My goodness, this is just depressing. What the hell have we done to ourselves in the name of security? What a disaster.
And that’s just direct costs...the peripheral costs run that number up much higher:
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According to an annual report from the Costs of War project at Brown University's Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, the total cost of the war on terror will reach roughly $5.9 trillion through fiscal year 2019.
This is far higher than the Pentagon's official calculation of $1.5 trillion because it goes beyond Defense Department appropriations and includes the cost of "spending across the federal government that is a consequence of these wars."
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Let’s face it...the WOT has been a miserable failure from start to finish. The only bright spot was getting Bin Laden. Everything else has been a failure.
More depressing news:
Quote:
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Nearly two decades later, America is conducting counterterror operations in 76 countries and US troops are fighting and dying everywhere from Afghanistan to Niger. At this point, it's not clear what victory would even mean in the context of this broad conflict, which the US public seems to pay less and less attention to.
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We’ve expanded the WOT so far and wide that we all know the strategy is a complete mess. No one can clearly articulate a strategy. I still don’t know why 4 troops were killed in Niger!! For what? Why are we in Niger anyway? Lindsey Graham said that he didn’t even know our troops were even in Niger!
The Pentagon has run amok. They are seemingly accountable or beholden to no one or no entity. The Presidents going back to Ike have been powerless to rein them in. Moreover, public support continues to almost ALWAYS be on the side of the generals no matter how incompetent they might be.
So we’ve expanded the WOT to the planet Saturn, stupidly moved NATO to the Russian border, and taken on responsibility to protect Israel and the Gulf States from Iran...and Japan, Taiwan and Korea from China. And of course we have a president that floats the idea of a Venezuela intervention because he thinks we aren’t in enough s***! Sound like a smart idea to any of you? It sounds suicidal to me.
Sorry if this hurts feelings (actually, I’m not sorry), but the United States is now the rogue nation that the rest of the world rolls their eyes at. You can talk about Iran or North Korea all you want, but we’ve become just as roguish as those states. In fact, we’re more out of control.
https://amp.businessinsider.com/the-...illion-2018-11
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