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This month
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the addition of some
1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers
to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health staff in attempt to get a
handle on the epidemic of suicides among combat veterans. Unfortunately, when
presidents misuse our military on an unprecedented scale – and Congress
lets them get away with it – the resulting stress causes military
suicides to increase dramatically, both among active duty and retired service
members. In fact, military deaths from suicide far outnumber combat deaths.
According to an article in the Air Force Times this month, suicides among
airmen are up 40 percent over last year.
Considering
the multiple deployments service members are forced to endure as the war in
Afghanistan stretches into its second decade, these figures are sadly
unsurprising.
Ironically,
the same VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was forced to retire from the Army by
President Bush for daring to suggest that an invasion and occupation of Iraq
would not be the cakewalk that neoconservatives promised. Then Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who is not a military veteran, claimed
that General Shinseki was "wildly off the mark" for suggesting that
several hundred thousand soldiers would be required to secure post-invasion
Iraq. Now we see who was right on the costs of war.
In
addition to the hidden human costs of our seemingly endless wars are the
economic costs. In 2008, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The
True Cost of the Iraq Conflict." Stiglitz
illustrates that taking into account the total costs of the war, including
replacing military equipment and caring for thousands of wounded veterans for
the rest of their lives, the Iraq war will cost us orders of magnitude
greater than the 50 billion dollars promised by the White House before the
invasion. Add all the costs of Afghanistan into the mix, wrote Stiglitz, and the bill tops $7 trillion.
Is it any
wonder why our infrastructure at home crumbles, healthcare is more expensive
and harder to come by, and unemployment together
with inflation continue their steady rise? Imagine the productive power of that seven trillion dollars in our private sector. What could
it have done were it in private hands; what may have been discovered, what
diseases might have been cured, what might have been built, how many
productive jobs created?
With the
bills coming due for our decade of reckless military action, the cuts rarely
come from the well-connected military industrial complex with their lobbyists
and powerful political allies. In President Obama's 2013 budget, troop
strength is to be cut significantly while enormously expensive and largely
superfluous weapons systems emerge essentially unscathed. As defense analyst
Winslow Wheeler wrote this month, costs of the "next generation"
fighter, the F-35, will increase by another $289 million. This despite the
fact that the fighter is badly designed and already outdated, a "virtual
flying piano" writes Wheeler.
The
military contractors building monstrosities like the F-35 are politically
connected and thus protected. Unfortunately, returning military veterans are
less so. In the same 2013 budget, the White House proposes to increase
medical and pharmaceutical costs paid by veterans while reducing their cost
of living increases. And how many years of increasingly alarming mental
illness and suicide statistics has it taken for the modest increase in
resources to be made available?
Those who
predicted the real costs of our decade of global military conquest were
ridiculed, scoffed at, and fired. History has now shown us that much of what
they warned was correct. America is clearly less secure after a decade of
unnecessary wars. It is more vulnerable and closer to economic collapse. Its
military is nearly broken from years of abuse. Will we come back to our senses?
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