When we estimate the costs of wars, our guesses can render figures too vast and numbing to really grasp. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that wars since 2001 involving U.S. forces have cost $4.8 trillion, 370,000 people killed in direct violence and nearly 1.2 million dead when indirect causes are counted. At the U.S. Institute of Peace on Feb. 22, a prominent journalist and U.S. combat veterans focused on a tiny but dramatic subset of costs—the price paid by these former soldiers when they were sent a decade ago to a perilous corner of Afghanistan.
Type:
Analysis
Civilian-Military Relations