I was just wondering if there is any way to put a cost on how much it took to get Bin Laden?
I know there is no real good way, as it’d be like trying to estimate the cost of WWII or Vietnam, there’s too many variables, but there must be some way to put a rough estimate on the amount of money spent.
Just wondering if anyone has done this yet or any ideas on how to do it?
I don’t have an answer for you, but I think you’ll need to be more specific. Are you talking about the cost of this specific mission or the cost of all attempts to capture him since 9/11? Come to think of it, I know the general public hadn’t heard his name but IIRC the CIA was aware of who he was well before 9/11, but I don’t know that they were actively trying to catch him then.
If the end result of the raid was just one major attack not happening (which I’ll freely admit is something else that we will never really know for sure was accomplished), then it will have been worth it.
In my opinion, it’s not just the cost of the raid: it’s all the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, since they were supposed to be about finding Bin Laden. (Of course, Iraq was about Saddam Hussein and Afghanistan was about the Taliban, but I am going on how those wars were spun.)
Losing a helicopter was pretty expensive though.
I would say how much did the USA spend from the time AFTER the 9-11 attacks, so that would be as of 9-11-01 till he was shot dead.
I would include the war in Afghanistan, but not Iraq. In other words after 9-11, GW Bush asked the Taliban to surrender Bin Laden. If they had did this, then we wouldn’t have been in Afghanistan and thus from that point, what did it cost.
Obviously this is not going to be an easy thing to answer, nor will you ever have a definite answer. It’s like trying to put an estimate on the cost of the war in Vietnam. You can try but you get a rough general idea.
For this I was thinking of direct cost, not indirect. For instance, how much we pay the armed forces is a direct cost only if we had to increase troop strength. I would not consider indirect costs, like if someone got killed, you wouldn’t take the earning potential of the person that won’t be realized.
As I said, it’s beyond me to even try to put an estimate on it, but I thought it would be an interesting idea.
Basically it comes down to what did the “Hunt for Bin Laden” cost. It’s doubtful there’s ever been a more expensive hunt for a single man.
So I’d just like to get some ideas from people. They won’t be right or wrong as there is no “real” way to qualify such cost, but it’d be fun for a reasonable estimate.
It’s certainly how those wars were spun (to the american public) but with the scale of the 9/11 attacks I doubt anyone would have been satisfied with just the capture or death of BL.
IMO there would have been at least 1 M.E. campaign to attack terrorist “safe havens”. And I’m not saying that as a blast against america: any country with a sufficient military would probably have done the same.
This is an interesting article that just came out on Yahoo News:
Secret Stealth Helicopters -100 million dollars
Advanced Bullet Proof Vests - 5 million dollars
Years of Advanced Training - 50 million dollars
Bin Laden shot by Navy Seals - priceless
He was definitely on the edges of the public consciousness and in the media since 1998, following the African embassy bombings.
ETA: assuming he was put on the Most Wanted list in '98, do they update it with further nasties or just leave the original charge?
The only reason that many people did not know his name prior to the WTC/Pentagon attacks was a general lack of interest in the world situation on the part of many people.
bin Laden was named as a specific target after the attacks on the USS Cole and the African embassies during the Clinton administration. Even before that, people who actually read their news, (beyond the sports page), even in general daily newspapers should have seen numerous references to him throughout the 1990s. (Folks who get all their news from television were less likely to know of him.) He never made any attempt to be a “behind the scenes” terrorist, openly calling for Muslims to reject and resist “the West” from the time he first came home from Afghanistan following the defeat of the Soviets, there.
According to the Congressional Research Service, about $444 billion has been spent in Afghanistan so far.
The article below suggests that he has cost about 3 trillion dollars, although all that wouldn’t have been spent on “getting” him.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/the-cost-of-bin-laden-3-trillion-over-15-years-20110505
While that is clearly an article about the economic fallout of the war on terror, it’s funny how it makes no mention whatsoever of the cited reasons for going to war or what are supposed to be the benefits. It doesn’t even use the word “taliban”.
And the tone is as though WWII would have been a big-ass waste of time if all we’d done was help save the world from a genocidal maniac. But fortunately, our economy got a boost 
It also made me smile the benefits of the civil war: the end of slavery and…standardized shoe sizes.