The cost of America’s 25-year War on Terror: Closing in on $10 trillion

The Brown University Costs of War project just released updated figures putting total spending on the post-9/11 wars at $8.08 trillion through fiscal year 2023, with projections hitting nearly $10 trillion when you factor in Veterans Affairs care obligations stretching into the 2050s. That's not an estimate of combat operations alone—it includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and drone operations globally, plus the Pentagon's ongoing medical and disability commitments to veterans. For scale: the entire Apollo program, adjusted for inflation, cost roughly $280 billion. America has now spent something closer to 36 Apollo programs on 25 years of Middle Eastern counterinsurgency.

The beneficiaries of this spending are visible and specific. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics secured guaranteed contracts worth hundreds of billions. Veterans' healthcare systems expanded significantly. But the distribution was uneven—soldiers themselves saw median enlistment bonuses of $8,000 to $15,000 during peak recruiting years, while the same dollars flowing toward contractors were often measured in the low millions per project. The geographic footprint matters too: defense spending concentrated in Texas, California, Connecticut, and Virginia, meaning the economic stimulus wasn't distributed equally across the country, even as recruitment pulled young men and women from economically depressed rural areas nationwide.

The conservative argument here is straightforward and has genuine force: the money was borrowed. The U.S. ran budget deficits in every single year of these wars except 2000. Economists across the spectrum now point to post-2001 deficit spending as a contributing factor to current inflation and the national debt climbing above $33 trillion. That's not a hypothetical—it's arithmetic. A voter in Ohio paying 8% interest rates on a mortgage or credit card can draw a direct line between Treasury borrowing for Afghanistan reconstruction and their monthly payments. Meanwhile, the initial stated objectives—eliminating al-Qaeda's core leadership, preventing another 9/11-scale attack—were largely achieved by 2011. Everything after that was nation-building and preventing bad outcomes nobody had clean authority to prevent, funded with borrowed money while domestic infrastructure crumbled.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars specifically offer the closest historical parallel: like Vietnam, they consumed enormous national resources, reshaped military doctrine toward counterinsurgency that proved costly and marginal, and ultimately ended in retreat. But this war was more expensive and longer than Vietnam in real terms. The difference is Vietnam at least came with a direct Cold War strategic rationale, however debatable. The post-2011 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had no discrete objective—just indefinite commitment to prevent collapse in states most Americans couldn't locate on a map.

Watch the 2024 budget and defense appropriations fights in Congress. The Pentagon is already requesting $850 billion for fiscal 2025, with significant portions still earmarked for Middle Eastern operations and base maintenance in Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE. Any serious conversation about deficit reduction has to reckon with whether that level of ongoing spending is sustainable or justifiable, especially as domestic concerns—crumbling bridges, opioid epidemic, border security—compete for the same dollars. The Costs of War project will release updated veterans' healthcare projections in late 2024, which will force the number higher still.