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Costs of the 20-year war on terror: $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths

A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University revealed that 20 years of post-9/11 wars have cost the U.S. an estimated $8 trillion and have killed more than 900,000 people.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Nearly 20 years after the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan, the cost of its global war on terror stands at $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths, according to a new report from the Costs of War project at Brown University.

The Costs of War project, founded more than a decade ago at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and co-directed by two Brown scholars, released its influential annual report ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, the impetus for an ongoing American effort to root out terrorism in the Middle East and beyond.

Stephanie Savell, Catherine Lutz and Neta CrawfordThe Costs of War project is co-directed by Stephanie Savell (left), Catherine Lutz (center) and Neta Crawford (right).

“The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful... and the war continues in over 80 countries,” said Catherine Lutz, co-director of Costs of War and a professor of international and public affairs at Brown, during a virtual event hosted by the Watson Institute on Wednesday, Sept. 1. “The Pentagon and the U.S. military have now absorbed the great majority of the federal discretionary budget, and most people don’t know that. Our task, now and in future years, is to educate the public on the ways in which we fund those wars and the scale of that funding.”

The research team’s $8 trillion estimate accounts for all direct costs of the country’s post-9/11 wars, including Department of Defense Overseas Contingency Operations funding; State Department war expenditures and counterterror war-related costs, including war-related increases to the Pentagon’s base budget; care for veterans to date and in the future; Department of Homeland Security spending; and interest payments on borrowing for these wars. The total includes funds that the Biden administration requested in May 2021.

The death toll, standing at an estimated 897,000 to 929,000, includes U.S. military members, allied fighters, opposition fighters, civilians, journalists and humanitarian aid workers who were killed as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets or fire. It does not, the researchers noted, include the many indirect deaths the war on terror has caused by way of disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.

“The deaths we tallied are likely a vast undercount of the true toll these wars have taken on human life,” said Neta Crawford, a co-founder of the project and a professor of political science at Boston University. “It’s critical we properly account for the vast and varied consequences of the many U.S. wars and counterterror operations since 9/11, as we pause and reflect on all of the lives lost.”

“ Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — long after U.S. forces are gone. ”

Stephanie Savell Co-director, Costs of War project

The report comes at the end of a contentious U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, where Taliban insurgents captured every major city and seized governmental control as American military units worked to extract 123,000 troops, diplomats and allies. Of the $8 trillion, $2.3 trillion is attributed to the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone, according to the report.

In an address to the nation on Tuesday, Aug. 31, President Joe Biden cited Costs of War estimates to convey the financial and human burden of the 20-year war in Afghanistan as he defended his decision to withdraw from the country.

“We no longer had a clear purpose in an open-ended mission in Afghanistan,” Biden said. “After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan, costs that Brown University researchers estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years — yes, the American people should hear this... what have we lost as a consequence, in terms of opportunities? ...I refuse to send America’s sons and daughters to fight a war that should have ended long ago.”

Even as the U.S. exits Afghanistan, Costs of War estimates show that Americans are far from done paying the bill on the war on terror, which continues across multiple continents. The cumulative cost of military intervention in the Iraq/Syria war zone has risen to $2.1 trillion since 9/11, and about $355 billion more has funded military presence in other countries, including Somalia and a handful of African countries.

And when the wars do end, the costs of war will continue to rise, the report notes: A towering $2.2 trillion of the estimated financial total accounts for future care that has already been set aside for military veterans, the researchers said, and the U.S. and other countries could pay the cost of environmental damage wrought by the wars for generations to come.

“What have we truly accomplished in 20 years of post-9/11 wars and at what price?” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project and a senior research associate at the Watson Institute. “Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — long after U.S. forces are gone.”

The Watson Institute’s virtual event included commentary from multiple researchers associated with the Costs of War Project, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and U.S. Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., David Cicilline, D-R.I., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif. It was moderated by Murtaza Hussain, a national security reporter at the Intercept.

The terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, can be considered a watershed moment in the 21st Century. Its importance in defining the future course of global events is, perhaps, on par with the Russian revolution or the fall of Nazi Germany and atomic annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Two major wars, interventions by the US and NATO in numerous other countries, rise of new terror outfits and new geopolitical alliances and rivalries have marked the responses to 9/11 in the past 20 years.

In 2010, a group of scholars at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in Rhode Island began work to chronicle the costs of the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and related violence in Pakistan and Syria. The team, called 'The Costs of War Project', recently released figures of the costs incurred by the US and others in responding to 9/11.

The budgetary costs of the post-9/11 wars incurred by the US federal government was estimated by The Costs of War team to be over $8 trillion. Successive US governments, including the Joe Biden administration, have sought $5.8 trillion to react to the 9/11 attacks. This includes expenditure on war zones, homeland security and interest payments on war borrowing.

"The research team’s $8 trillion estimate accounts for all direct costs of the country’s post-9/11 wars, including Department of Defense Overseas Contingency Operations funding; State Department war expenditures and counterterror war-related costs, including war-related increases to the Pentagon’s base budget; care for veterans to date and in the future; Department of Homeland Security spending; and interest payments on borrowing for these wars," Brown University said in a statement.

Future medical care and disability payments for veterans would likely exceed $2.2 trillion, according to The Costs of War project, making for a figure of about $8 trillion in current dollars. The Costs of War project noted the figure of $8 trillion does not include the money spent on humanitarian assistance and development in Afghanistan and Iraq or expenditure by US allies.

Death toll

The Costs of War project notes the death toll in the wars after 9/11 is between 897,000 to 929,000 people. This includes "US military members, allied fighters, opposition fighters, civilians, journalists and humanitarian aid workers who were killed as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets or fire".
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A total of 7,052 US military personnel have died in the post-9/11 conflicts, with Iraq (4,598 deaths) and Afghanistan (2,324) accounting for the most fatalities. Highlighting the role played by private 'contractors' in the conflicts, a total of 8,189 contractors have lost their lives in these conflicts. Again, Afghanistan (3,917 deaths) and Iraq (3,650) account for the most fatalities.

Civilians account for the largest category of deaths. Civilian fatalities are estimated to be between 363,939 to 387,072, with Iraq accounting for approximately 208,964 deaths, the highest figure for a single country.

Refugees

The post-9/11 conflicts have led to around 38 million people being displaced. Since 2001, 5.9 million people have been displaced in Afghanistan and 3.7 million in Pakistan. Over 9 million people have been displaced in Iraq since 2003, while over 7.1 million have been displaced in Syria since 2014.

The Costs of War project states this figure exceeds people displaced in all conflicts since 1900, with the exception of the Second World War. The researchers caution the figure of 38 million is a "conservative" estimate, noting the the actual number could be closer to 49 million-60 million, rivalling the refugee numbers seen in the Second World War.

On September 10, 2001, then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed that his department was unable to account for roughly $2.3 trillion worth of transactions. The next day, the U.S. sustained the terrorist attacks that changed the world, and this startling revelation was forgotten.

When an account discrepancy occurs that cannot be traced, it’s customary to make what is called an “un-documentable adjustment.” This is similar to when your checkbook balance is off by, say, ten dollars; you add or subtract that amount to make everything balance with the bank. In 1999, the amount that the Pentagon adjusted was eight times the Defense Department budget for that year; it was one-third greater than the entire federal budget.

By 2015, the amount reported missing by the Office of the Inspector General had increased to $6.5 trillion—and that was just for the army. Using public data from federal databases, Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, found that $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments had been reported by the Defense and Housing and Urban Development departments between 1998 and 2015. That’s about $65,000 for every American.

There is no sign that the government’s internal auditors have made much headway in finding the missing money. Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service traveled the country in 2002 looking for documents on just $300 million worth of unrecorded spending. “We know it’s gone. But we don’t know what they spent it on,” he said. He was reassigned after suggesting that higher-ups covered up the problem by writing it off. He’s not the only who thinks so. “The books are cooked routinely year after year,” says former defense analyst Franklin C. Spinney.

According to a 2013 Reuters report, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a 1996 law that requires annual audits of all government departments. The Pentagon has spent tens of billions of dollars to upgrade to more efficient technology in order to become audit-ready. But many of these new systems have failed and been scrapped.

Predictably, the government did not race to correct the problem even after investigators sounded the alarm. Skidmore contacted the Office of the Inspector General but was not permitted to speak to anyone who had worked on the corruption report. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office assured him that congressional hearings would have been held if there was a significant problem. When Rumsfeld eventually did appear before Congress in March 2005, his testimony offered no substantive answers.

In short: the military doesn’t know how its budget is being spent. The “total military expenditures” that analysts so confidently cite are whatever the Treasury Department says they are, and the individual line items, at least for the army, are for the most part unknown. If money is being diverted from the armed forces, the losses are degrading our defense capability in ways difficult to observe. The same is true on a smaller scale for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where billions in missing expenditures could have gone to support the perennially cash-strapped federal mortgage-loan program, and possibly other unrelated programs, without congressional knowledge or approval.

Though each passing year diminishes the likelihood that already-disbursed funds will be tracked down, Americans should insist on a renewed effort to rein in future discrepancies. The Trump presidency presents a fresh chance to prioritize accountability, and the president campaigned on robust military spending and reducing government waste. With congressional cooperation, the president should ask the secretaries of the Departments of Defense and of Housing and Urban Development to testify about any misplaced spending, and commission new independent audits of their expenses. This ongoing mismanagement of the public trust—and public dollars—is possibly the greatest silent scandal in America today.

If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China.

Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015. This represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and investment, is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.

The damage cost estimation is based on historical cybercrime figures including recent year-over-year growth, a dramatic increase in hostile nation-state sponsored and organized crime gang hacking activities, and a cyberattack surface which will be an order of magnitude greater in 2025 than it is today.

Cybercrime costs include damage and destruction of data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud, post-attack disruption to the normal course of business, forensic investigation, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational harm.

The United States, the world’s largest economy with a nominal GDP of nearly $21.5 trillion, constitutes one-fourth of the world economy, according to data from Nasdaq.

Cybercrime has hit the U.S. so hard that in 2018 a supervisory special agent with the FBI who investigates cyber intrusions told The Wall Street Journal that every American citizen should expect that all of their data (personally identifiable information) has been stolen and is on the dark web — a part of the deep web — which is intentionally hidden and used to conceal and promote heinous activities. Some estimates put the size of the deep web (which is not indexed or accessible by search engines) at as much as 5,000 times larger than the surface web, and growing at a rate that defies quantification.

The dark web is also where cybercriminals buy and sell malware, exploit kits, and cyberattack services, which they use to strike victims — including businesses, governments, utilities, and essential service providers on U.S. soil.

A cyberattack could potentially disable the economy of a city, state or our entire country.

In his 2016 New York Times bestseller — Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath — Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the U.S. is shockingly unprepared.

Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffet calls cybercrime the number one problem with mankind, and cyberattacks a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear weapons.

A bullseye is squarely on our nation’s businesses.

Organized cybercrime entities are joining forces, and their likelihood of detection and prosecution is estimated to be as low as 0.05 percent in the U.S., according to the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risk Report.

RANSOMWARE

Ransomware — a malware that infects computers (and mobile devices) and restricts their access to files, often threatening permanent data destruction unless a ransom is paid — has reached epidemic proportions globally and is the “go-to method of attack” for cybercriminals.

A 2017 report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicted ransomware damages would cost the world $5 billion in 2017, up from $325 million in 2015 — a 15X increase in just two years. The damages for 2018 were estimated at $8 billion, and for 2019 the figure rose to $11.5 billion.

The latest forecast is for global ransomware damage costs to reach $20 billion by 2021 — which is 57X more than it was in 2015.

We predict there will be a ransomware attack on businesses every 11 seconds by 2021, up from every 40 seconds in 2016.

The FBI is particularly concerned with ransomware hitting healthcare providers, hospitals, 911 and first responders. These types of cyberattacks can impact the physical safety of American citizens, and this is the forefront of what Herb Stapleton, FBI cyber division section chief, and his team are focused on.

Last month, ransomware claimed its first life. German authorities reported a ransomware attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

Ransomware, now the fastest growing and one of the most damaging types of cybercrime, will ultimately convince senior executives to take the cyber threat more seriously, according to Mark Montgomery, executive director at the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) — but he hopes it doesn’t come to that.

CYBER ATTACK SURFACE

The modern definition of the word “hack” was coined at MIT in April 1955. The first known mention of computer (phone) hacking occurred in a 1963 issue of The Tech. Over the past fifty-plus years, the world’s attack surface has evolved from phone systems to a vast datasphere outpacing humanity’s ability to secure it.

In 2013, IBM proclaimed data promises to be for the 21st century what steam power was for the 18th, electricity for the 19th and hydrocarbons for the 20th.

“We believe that data is the phenomenon of our time,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Corp.’s executive chairman, in 2015, addressing CEOs, CIOs and CISOs from 123 companies in 24 industries at a conference in New York City. “It is the world’s new natural resource. It is the new basis of competitive advantage, and it is transforming every profession and industry. If all of this is true — even inevitable — then cyber crime, by definition, is the greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world.”

The world will store 200 zettabytes of data by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. This includes data stored on private and public IT infrastructures, on utility infrastructures, on private and public cloud data centers, on personal computing devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones — and on IoT (Internet-of-Things) devices.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half the U.S. labor force is working from home, according to Stanford University. As employees generate, access, and share more data remotely through cloud apps, the number of security blind spots balloons.

It’s predicted that the total amount of data stored in the cloud — which includes public clouds operated by vendors and social media companies (think Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.), government-owned clouds that are accessible to citizens and businesses, private clouds owned by mid-to-large-sized corporations, and cloud storage providers — will reach 100 zettabytes by 2025, or 50 percent of the world’s data at that time, up from approximately 25 percent stored in the cloud in 2015.

Roughly one million more people join the internet every day. We expect there will be 6 billion people connected to the internet interacting with data in 2022, up from 5 billion in 2020 — and more than 7.5 billion internet users in 2030.

Cyber threats have expanded from targeting and harming computers, networks, and smartphones — to people, cars, railways, planes, power grids and anything with a heartbeat or an electronic pulse. Many of these Things are connected to corporate networks in some fashion, further complicating cybersecurity.

By 2023, there will be 3X more networked devices on Earth than humans, according to a report from Cisco. And by 2022, 1 trillion networked sensors will be embedded in the world around us, with up to 45 trillion in 20 years.

IP traffic has reached an annual run rate of 2.3 zettabytes in 2020, up from an annual run rate of 870.3 exabytes in 2015.

Data is the building block of the digitized economy, and the opportunities for innovation and malice around it are incalculable.

CYBERSECURITY SPENDING

In 2004, the global cybersecurity market was worth $3.5 billion — and in 2017 it was worth more than $120 billion. The cybersecurity market grew by roughly 35X during that 13-year period — prior to the latest market sizing by Cybersecurity Ventures.

Global spending on cybersecurity products and services for defending against cybercrime is projected to exceed $1 trillion cumulatively over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021.

“Most cybersecurity budgets at U.S. organizations are increasing linearly or flat, but the cyberattacks are growing exponentially,” says CSC’s Montgomery. This simple observation should be a wake-up call for C-suite executives.

Healthcare has lagged behind other industries and the tantalizing target on its back is attributable to outdated IT systems, fewer cybersecurity protocols and IT staff, extremely valuable data, and the pressing need for medical practices and hospitals to pay ransoms quickly to regain data. The healthcare industry will respond by spending $125 billion cumulatively from 2020 to 2025 to beef up its cyber defenses.

The FY 2020 U.S. President’s Budget includes $17.4 billion of budget authority for cybersecurity-related activities, a $790 million (5 percent) increase above the FY 2019 estimate, according to The White House. Due to the sensitive nature of some activities, this amount does not represent the entire cyber budget.

Cybersecurity Ventures anticipates 12-15 percent year-over-year cybersecurity market growth through 2025. While that may be a respectable increase, it pales in comparison to the cybercrime costs incurred.

SMALL BUSINESS

“There are 30 million small businesses in the U.S. that need to stay safe from phishing attacks, malware spying, ransomware, identity theft, major breaches and hackers who would compromise their security,” says Scott Schober, author of the popular books “Hacked Again” and “Cybersecurity Is Everybody’s Business.”

More than half of all cyberattacks are committed against small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs), and 60 percent of them go out of business within six months of falling victim to a data breach or hack.

66 percent of SMBs had at least one cyber incident in the past two years, according to Mastercard.

“Small and medium sized businesses lack the financial resources and skill set to combat the emerging cyber threat,” says Scott E. Augenbaum, former supervisory special agent at the FBI’s Cyber Division, Cyber Crime Fraud Unit, where he was responsible for managing the FBI’s Cyber Task Force Program and Intellectual Property Rights Program.

A Better Business Bureau survey found that for small businesses — which make up more than 97 percent of total businesses in North America — the primary challenges for more than 55 percent of them in order to develop a cybersecurity plan are a lack of resources or knowledge.

Ransomware attacks are of particular concern. “The cost of ransomware has skyrocketed and that’s a huge concern for small businesses — and it doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight,” adds Schober.

AI AUGMENTS CYBER DEFENDERS

You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

The U.S. has a total employed cybersecurity workforce consisting of nearly 925,000 people, and there are currently almost 510,000 unfilled positions, according to Cyber Seek, a project supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Faced with a domestic worker shortage, the heads of U.S. cyber defense forces — CIOs and CISOs at America’s mid-sized to largest businesses — are beginning to augment their staff with next-generation AI and ML (machine learning) software and appliances aimed at detecting cyber intruders. These AI systems are trained on big data sets collected over decades — and they can analyze terabytes of data per day, a scale unimaginable for humans.

The panacea for a CISO is an AI system resembling a human expert’s investigative and reporting techniques so that cyber threats are remediated BEFORE the damage is done.

If enemies are using AI to launch cyberattacks, then our country’s businesses need to use AI to defend themselves.

FOR THE BOARDROOM

Cybersecurity begins at the top.

CSC has an urgent message for boardroom and C-suite executives: The status quo in cyberspace is unacceptable, which is spelled out in its groundbreaking 2020 Report which proposes a strategy of layered cyber deterrence — to protect all U.S. businesses and governments from cybercrime and cyberwarfare. But, this is hardly the first warning. “Some of the same things we’re recommending today, we were pushing 23 years ago,” says Montgomery.

Someone should be in the boardroom who will wave the red flag and get everyone else paying attention to the severity of cyber risks. Montgomery says attention is the number one priority, not bringing in a new CISO — instead empower the CISO that you have.

The value of a business depends largely on how well it guards its data, the strength of its cybersecurity, and its level of cyber resilience.

If there’s one takeaway from this report, then let it be this: Don’t let your boardroom be the weakest cybersecurity link.

U.S. BUDGETARY COSTS The vast economic impact of the U.S. post-9/11 wars goes beyond the Pentagon's "Overseas Contigency Operations" (War) budget. This chart and the attached paper estimate the more comprehensive budgetary costs of the wars.

Posted on September 1, 2021

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/BudgetaryCosts