I seem to have issues of war and peace on my mind this morning (I am writing on Saturday, February 27, 2021). USA Today has a nice piece of data journalism on U.S. troop deployments and war costs around the world. This seems to be based mostly on the Costs of War project at Brown University, but the USA Today maps and graphics are very clean and informative at a glance. As usual, I’m going to tell you not to read this post and go look at their graphics instead!

• The U.S. military has engaged in ground combat in 8 countries since 2018 and conducted air strikes in 7 countries (some of these overlap, so it’s not 15 total). It has provided some form of training or assistance in 79 countries (again, overlapping). We have “up to” 800 military bases outside the U.S.
• Over 800,000 people have died in U.S.-involved wars since 2001, and over 300,000 of these were civilians. U.S. military troops and contractors killed total about 15,000, with most of these in Iraq and Afghanistan (significantly more in Iraq). [We manage to get a lot of allies killed for every American killed, to get a lot of enemy fighters killed for every “friendly” soldier killed, and roughly speaking around one civilian killed for every soldier killed. Are these measures of efficiency? Not in any moral sense, in my view. The civilian death toll alone suggests to me that the idea of “humanitarian war” is an oxymoron, because the innocent people you are getting killed are supposedly the ones you are trying to help. If they were instead living under the iron heel of some mad government, the body count might be lower. This might be true of any war in history, in my view, which might be a somewhat controversial view. But I am not suggesting turning a blind eye, I am suggesting doing what we can to help people through non-violent means.]
• The estimated cost of all this to the U.S. has been $6.4 trillion. About $130 billion of that was spent on diplomacy. The U.S. military budget (listed here as $731.8 billion dollars in 2019, but this must exclude a lot of intelligence, security, and nuclear spending outside the DOD), is equivalent to the military spending of the following countries in order of their spending: China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, UK, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. [Even setting aside the moral travesties and death and destruction, are we getting good value for our tax money? Or is it more like our health care and “pandemic preparedness” systems, where we spend the most and get average to poor results? We certainly couldn’t beat the countries above if they ganged up on us in a straight-out fight, I don’t think.]

Speaking of countries ganging up, there is now a group of potential World War III allies called “the quad“: the United States, Japan, India, and Australia. On the other side would be China and…I’m not sure, maybe Pakistan? Japan is saying its military may start firing missiles at Chinese ships that enter disputed waters, which it has not done before.

And finally, in what will be very old non-breaking news by the time this posts, the U.S. has apparently dropped some bombs in Syria, a sovereign country it is not clear whether we are at war with or not. This seems to have something to do with the U.S. relationship with Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and/or Israel. So our involvement in that unending regional proxy war grinds on at the same time we are rattling sabers at China and failing to tend to our significant problems at home.