The cost of the Iraq war is closing in on $500B according to this site.
How is this broken down? Is there a breakdown of the $500B number somewhere that details what the categories of spending are and how much is spent in those categories? My brief google effort turned up nothing, but I’m sure there is a search guru here who’ll find something within minutes.
I’m sorry that I don’t know how the cost is calculated.
I do wonder if they include miltary salaries, because they’d have to be paid in any case.
Still it was all about finding the WMDs and saving Iraqi lives, so what does money matter? :rolleyes:
I don’t know of anyone who has gone through each year of the war and added up the functional categories of spending; it’s not a difficult thing to do, I could show you how to do it online, it’d just take a few hours of work to get a fairly accurate picture of how the funds are being spent.
But in general, far and away the top costs are 1) operations & maintenance (things like buying fuel, electricity, repairing equipment, hiring contractors, etc) and some distance behind would be 2) procurement (buying weapons, ammunition, missiles, etc). Costs for personnel would probably be next on the list: those costs really only add up to big bucks when reservists are mobilized, because active duty military types get paid whether they’re in Iraq, Montana, or the moon (things like imminent danger pay notwithstanding).
Following way behind those items are things like the defense health program (medical services), assistance to the Iraqi armed forces, military construction (building bases and runways and stuff), various reconstruction funds (there are several different pots of reconstruction funds), and various other small cats and dogs.
In this huge PDF, if you look at pages 96 and 97, you’ll get a good idea of how the funds from 2007 and 2006 are being spent. Link. As I said before, I’m not aware of any aggregation like this that counts monies from 2002 to 2008, inclusive.
(addendum: the charts on those pages include war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. It isn’t precise, but that’ll give you a rough idea of how money is spent in sustained military operations, and then look at page 95 to get a sense of how much Afghanistan costs compared to Iraq. Hope that’s helpful.)
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/01/analysis_says_war_could_cost_1_trillion/
The cost of the war has to include health care costs for the soldiers who have been injured. there are some serious injuries that require long care expenses.