MORE ON WAR COSTS

McClatchy (Knight-Ridder) has another very informative article about the mounting costs of the Iraq War:

Official Iraq war costs don't tell the whole story
By Kevin G. Hall and David Montgomery
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Wed, Dec. 06, 2006

(excerpts)

Soldiers preparing to ship to Iraq don't have enough equipment to train on because it's been left in Iraq, where it's most needed. Thousands of tanks and other vehicles sit at repair depots waiting to be fixed because funds are short.

At the Red River Army Depot in Texas, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in October that at least 6,200 Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, trucks and ambulances were awaiting repair because of insufficient funds.

More than 73,000 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and with problems such as drug abuse and depression.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group report given to Bush on Wednesday warned that the United States should expect "significant `tail costs' to come" from the Iraq war. "Caring for veterans and replacing lost equipment will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars," it said. "Estimates run as high as $2 trillion for the final cost of the U.S. involvement in Iraq."

More than 1.4 million U.S. soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2001, and about 26 percent have filed disability claims, according to raw data provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. That percentage could grow as soldiers leave the armed forces.


"I see the whole thing as a mini-Medicare, another huge entitlement program which is going to be sprawling out over the course of our lifetimes and our children's lifetimes," said Linda Bilmes, a Harvard University public finance professor and co-author of the Stiglitz study. "The big costs come when they get back ... they stand a good chance of being really underfunded and not taken care of properly."