In The New Yorker, Michael Gurriero crunches the numbers on the American military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the most expensive in US history.
The price tag is estimated by Linda J. Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School to total somewhere between four and six trillion dollars. The decision to finance the wars almost entirely through borrowing has already added more than 1.3 trillion dollars to the national debt. And then there's the direct human cost: more than six thousand soldiers have died, and up to another six thousand contractors.
And then there's the number which is the focus of this piece: $44.6 billion, the total estimated lost economic value of the American war dead.
