High cost of waging war
It’s strange that some politicians so concerned with out-of-control government spending have no qualms about paying for war.
We hear calls for more involvement of our troops and war planes in places like Syria, Iraq and Libya with no mention of the cost.
The current bombing campaign against ISIS, criticized as too weak by some presidential candidates, is costing an estimated $10 billion a year, according to Foreign Affairs magazine.
International Business Times reports that the F-22 Raptor, one of the planes used in the bombing raids, costs $68,000 per hour to operate, not including its weapons, such as Sidewinder missiles and small-diameter bombs, coming in at $600,000 and $250,000 each, respectively.
The Pentagon estimates the cost of a typical bombing air strike against ISIS at $2.5 million, but that’s just the cost of fuel and ordinance. Figure in the cost of selecting the targets, the training and salaries of the pilots and their support personnel and the aircraft carriers that get them into position and you’re talking about a lot more money than that.
“Congress has appropriated almost $800 billion for military operation in Afghanistan; $113 billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe,” wrote Matthieu Aikins March 7 in the New Yorker magazine.
We have spent a combined $1.6 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we wonder why there’s not enough money to address our crumbing roads, bridges and infrastructure.
The human price of war is incalculable; the other costs are not and should be weighed before charging into more foreign adventures.