The financial legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq: How wartime spending decisions will constrain future U.S. national security budgets

Bilmes, Linda J.

doi:10.15355/epsj.9.1.5

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The prewar intelligence was "dead wrong," putting the blame on the intelligence community and politicization of the available information by a subset of policymakers (Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005). The United States would continue its involvement in the country for over a decade at an estimated cost between $4 and $6 trillion and thousands of casualties, numbers which underscore the dangers of over-confident "slam-dunk" assessments of ambiguous evidence (Bilmes, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing expert political judgment: The impact of training and practice on judgmental accuracy in geopolitical forecasting tournaments

2016

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The heuristics-and-biases research program highlights reasons for expecting people to be poor intuitive forecasters. This article tests the power of a cognitive-debiasing training module (“CHAMPS KNOW”) to improve probability judgments in a four-year series of geopolitical forecasting tournaments sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community. Although the training lasted less than one hour, it consistently improved accuracy (Brier scores) by 6 to 11% over the control condition. Cognitive ability and practice also made largely independent contributions to predictive accuracy. Given the brevity of the training tutorials and the heterogeneity of the problems posed, the observed effects are likely to be lower-bound estimates of what could be achieved by more intensive interventions. Future work should isolate which prongs of the multipronged CHAMPS KNOW training were most effective in improving judgment on which categories of problems.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing expert political judgment: The impact of training and practice on judgmental accuracy in geopolitical forecasting tournaments

2016

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“…If the costs are not adjusted for inflation, the budgetary expenditures for the Vietnam War are comparable to the expenditures in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and about two-fifths of the total budgetary costs of the post-9/11 wars. These financial cost estimates do not include the long-term increase in expenditures of the Department of Veteran Affairs and the Department of Defense (Bilmes, 2014), which arise due to influences such as likely long-term increases in military pay scales needed for recruitment for the war efforts and expanded medical insurance. The second column in Table 1 presents the military fatalities totals, which are almost identical for the two sets of estimates from governmental and non-governmental sources.…”

Section: Summary Of the Financial And Mortality Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mortality Cost Metric for the Costs of War

Viscusi

2019

Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy

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Estimates of the costs of war include the financial costs and the lives that are lost. Using estimates of the value of a statistical life and the value of a statistical injury, the health losses can be converted to a common monetary metric and added to the budgetary costs. Counting the monetary value of the direct war-related fatalities and injuries plays a relatively greater role for the Vietnam War than for the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. This article proposes an alternative war cost metric that also recognizes the lives that are also lost because economic resources are diverted to war efforts. All costs are converted to mortality costs using a measure of the mortality opportunity cost to the public of war-related expenditures. Recognition of these indirect mortality effects approximately triples the number of fatalities attributable to the post-9/11 wars. The relative role of these indirect mortality losses is less for the Vietnam War because of that war’s higher rate of fatalities compared to financial costs.

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“…The field of scholarship on Afghanistan in the post-9/11 era is vast. Scholarship addressing the US context is inter-disciplinary and has coalesced around several areas, which include the debates over the efficacy of the US strategy (Goodson, 2015; Hasnat, 2009; Hayworth, 2018; Miller, 2013; Roberts, 2009; Waldman, 2013), counterinsurgency (Cutler, 2017; Suhrke, 2015), state-building (Dodge, 2021; Swenson, 2017) and the efficacy of resource usage (Bilmes, 2014). Given the scale of the US presence, the US mission and the US policy in Afghanistan have been examined in various works.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Taliban 2.0 and US National Security Policy in Afghanistan

Snider

2022

Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs

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This article examines from the point of view of the US national security policy, the causes and contexts for the US exit from Afghanistan and the factors that will influence the US policy in Afghanistan in the coming decade. It reviews the logic behind post-9/11 US ‘grand strategy’ and the evolution of the US national security policy in this period, which included the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. It examines the evolution of the US deployment and factors which complicated the US strategic objectives in Afghanistan, including the persistent tension in the US national security objectives between counter-terrorism and nation-building objectives. It argues that the US faces limited palatable options regarding its post-withdrawal Afghanistan policy and that moving forward, policy will be constrained by a mix of situational and structural variables. These include US domestic politics, the Taliban regime itself (and its relationship with ISIS-K) and the region’s geopolitical winds, notably the strategic positions of Iran, Pakistan, China and to a lesser extent Russia.

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The financial legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq: How wartime spending decisions will constrain future U.S. national security budgets

Cited by 7 publications

References 9 publications

Developing expert political judgment: The impact of training and practice on judgmental accuracy in geopolitical forecasting tournaments

Developing expert political judgment: The impact of training and practice on judgmental accuracy in geopolitical forecasting tournaments

The Mortality Cost Metric for the Costs of War

Taliban 2.0 and US National Security Policy in Afghanistan

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