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?