The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a Cabinet-level executive branch department of the federal government charged with providing lifelong healthcare services to eligible military veterans at the 170 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics located throughout the country. Non-healthcare benefits include disability compensation, vocational rehabilitation, education assistance, home loans, and life insurance. The VA also provides burial and memorial benefits to eligible veterans and family members at 135 national cemeteries.
Criticism of the war on terror addresses the morals, ethics, efficiency, economics, as well as other issues surrounding the war on terror. It also touches upon criticism against the phrase itself, which was branded as a misnomer. The notion of a "war" against "terrorism" has proven highly contentious, with critics charging that participating governments exploited it to pursue long-standing policy/military objectives, reduce civil liberties, and infringe upon human rights. It is argued by critics that the term war is not appropriate in this context, since there is no identifiable enemy and that it is unlikely international terrorism can be brought to an end by military means.
Lawrence B. Lindsey is an American economist and author. He was director of the National Economic Council (2001–2002), and the assistant to the president on economic policy for George W. Bush. Lindsey previously served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1991 to 1997, nominated to position by President George H. W. Bush. During his time with George W. Bush administration he played a leading role in formulating President Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut plan, convincing candidate Bush that he needed an "insurance policy" against an economic downturn. He left the White House in December 2002 and was replaced by Stephen Friedman after a dispute over the projected cost of the Iraq War. Lindsey estimated the cost of the Iraq War could reach $200 billion, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld estimated that it would cost less than $50 billion. The overall cost of the Iraq War has been estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be approximately $2.4 Trillion.
The military budget of the United States is the largest portion of the discretionary federal budget allocated to the Department of Defense (DoD), or more broadly, the portion of the budget that goes to any military-related expenditures. The military budget pays the salaries, training, and health care of uniformed and civilian personnel, maintains arms, equipment and facilities, funds operations, and develops and buys new items. The budget funds six branches of the US military: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Air Force, and Space Force.
The U.S. rationale for the Iraq War has faced heavy criticism from an array of popular and official sources both inside and outside the United States. Putting this controversy aside, both proponents and opponents of the invasion have also criticized the prosecution of the war effort along a number of lines. Most significantly, critics have assailed the U.S. and its allies for not devoting enough troops to the mission, not adequately planning for post-invasion Iraq, and for permitting and perpetrating widespread human rights abuses. As the war has progressed, critics have also railed against the high human and financial costs.
The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs is an interdisciplinary research center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Its mission is to promote a just and peaceful world through research, teaching, and public engagement. The institute's research focuses on three main areas: development, security, and governance. Its faculty include anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians, as well as journalists and other practitioners.
War finance is a branch of defense economics. The power of a military depends on its economic base and without this financial support, soldiers will not be paid, weapons and equipment cannot be manufactured and food cannot be bought. Hence, victory in war involves not only success on the battlefield but also the economic power and economic stability of a state. War finance covers a wide variety of financial measures including fiscal and monetary initiatives used in order to fund the costly expenditure of a war.
The budget of the United States government for fiscal year 2007 was produced through a budget process involving both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. While the Congress has the constitutional "power of the purse", the President and his appointees play a major role in budget deliberations. Since 1976, the federal fiscal year has started on October 1 of each year.
The following is a partial accounting of financial costs of the 2003 Iraq War by the United States and the United Kingdom, the two largest non-Iraqi participants of the multinational force in Iraq.
The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks and is the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. The main targets of the campaign are militant Islamist movements like Al-Qaeda, Taliban and their allies. Other major targets included the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which was deposed in an invasion in 2003, and various militant factions that fought during the ensuing insurgency. After its territorial expansion in 2014, the Islamic State militia has also emerged as a key adversary of the United States.
The Three Trillion Dollar War is a 2008 book by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Bilmes, both of whom are American economists. The book is based on a paper they presented in January 2006 titled The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict.
Cost of Conflict is a tool which attempts to calculate the price of conflict to the human race. The idea is to examine this cost, not only in terms of the deaths and casualties and the economic costs borne by the people involved, but also the social, developmental, environmental and strategic costs of conflict. In most cases organizations measure and analyze the economic and broader development costs of conflict. While this conventional method of assessing the impact of conflict is fairly in-depth, it does not provide a comprehensive overview of a country or region embroiled in conflict. One of the earliest studies assessing the true cost of conflict on a variety of parameters was commissioned by Saferworld and compiled by Michael Cranna. Strategic Foresight Group has taken this science to a new level by developing a multi-disciplinary methodology, that has been applied to most parts of the world. A key benefit of using this tool is to encourage people to look at conflict in new ways and to widen public discussion of the subject, and to bring new insights to the debate on global security.
Linda J. Bilmes is an American public policy expert who is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer Chair in Public Policy and Public Finance at Harvard University. She is a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School where she teaches public policy, budgeting and public finance. She served as Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the US Department of Commerce during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
A burn pit is an area of a United States military base in which waste is disposed of by burning.
Catherine A. Lutz is an American anthropologist and Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. She is also a Research Professor at the Watson Institute where she serves as a director of the Costs of War Project, which attempts to calculate the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The Afghanistan Papers are a set of interviews relating to the war in Afghanistan undertaken by the United States military prepared by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that was published by The Washington Post in 2019 following a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents reveal that high-ranking officials generally held the opinion that the war was unwinnable while keeping this view hidden from the public. Due to the difficulty of creating objective metrics to demonstrate success, information was manipulated for the duration of the conflict. NPR host Lulu Garcia-Navarro, comparing the documents with the Pentagon Papers, noted the revelation of what constituted "explicit and sustained efforts... to deliberately mislead the public."
Joe Biden's tenure as the 46th president of the United States began with his inauguration on January 20, 2021. Biden, a Democrat from Delaware who previously served as vice president for two terms under President Barack Obama, took office following his victory in the 2020 presidential election over Republican incumbent president Donald Trump. Upon his inauguration, he became the oldest president in American history, breaking the record set by his predecessor Trump. Biden entered office amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic crisis, and increased political polarization.
The United States Armed Forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan on 30 August 2021, marking the end of the 2001–2021 war. In February 2020, the Trump administration and the Taliban signed the United States–Taliban deal in Doha, Qatar, which stipulated fighting restrictions for both the US and the Taliban, and provided for the withdrawal of all NATO forces from Afghanistan in return for the Taliban's counter-terrorism commitments. The deal, and then the Biden administration's final decision in April 2021 to pull out all US troops by September 2021 without leaving a residual force, were the two critical events that triggered the start of the collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). Following the deal, the US dramatically reduced the number of air attacks on the Taliban at the detriment the ANSF fighting the Taliban insurgency, leading to the Taliban takeover of Kabul on 15 August 2021.
Neta C. Crawford is an American political scientist. She is Montague Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Oxford and holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College. Crawford previously served as professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences in Boston, Massachusetts.
The 20-year-long War in Afghanistan had a number of significant impacts on Afghan society.
