With this estimate, the report averages that the average American taxpayer has so far spent $23,386.
"The US wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the increased spending on homeland security and the Departments of Defense, State and Veterans Affairs since the 9/11 attacks have cost more than $4.3 trillion in current dollars through fiscal year 2017," Neta Crawford, a co-director of the report, said in a statement. "Adding likely costs for fiscal year 2018 and estimated future obligations for veterans' care, the costs of war total more than $5.6 trillion."
The study took "into account not only Department of Defense spending, but spending by the Departments of State, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security as well as the cost of interest paid to date on the money the US has borrowed to pay for the wars."
Speaking to Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear, Ted Rall, an award-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist, says the estimates "[are] a classic example" of how "government wastes a lot of money."
"It is actually madness and it's insane to live in a country that spends trillions of dollars on war when you have people who are homeless and are sleeping outside and people dying of diseases that they could have treated," Rall told show hosts Brian Becker and Walter Smolarek. "It's insane and that's where we live."
Though Catherine Lutz, another co-director on the Costs of War project, claimed that "the American public should know what the true costs of these choices are and what lost opportunities they represent," the study's attempt at transparency comes off a little foggy.
The study "completely leaves out the US Department of Energy, which manages the nuclear arsenal," Smolarek points out. And yet that still isn't the only issue here.
"The ‘War on Terror' was a slogan under which all military operations were carried out," Becker says matter of factly.
"For the most part, it's the US using arms and money to prop up authoritarian dictatorships around the world and using them to attack revolutionaries who are trying to overthrow them," said Rall, reminding listeners what the Global War on Terror means. "In many cases they are people whose values are closer to ours than the people they are trying to overthrow."
The Brown University study was launched in 2011 and launched to "document the costs of the post-9/11 wars in a comprehensive fashion."
