Vital Interests: Catherine, thanks for participating in the Vital Interests forum. You are a professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University and the Co-Director of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Costs of War Project. The project was initiated to bring together scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and other authorities to research and facilitate debate on the real costs of the post-9/11 wars. How did the project start? 

Catherine Lutz: We began in 2010, with the sense that the 10th anniversary was coming up in 2011 and that the stories that we'd been seeing in the press up to that point were quite inadequate to the task of understanding what the wars have wrought. We saw that a lot of the news stories were pretty thin. They often focused, or overwhelmingly focused, on the fate of U.S. veterans of those wars, as well as the strategic ups and downs of U.S. military activities and their successes or failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What they missed was the larger sense of who the war really affected, which is the civilians on the ground in those countries. What they missed was a more critical view of what the costs of that war were in budgetary terms. They were accepting official numbers of the Overseas Contingency Operation budget, which were not in any way a full accounting of where dollars were flowing in paying for the war.

We had a sense that, if those 10th anniversary assessments were to do anything, they needed a better set of data from people who were on the ground in those countries or had a better sense of where, for example, the U.S. federal budget had been going over the last 10 years. Again, we found a number of very surprising things. Our material was picked up very extensively by journalists - then and in the 10 years since.

VI: To be able to grasp the true costs of these wars you depended on sources from within the U.S. American government or outside groups that monitored Department of Defense funding. However, when it comes to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and for many other global counter-terrorism operations, there are CIA (Central Intelligencee Agency), NSA (National Security Agency), and other entities involved. How are the costs for the non-DOD activities accounted for?

Catherine Lutz: The problem of transparency is huge, and it's gotten more difficult, not less difficult, over time, to get a sense of where all of those other places in the budget are, where the monies go. The CIA budget has been very opaque, but finding these other places like Homeland Security, like Veterans Affairs, NSA, there are ways. We looked not only at those other places but also other locations in the DOD budget. Increases to the base defense budget were very dramatic year-by-year from 2001 on, beyond what would have been expected by the trend lines and other prognostications. We were able to assess that as well.

VI: The map on The Costs of War Project website titled “Where We Fight” is very informative and rather startling (WHERE WE FIGHT). The United States has bases of operations in 80 countries on six continents in the world. Do these numbers account for large air and naval bases, small outposts, and drone installations covering the gamut of where the United States is operating militarily?

Catherine Lutz: No, that map only includes US counter-terror activities, whether that's ground troops, drone activity, training and assistance, or military exercises focused on building counter-terror capacity. As you say, even though it does not include all US military basing or activities, it still represents a startling number of locations for US military activity.

VI: What are the costs, military or otherwise, related to the Global War on Terror? 

Catherine Lutz: $6.4 trillion is our latest estimate, which includes spending to date, as well as obligated spending. The obligated spending is mainly in the area of future veterans’ care. Now, that's a huge item. It’s size is due to the fact that there are so many veterans of the post-9/11 wars at this point, 20 years later. There are so many people who've been in one of those war zones, and so many people who have been grievously injured - and survived in ways that veterans of previous wars did not, given the advances in our ability to rescue and sustain wounded people.

That $6.4 trillion doesn't include the interest on the debt. As the war was mainly paid for with borrowed money, the interest to date is getting close to a trillion dollars paid each year. There will be trillions more that come due as we go forward into the 20s, 30s and possibly beyond.

VI: Let's look at where this money is coming from. You’ve shown that defense spending is now fifty percent of all discretionary spending - more than education, transportation, and healthcare combined. Basically half of all government spending other than Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security is coming out of these funds. Is this level of defense spending bankrupting all other government programs?

Catherine Lutz: Exactly. Actually, if you look at military spending in all corners of the federal budget, the discretionary budget, if you include for example, not just DOD, but Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons programming in the Department of Energy, interest on war debt and so on, you get to something closer to two thirds to three quarters of the discretionary budget. Yes, that squeezes out everything else - transportation, the Food and Drug Administration, environmental protection, planning for pandemics. Every other public good and public function that you can think of is forced to share what's left.

VI: And is this huge spending locked in? Is there no way out of this? It doesn't seem like any administration, whether it's this one or a  Democratic one, can confront the interests that perpetuate such large military budgets.

Catherine Lutz: There was recently a very unusual, extremely unusual, amendment proposed to the National Defense Bill that called for a 10% reduction in the Pentagon budget. This 10% would have only taken us back to the level of spending that the Defense Department had two years ago. In other words, it was not asking for some kind of draconian cut, just a return to the unconscionably high level of spending of just two years ago before theTrump administration pushed forward an even larger military budget. 

This amendment got a surprising amount of support.  It failed, but I think that is the wave of the future. It's the attempt to get the federal budget to reflect the will of the American people. I just saw some very recent data on the attitude of the public towards America's endless wars, and it's not positive. Among Democrats in particular, an overwhelming majority believe that military spending should be cut and that the forever wars need to be ended. The people are waiting for their representatives to follow them on that.

VI: Do you think the public understands the level and allocation of these military costs?  There was some media coverage of the recent debate to redefine the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that authorized the Global War on Terror. But we also hear of funds allocated to a new space force, next generation missiles, nuclear capabilities, warships, and aircraft. These programs are announced with great fanfare but there is rarely a price tag attached.

Catherine Lutz: It's harder and harder to tell which dollars are going in which direction because of the lack of transparency and the attempt, particularly under sequestration over the last number of years, for the Defense Department to try to pack additional spending into the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget, which was free from those restrictions on spending increases.

We've had some sleight of hand with that spending for a number of years. It is very hard to tell how much goes there. We do know that military contractors, providing services and weapons to the Defense Department, continue to get the levels of contracting that they've been getting and more. They are the most powerful force working not only against our ability to spend on other human needs, but also our ability to understand where all the money is going.

VI: I was looking at the recent article by one of your colleagues, Heidi Peltier, on the growth of the "camo economy” - her term for the commercialization of post-9/11 wars. We have vague notions about privatized military forces like Blackwater. But, in fact, Heidi says it is much broader and bigger than that which is why “privatization” is a wrong term, but rather that it is more the “commercialization” of all military related operations?

Catherine Lutz: That is correct. All of those people involved with commercial ventures connected to the military have a lot at stake in continuing the wars, continuing the level of spending. The spend on personnel and operations has not been the biggest part of the billions flowing to private contracting companies --  rather its been for weapons development and technology. 

VI:The United States is not only developing new and more lethal weapons for itself, it is also the world’s largest arms exporter, accounting now for an estimated 34 percent of all global arms sales. The Trump administration characterizes this “business” as great for America. How does this militarization of the U.S. economy impact how Americans think of war? 

Catherine Lutz: These arms sales are very attractive to Donald Trump who, as commander-in-chief, has actually been the transactor-in-chief. To him, the Defense Department is a device for spectacle, for projecting power, or at least the  appearance of power, and for making money. His unhappiness with the nation’s traditional alliances, his insistence that the US is being “cheated” out of money owed to it for its military deployments is an indication that he does not understand the decades of economically advantageous relationships that have been established with countries around the world where we have foreign bases.  He looks only at the immediate dollar signs. 

The arms deals have an immediate transactional visibility that these other arrangements do not.  They are also, under his watch, completely morality-free, ethics-free, and often free of the legal constraints that have been built up over the years to try and  have at least some consideration for human rights and democracy when it comes to where weapons are allowed to flow from the U.S. I think that's really a point where the public, again, according to this recent survey, has a much stronger anti-weapons trade perspective than is  reflected in our leadership - whether the Congress or Executive branch.

VI: There’s the huge financial costs of the military budget that cripples the American government’s ability to prioritize infrastructure, education, healthcare, and other essential public goods. There are also tragic human costs associated with the wars the U.S. has been engaged in over the past decades.  What are the human costs to both U.S. military personnel and civilians? 

Catherine Lutz: The U.S. military has lost just over 7,000 uniformed service members in all the war zones. That number is just 1% of the total of those who've died in these wars. That larger death toll is close to 800,000, as a very conservative estimate, when you add everyone - the soldiers, the civilians, the contractors, the local police , the journalists, media workers, humanitarians, NGO workers. We've counted them all as far as we are able. That number is, again, startling: 800,000.

Another cost that the experts in the public health aspects of  war who have collaborated on the project point to are what are termed indirect deaths. Those other deaths are not deaths by bombs and bullets but deaths as a result of the wars’ destruction of healthcare and basic public health infrastructure like sewage treatment, the electric grid and clean water in places under bombardment. These deaths result as well when people have to flee and live on the road or live in camps that are not sanitary or safe. We have increased morbidity and mortality for those reasons. 

One has to multiply that direct death number of 800,000 by an estimated two to four times to get to the total number of people -- in the millions -- who are dead today who would not have been dead had the wars not been fought.

I think that's a number and an idea that people are not often very familiar with. They think of war as beginning and ending with and being constituted by the fighting.

VI: The number of internally displaced persons and refugees resulting from the Global War on Terror has got to be quite substantial. What has your research found?

Catherine Lutz: We have actually just released a study on the latest estimate of the number of people displaced as a result of America’s Global War on Terror - approximately 37 million people have been forcibly displaced in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria. That's a very conservative estimate. Displacement_Vine et al_Costs of War 2020 09 08

VI: When you try to evaluate the actual destruction these wars have caused in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries - to habitat, electrical grids, safe water, and other basics for sustainable living, who pays the costs for reconstruction? 

Catherine Lutz:  Refugees are one issue - there's an international UN and NGO-based apparatus for dealing with refugees through the whole post-World War II period and with laws that codify how they are to be treated, and so on. Reconstruction on the other hand is a whole other question of what happens to places that have been physically decimated by military operations. Unfortunately the answer is that it depends on the kindness of strangers or the strategic interests of strangers, and there the United States and other wealthy countries have been quite remiss in terms of taking responsibility for any of the rebuilding.

There are tremendous needs in these combat zones for everything - the electrical system in Iraq is still not back to pre-war levels, the bombed sewer system in Basra has not been repaired. The list of needs is endless and the available resources sparse. One of the studies done for the project had to do with the reconstruction spending in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. and others like Japan and European countries. Just examining the U.S. spending, which has been done very carefully by inspectors generals for both countries, it appears to be a large number, but it is dwarfed by the need. In addition, that money -- what's called "reconstruction money"-- has often gone to build prisons, pay for police training and equipment, and other things to build up the security sector in those countries. These distorted priorities that we have just been talking about as a problem in the United States have been exported to Iraq and Afghanistan, accelerating the process of militarization there. Reconstruction is often a misnomer -- to look for a number that's a true reconstruction number, you have to break them down to see what has really gone towards remaking societies destroyed by war.

VI: How do you achieve better oversight over defense spending? A fundamental tenet of the United States was civilian control over the military. Has this divide melted away as key positions such as Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Army are filled with former military officers rather than civilian leaders?

Catherine Lutz: It's a system that's developed, at this point, over 100 years in a strict sense of the term, and in the looser sense of the term since the nation's founding. I think that violence and a war response has been seen as at the core of American identity and of how the US deals with problems. I think it's not new, but it certainly hasn't helped to have had 20 years in which trillions of dollars have been flowing to military companies and war wages going to individuals, to families who depend on a wage earner.

Again, it's not the personnel who are the main problem -- most would still have a job if they were not deployed to war. They'd have a job either in the civilian sector that would be hiring at higher rates because there'd be money available, or they'd be in a peacetime, defensive force.

VI: Is there a division now in our society caused by having a professional military, by no longer having a draft? There is a certain segment of the population who are involved in military life and operations, there are military families which bear the burden of deployments and personnel coming back with injuries and issues that have to be dealt with over many years.

Catherine Lutz: I think that it's a problem when the citizenry, whether they're in the military or not, don't understand the full cost of war. I think some people in the military don't either because they haven't been deployed and they are dealing with a simulated sense of what war is about, or because they don't experience it from the perspective of all of the people involved, they're on the relatively safer end of the gun.

I think it's not just that the military understands war and civilians don't, but I think it certainly helps. There have been some pretty remarkable anti-war statements that have come out from the military itself for military moderation, for non-interventionist perspectives on what the military should be about. In part, I think because they do often understand what it looks like, while civilians in the United States often get an extremely sanitized version of, or a Hollywood version of it.

It is very dangerous when people lobby for or celebrate war when they don't understand how often it not only kills innocents but how often it doesn't accomplish the ends it claims to accomplish, and, in fact, makes things worse for their own security.

VI: There has to be some serious thinking about how you demilitarize a society. If the United States is built on militaristic traditions and there is this financial incentive to engage in arms development and preparations for war, does there need to be a consciousness-raising movement that can change this mindset?

Catherine Lutz: I think people's consciousness is already raised much higher, as I mentioned, than their representatives. The problem is not so much the cultural one of, how do you change minds- although I'm very keen to do the kind of work that we're doing, so as to have more adequate information out there and a more informed populace.

I think the real problem is a lack of democracy, that we have a political system in which Lockheed Martin, which over the last 20 years has gotten literally trillions of dollars for all of its DOD work, and the people who they contribute to and lobby and go to parties with in Washington, are making decisions in which their interests take precedence over a more rational national security policy. I think a more free and fair election system would be the first step to demilitarizing.

VI: We are not likely going to see any reform come from the top down, so will it take a grassroots effort like what happened in the Cold War era when people were building bomb shelters and contemplating nuclear Armageddon and a citizen’s movement of anti-nuke activists actually got arms limitation and nuclear non-proliferation treaties passed? Do you see that kind of scenario?

Catherine Lutz: Yes, absolutely. That's where these public attitudes about the war on terror have changed year-by-year, in part through that kind of organizing and just people's own experience of seeing their family members go off to war and multiple deployments and not understanding what's being accomplished except damage to their young people.

VI: There haven't been any other 9/11 types of attacks on the homeland that the Global War on Terror was originally undertaken to prevent. That memory is now almost 20 years old. A lot of money went into the creation of an extensive domestic national security operation - the Department of Homeland Security, NSA, and other intelligence entities. How did this contribute to the militarization of our society?

Catherine Lutz: Yes, and what is under-recognized is that the techniques and the equipment and the surveillance, and so on, that Homeland Security engages in, has really expanded the reach of a military mindset into a domestic context where it had been relatively absent.

VI:This spring and summer during social unrest throughout the country, police forces responded with military vehicles and weapons to suppress domestic populations. In the coming years, if there aren't any major terrorist attacks, do you think there is a chance that the Global War on Terror will be rolled back, that the AUMF will be reconsidered?

Catherine Lutz: The idea of repeal has been brought up year after year, and each year it gets more support. I think yes, that will happen, because, more generally, that's the issue of  an unbridled executive. After Trump, I think that his misuse of the executive and his authoritarian tendencies in all domains, not just the defense domain, has made people much more aware of the risks and dangers of that abuse of power. Hopefully that will spill over to and incentivize a much more robust take-back of the power to declare war to Congress, which is what exactly makes it less likely, and that's why the Framers wanted it to be in the hands of Congress not the President, knowing that to get all of those hundreds of people to agree to go to war was going to be more difficult.

VI: Do you think it will mean that the U.S. bases in 80 countries on six continents will come under more scrutiny and the United States might have a different engagement with the world other than being the largest exporter of arms and  proponent of military intervention?

Catherine Lutz: That's the hope, but each of those elements is quite different and has a different systemic context and a different carry-on imperative. There are a number of large for-profit companies making a tremendous amount of money doing this, and it seems a relatively cost-free, profitable route to take in international affairs, compared to sending U.S. troops to an intervention somewhere in Asia or the Middle East. I think there are some parts of this that are going to be easier to roll back, and others that are going to be more difficult.

VI: We are coming to the end of our time. Thank you for this informative conversation about the difficult and often hidden consequences of the wars the U.S. have been engaged in for nearly 20 years. There is some hope that the future will be different and we can look at American military operations in a different light, understanding the true costs of war and the need for meaningful civilian control.

Catherine Lutz: I think there's a progressive movement that’s come out of not just seeing these wars and their damages in the U.S. domestic context, but seeing their failures, wondering what they've accomplished. We now can see all of the other consequences, the indirect consequences on the homefront, of being a nation that's focused so much on war, resulting in so much racial and economic inequality, inequalities that we need to urgently address.

All of those things have helped produce the progressive movement that will, let’s hope, bring in a new administration and a more progressive Congress ready to have a real reorientation of national priorities.

Catherine Lutz is Research Professor at the Watson Institute and Thomas J. Watson Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies Emerita at Brown University. She is the author of a number of widely read books, including Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century, Unnatural Emotions, and Reading National Geographic, and editor of The Empire of Bases and other work on security and militarization, gender violence, emotions, photography, education, and transportation.  She co-founded and directs the Costs of War Project at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.  She has also consulted with the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations on sexual exploitation and abuse among peacekeepers and with the government of Guam on the U.S. military’s contamination of the island. She is past president of the American Ethnological Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Radcliffe Fellow.