I will give Biden his props for ending the Afghan War.

Let’s take a look at the cost of war……

Afghanistan cost the US taxpayers. $2.3 trillion…..about $300 million a day…..think about those totals…..what good could that cash have done here in this country?

Some of the coasts of this war is the contractor abuse and fraud…..

It’s well known that waste, fraud, and abuse were widespread among contractors working for the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the negative consequences of the heavy reliance on contractors to help wage wars go well beyond that to the question of whether and how the United States wages war.  

The issue of waste in America’s endless wars should certainly not be ignored, given its immense costs to taxpayers. As early as 2011 — ten years into the Afghan war — the congressionally-mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that there had already been between $31 billion and $60 billion in waste related to contracting in the two war zones. There has been no comparable analysis since, but it’s safe to say that there have been tens of billions more in waste — including criminal fraud — in the most recent ten years of war. The Special Investigator General for Afghan Reconstruction has produced scores of reports documenting waste in Afghanistan, even as it has helped convict 160 companies and individuals of fraud and saved taxpayers $3.8 billion in the process.

All of this occurred in the context of the record surge in Pentagon spending that accompanied and was publicly justified by what was originally known as the Global War on Terror. As I noted in a joint report of the Center for International Policy and the Brown Costs of War Project published in September 2021, the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending resulted in $14 trillion in Pentagon spending from 2001 to 2020, up to half of which went to contractors. Among the report’s findings were that the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top five weapons contractors, namely Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These five companies alone have split $2.1 trillion in contracts since 2001. To give some sense of scale, Lockheed Martin alone received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2020, which was more than one and one-half times the combined budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development. If the Biden administration is truly to put diplomacy first, this extreme militarization of our budget must be corrected.

https://inkstickmedia.com/how-private-contractors-disguise-the-real-costs-of-war/

Privatization of war has cost this country dearly…..

It is time for diplomacy to return to the world and armed conflict should be the last resort and not the first knee jerk action.

But thanks to the M-IC this idea will not see the light of day….war is great business.

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