Bilmes is actually saying that, you know, for sure we have already spent probably $1 trillion on this war when you take into those short, medium and long-term costs.

- To your point about the cost being greater than the administration is saying, what do you expect about the economic fallout for the US in the global economy?

- My colleague Jeff Colgan actually at Brown has been calculating the extra cost that Americans have been spending on gas and diesel.

It's something on the order of 32 billion extra it had we not gone to war just in those, just for Americans.

And what I've been hearing experts talk about is the fact that those increased fuel costs are not, even if the war in Iran were to end tomorrow, those are not gonna go back down anytime soon.

There's a lot of speculation that those costs are just gonna stay high for quite some time to come.

- Stephanie, I know you and the Cost of War Project like to focus on facts because war is inherently political and that could be a quick sand of arguments, but do you have any view on how the Trump administration made a big turnabout from saying it would not get into new wars and then it elected to go to war when there were a lot of people who really questioned the wisdom of that?

- Yeah.

Look, I think that, you know, a lot of Americans don't wanna see war costs of the sort that I'm talking about.

They don't wanna see more economic costs, they don't wanna see the human costs, they don't wanna see the environmental costs.

And I think when Trump campaigned that he was going to be a peacetime president, and that stuck around for a while into his current administration.

He was speaking to a large portion of the American public who's, you know, tired of war after the post-9/11 wars.

And you know, I think from where I was sitting, I was seeing that the kind of falsity of that kind of discourse from the beginning.

So for example, Somalia is a place that most Americans aren't aware that the US is involved.

But the airstrikes on this militant group, Al-Shabaab in Somalia have ramped up exponentially under the current Trump administration.

And that's something we just don't hear about at all.

There was an Air War in Yemen against the Houthis that the US was heavily involved in and spent a lot of money on, and that also we haven't heard about.

So I was tracking these kinds of very, you know, belligerent, aggressive military-first, you know, warlike approach to foreign policy that Trump has been, you know, that's been his MO since the beginning.

So I think, you know?

At least now, I think people can see what his administration is doing more clearly.

- The US is using debt to pay for this war.

This comes decades after the draft was eliminated.

So it seems like Americans have less and less tangible skin in the game, even if they face enormous long-term costs as you've outlined, what is your perspective on the use of debt to pay for these kind of military conflicts?

- It's such a good question.

Because again, this is something people aren't aware about, the extent of this.

We owe about $31 trillion in debt as a nation.

And a big part of that comes from the post-9/11 wars and the four tax cuts since 2001.

Basically before the post-9/11 era, the US budget was for a time balanced.

So around the beginning of the Iraq war, we had about $4 trillion in debt.

Now it's 31.

We pay 15% of the annual budget in interest payments on that debt.

And what happens is Linda Bilmes uses this phrase, these are credit card wars, then post-9/11 wars, and this war Iran are wars that don't touch Americans in part because we are passing the cost to future generations.

You know, and I'm a mom, I have kids.

And that is a terrifying thing.

I have to get into in front of college student, my college students and tell them, you know, "Our leaders have made a decision to saddle you with a tremendous amount of debt that's gonna affect all of the things that you care about."

Spending the federal budget on is gonna be squeezed because of the amount that this country has spent on war.

And that is an ongoing cost.

And those costs of the debt are just kind of growing exponentially.

So it's a scary thing.

- The federal government though can just print more money in deficit spend.

When did the chickens come home to roost from your perspective?

- Well, I'm not an expert in that sort of question.

But, you know, inflation is the kind of thing that it affects levels of social inequality.

So that's something that our research has shown is that the way that the US has chosen to finance the post-9/11 wars who we're borrowing from is not necessarily the American public.

The way it was in, for example, World War II when the US was selling war bonds.

And even later on in the Vietnam War and the Korean Wars, the government was really keen on getting people involved in understanding that the US was making a choice about how to spend dollars in war costs.

Now, the credit card wars means that people just aren't aware of what's going on.

And so, you know, I think that's a tremendous... That brings about a tremendous opacity in US.

You know, how Americans are able to hold their government accountable for decision-making.

- We've seen how in conflicts in Iran and Ukraine, drones have been used as leverage against more conventional, more expensive weapons systems.

What does that mean for the future of war and the cost of war?

- Well, it's a great point.

I think we've seen a really asymmetric warfare at this point.

So we're spending, you know, millions to take down drones that are produced very cheaply in Iran.

And it's been the same story with actually the Houthis militant group in Yemen.

They've produced very low cost weapons, and we're spending millions to take down each one of those.

So it's really, it's very asymmetric.

And what that means is that I think Iran has the capacity to keep producing those cheap drones.

And so, it doesn't end anytime soon.

It's not like we're gonna exhaust their stockpiles.

- Let's talk a little bit about the Cost of War Project at Brown University.

It began in 2011 after the 10-year anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan.

How did this get started and what was the rationale for the project?

- Yeah, it was founded by my two colleagues, Neta Crawford and Cathy Lutz, an anthropologist and a political scientist.

And they were seeing that it was 10 years in to the post-9/11 wars at that time.

And there was just not enough public conversation about the fact that the US was at war at all at the time, much less evaluating the costs of war.

And so they said, you know, let's bring an information into the public sphere and promote the kinds of big picture questions that need to be asked through the, you know, kind of bringing this research to the American public.

Things, questions like exactly what we started out talking about.

Like what actually keeps people safe and is it a war at that time?

Was it in Afghanistan that was protecting American people?

Was it war in Iraq or not?

And let's have a real conversation about the true toll up until this point.

And so that was the idea of starting it out.

And I think, you know, I think that mission is as important now as it ever was.

- When it comes to the true toll, how does the project get its information and how do you ensure the accuracy of that information?

- Each of our papers, we have about 70 scholars and other experts who have contributed work to our projects.

So these are people all around the country and even from different countries in the world.

And these are just top experts on whatever it is that they're looking at.

So I've mentioned Linda, there's also- Nita Crawford has done a lot of work on calculating both the dollar cost of the post-9/11 wars and the human toll.

And she is, you know, she's written books, she's an expert on figuring out state accountability for war making and she knows exactly the sources to use.

So for example, the post-9/11 war cost, she estimated back in 2021 that those had cost about $8 trillion, including some future cost obligations to some veterans through the veterans of the wars through 2050.

- And that more than 900,000 people had been killed through those wars?

- And more.

Thank you, yes.

More than 929,000 people.

And of course, that's actually just direct deaths.

People who have died from the weapons of war.

My own research, I've looked at what we call indirect deaths.

So these are the deaths from the reverberating effects.

Like the collapse of economies, the destruction of hospitals and healthcare systems.

When you take all that into account, the post-9/11 wars have led to the deaths of probably 4.5 million people and counting.

- You talked earlier about how politicians office often promise that wars will be fast and relatively painless.

There was some of that rhetoric around the time of the invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet they went on for many, many years.

What is your sense of how the post-9/11 wars changed America?

- Oh my goodness.

You can't even count the ways.

There have been... You know, think about things like the dramatic ramping up of surveillance.

The opera of surveillance in this country.

There have just so many government agencies involved in, you know, the very basic, you know, infringement on, you know, your privacy, my privacy as American citizens.

And the ramp up in police militarization, for example.

We have research that shows that, you know, military grade weapons have been transferred to police departments in the post-9/11 era in a hugely more intensified rate.

You know, police has always been militarized to a certain degree.

But the post-9/11 era really ramped that up.

And a lot of times, the effects of those sorts of things are gonna be felt most deeply for people of color, for the, you know, the communities that are suffering from, you know, police militarization to begin with.

We're seeing that play out right now in the US war on migrants who are bearing the brunt of a lot of the ramped up surveillance efforts and the ways that the law was used to prosecute domestic terrorists that's now being used against migrants.

We have a paper coming out on that today, actually.

- To follow up on that.

President Eisenhower warned long ago about the military industrial complex in terms of the massive military spending that the US engages in and the power of the defense lobby.

What does that mean for democracy in America?

- Oh, yeah.

It's really... I don't think people know enough about how our political system is completely shaped by how much money the Defense Department gives to these military contractors.

So of about a trillion dollar annual Pentagon budget.

Those companies, the bigs are manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

They're earning over half of that annually now.

And the military industrial complex is a big reason why we take this military style approach to foreign policy.

There are 900 some lobbyists for the weapons sector in Congress every year now.

That's almost twice as many as members of Congress.

So when we speak, when we do educational work on Capitol Hill, people tell us, you know, those lobbyists are in their offices almost every day.

There's a revolving door between the Pentagon and congressional offices.

There are increasingly Pentagon officials now being appointed to the kinds of think tanks that are advocating for a hawkish policy.

Even the cultural myths and ideas that we have as Americans about, for example, the, you know, war being good for the economy or good for jobs, all of those myths are kind of tied up with the role of political economy, of the money, of the weapons sector and how that influences political decision-making.

- If you say military spending in the US is wildly excessive, and if you say it's not necessarily the smartest use of the money for a safe country in a healthy economy, what is the alternative?

- You know, I think we're hearing a lot more about the ways that these dollars that are spent on.

The overspending on the military could be spent in other ways.

And I think we hear a lot of political leaders and journalists doing the kind of dollar for dollar equation.

One that really sticks out for me is in the amount of money that we've spent on just preparing for war with China, for example, 3.4 trillion.

We had a paper on that recently by Jennifer Kavanagh.

We could have paid for 80 years of free college education for all Americans, 80 years.

Like, it's astronomical these sums.

So I think that's precisely the point is to ask what could we be doing with these dollars instead?

And it really, the answer's gonna vary.

Some people are gonna say, you know, let's get our budget in in less out of the red.

Let's get it, let's be more fiscally responsible.

Let's use the money to pay off the deficit.

Right?

So you could have a good debate about how to use the money.

Were it not to be overspent on these military expenditures that, you know, arguably aren't keeping anyone safer.

- You mentioned China, which is seen as a rising power and there's more attention devoted to the possibility of a future military conflict between the US and China.

How do you expect that to influence the cost and posture the US military moving forward?

- Yeah, look, I think the idea of preparing for war with China has been a big justification for what I see as an overinflated Pentagon budget over these past years since President Obama's pivot to Asia in about 2012.

We've spent, as I said, 3.4 trillion.

And that includes things like, you know, building up bases and assets in the Asia Pacific region.

And all of the expenditures of projecting and preparing for what a war might look like when, you know, experts have shown that the actual threat of the China threat is definitely overinflated.

And it's the same kind of logics and justifications that we saw during the Cold War, for example, in terms of, you know?

It's really about identifying an enemy as a means to continue what is often I think, just a heavily militarized foreign policy.

So, you know, it seems like the Trump administration is even shifting away from the focus on China as a justification for high military spending.

The pivot is going to the western hemisphere and the, you know, and the focus on migrants.

And so we can track the way that the narratives change, right?

It was the post-9/11 wars and the threat was the terrorists.

Then it was China and Russia, a great power competition.

And now we're shifting again.

So the way that, the way that a lot of us see it who are experts on these things is that the narrative changes, but the money stays the same, if you know what I mean.

- Speaking of the money, in closing, Rhode Island has struggled to build a stronger economy for many decades.

But one, what might be considered a bright spot in the local economy is the defense sector, which is a reliable supplier of jobs.

If you are arguing that money could be spent better in better ways, what would you say to people who say the defense sector is a very important part of the Rhode Island economy?

- Yeah, I'm really glad you asked that.

So my colleague Heidi Peltier, who's an economist, she has come out with research over the years that shows that per dollar spent, the government could create far more jobs in other sectors of the economy like education and healthcare than in military spending.

And why is that?

That's because military spending is very capital intensive rather than labor intensive.

So here I'm talking about things like, you know, spending on equipment and kind of high tech spending as opposed to education or healthcare, which is very labor intensive, which, you know, the dollars are going into people's salaries.

So I think that myth that the military spending creates jobs.

When I say it's a myth, it's not that's not true at all.

Of course it creates some jobs.

It's just that it's not as an efficient job creator as we've all been led to believe.

And actually that there are, you know, societally beneficial ways that that money could be spent on and also create more jobs.

And arguably, education and healthcare, green energy are just a few examples.

- We've gotta leave it there.

Stephanie Savell, director of the Cost of War Project at Brown University, thank you so much for sitting down with me.

- Yeah, thank you for having me.

Appreciate it.

- Thanks for watching "One-on-One" with me, Ian Donnis.

You can find all of our past interviews on the YouTube channel for Ocean State Media.

We'll see you next week.

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