Posted on 08/31/2005 5:13:38 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
The monthly cost to the US of the war in Iraq is now greater than the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War, a report by two anti-war groups says. The report put costs in Iraq at $500m (£278m) a month more than in Vietnam, adjusted for inflation.
This makes Iraq the most expensive US war in the past 60 years, they say.
But an analyst from the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) said the cost was small in the context of the whole US economy.
The report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), called The Iraq Quagmire, calculates the cost of current military operations in Iraq at $5.6bn (£3.1m) every month.
By comparison, the eight-year campaign in Vietnam cost on average $5.1bn (£2.8m) a month.
'Poor preparation'
The IPS and FPIF say this is partly down to differences in the way modern war is waged.
Although there are fewer troops in Iraq than Vietnam, they are paid more and weapons are more expensive, the report says.
"Broken down per person in the US, the cost so far is $277 per person, making the Iraq War the most expensive military effort in the past 60 years," it concludes.
Co-author Erik Leaver told the BBC costs in Iraq had spiralled since 2003 because the US had not been well-prepared.
"We have deployed now roughly one million troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the numbers just keep going up and up," he said.
"We are going to continue to see costs not only from the fighting now but also from the health care of these soldiers and veterans when they come home."
'Drop in the bucket'
However Thomas Donnelly, a defence expert with the AEI, believes the eventual result of the Iraq war is more important than its cost in dollars.
"The more valued criticism is whether the Bush administration is winning the war and prosecuting it in a successful way," he said.
"So what price victory? I would say that $5bn a month is certainly something I would be willing to pay."
Mr Donnelly said the relative cost of operations in Iraq, at 2% of America's annual GDP, was less than either the Vietnam conflict at 12% or World War II at 40%.
"Although the costs of war have grown... the American economy is exponentially larger than it was in the Vietnam War years," Mr Donnelly said.
"When it [the Iraq war] is compared to the overall size of the American economy, it's really a drop in the bucket, certainly by historical standards."
Costs money not to use soldiers as cannon fodder.
Our smaller force is better equipped, better compensated, and better protected by several orders of magnitude.
Well, 'spose we can let the Muslims kill the infidels for free. We probably could have saved every penney by frying the whole Middle East. Whatchgoinado?
These anti-war whiners know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
I REALLY wonder when FR will get off of this "Let's just nuke the Middle East" kick.
Be real people. It isn't going to happen unless we get hit first. Sad but true.
And even then some folks will demand that we don't.
Well World War II did cost the United Kingdom a lot of money. Perhaps after the fall of France they should have cut their losses and signed an armistice with the Austrian corporal.
And they would be wrong.
Exactly. How many soldiers had we lost in Vietnam in this same time frame? I'd rather see a $27,000 JDAM used than one soldier die.
Liberals really think they can fool us into thinking they're concerned about money... after their 40 year shopping spree in the "War on Poverty"?
It's hard to imagine another scenario in which they would be used.
There is no comparison.
Notice that the casualty rate is not mentioned.
Now that it's below the peacetime accident rate,
and being in Iraq is safer than having a domestic
assignment, ...
... the Beeb is signalling the DNC that now is the
time to switch to talking about the money.
The "real" cost, of course, is the delta over what
is routinely costs to have the troops on the payroll.
That delta is paying handsome rewards by focusing the
cutthroat cultist activity where they do the least
damage to the US. It's almost too bad the DOD is
avoiding "body counts". The jihadis are getting their
butts kicked.
I guess they would have also approved the old Russian style of fighting. Give one solider a gun and tell the other one to get one from a wounded comrade.
Call of Duty? ;-)
The left will forever compare every single military conflict the U.S. gets involved with to Vietnam (unless there's a Democratic President of course).
The opening scene of "Enemy at the Gates" showed this practice.
How many American lives would have been lost if we'd been forced to launch ground assaults on those strongholds we've been bombing up in northwestern Iraq over the past week? There were at least one hundred twenty terrorists in those buildings, so even a twenty-to-one ratio in our favor would have resulted in the deaths of six American soldiers or marines.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.