Bridget Conley: We are thrilled to announce our collaboration with the Costs of War project and will co-publish a series of reports starting this month and continuing through Spring 2027. Can you give the WPF audience an overview of the Costs of War project?
Stephanie Savell: The Costs of War project was founded in 2011 by two colleagues, Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist, and Neta Crawford, a political scientist, to shed light on the broad economic, social, human, political, environmental costs of the US choice to wage wars and engage in military operations abroad.
At the time, the US was 10 years into the so-called “War on Terror,” and there was very little public discussion or debate about the fact that the US was at war at all, much less its costs. The idea was to get this information and research into the public domain, and in doing so, change the public conversation. That’s what we’re trying to do: promote more critical thinking and questioning in the American public about US militarism, and in so doing, hold the US government to account, promote the possibility of and lay the groundwork for better foreign policy, and give civil society and movement groups the tools that they can use to advocate for the kinds of changes that can promote peace, social justice, and human rights around the world.
BC: There are many policy critiques or arguments that one could use to try to change the degree of militarism in US foreign policy. What is particular about the approach of using the cost of war?
SS: Much of US war making and military operations are conducted in the shadows. Political leaders are loathe to test the limits of public acceptance and approval for military operations.
When you track the dollars, it’s a way of tracking what’s going on. It’s a political economic approach to understanding militarism and making it real for people. We found that the US media is more inclined to cover a story about taxpayer dollars spent on war than it is to cover a story on the human toll of those dollars spent. We always try to put the two together. The dollars ground the research in what’s actually happening and the human costs show the human consequences of those dollars.
BC: Do you think that there is an understanding among the American public of how much debt that the United States is accumulating because of constantly being at war?
SS: That’s a good question. The polls show that Americans broadly are tired of endless war and have other priorities for US federal spending. Certainly, people would never want to think that the US was spending more on weapons systems than on programs that are going to impact their pocketbooks. We saw Vice President J.D. Vance recently talking about how the midterm elections were a referendum on war — Americans were sick of the war in Iran and that that was why they broadly repudiated President Trump’s administration.
We have seen people connecting the dots in a loose and ambiguous kind of way. The difference with the current war in Iran is that it has impacted fuel costs so dramatically, and therefore, almost all aspects of American domestic economic life. People feel it every day in gas prices, food prices, and so on. While I am suffering from those price increases along with everyone else, I think at a structural level, it is also important for people to realize that US wars always have a cost. The price increases are an important opportunity for greater understanding that the choice to wage a war is going to impact everyone.
The post 9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other countries flew under the radar and received tacit public approval for so long, in part because they were credit card wars. They were paid for largely through deficit spending, and they went along with tax cuts in the same era. Americans (if they weren’t closely connected to military personnel) just didn’t feel the effect of the choice for war as directly as they are today.
I don’t think that people necessarily will connect the dots between US debt and war spending, even though certainly these credit card wars contributed vast amounts to the national debt, which is over $40 trillion right now. Yet many people have an underlying unease and dissatisfaction with the US government spending dollars in this way.
BC: For our recent podcast series, I interviewed Radhya al-Mutawakel, the chairperson of Mwatana Organization for Human Rights in Yemen, and as part of background research, learned that we’ve bombed Yemen every single year for close to 20 years now. Every single year. I didn’t know that and I work on peace and conflict issues.
SS: That’s right.
BC: And it’s not only wasteful, it also doesn’t advance any strategic causes.
SS: Absolutely, these military operations are flying under the radar of attention of most Americans. Obviously, for people in Yemen or Somalia, they’re very aware of those actions.
I’m actually working on a book manuscript right now about US security assistance in the name of counterterrorism, which has taken place in over 70 countries, the last time I counted. It sounds so innocuous and kind of neighborly, we’re providing “assistance”. In fact, what happens in almost every case is that military funding — the equipment, the arms sales, the training for foreign security forces — is often getting used by foreign governments to bolster authoritarian governance, repress minorities, boost profiteering. These trends have the effect of intensifying conflicts around the world. When you’re thinking about peace, as the World Peace Foundation is concerned with, security assistance – or direct military operations — in places like Yemen are actually fueling and intensifying many local wars and conflicts.
BC: Yeah, they become a part of the war economy, become another resource that helps deepen instability, and, as you noted, makes peace more difficult to achieve or sustain.
This is why we are so excited to be able to co-publish reports with you as part of our new collaboration. And I thought it might be interesting to talk through some of the connections between our programs and yours. We have a program on militarism and the arms trade, which is just such an obvious overlap. I don’t think we really need to say a whole lot more about that one. But when I was looking at the archive of your reports, you’ve also made some connections with other issues we work on, like, food insecurity. We work quite a bit on mass starvation and famine. So how do questions of the cost of war tie to food insecurity?
SS: First of all, let me just say that I’m really excited about this collaboration. I’m grateful for the thematic partnership between your work and ours, because a lot of the topics that you’ve covered, and are central to the peace-building communities, are slightly different from the areas of focus in scholarship that critiques US militarism. But there’s so much intersection and opportunity for further research.
We have covered food insecurity through the topic of indirect death. For example, we published a paper a few years ago called How Death Outlives War, that looked at the public health and epidemiological concept of indirect death. Wars kill people directly through bombs, bullets, weapons and violence, and also indirectly, through the reverberating long effects of war, such as the collapse of economies and livelihood generating possibilities, the destruction of healthcare infrastructure, the erosion of vaccine campaigns, the bombing of hospitals, environmental harm and damage, reverberating kinds of violence like domestic violence and interpersonal violence, and crime-related violence due to the greater circulation of weapons in war-torn areas.
Those are what public health experts call “causal pathways” to indirect death. Food insecurity plays a major role in that larger picture. What a lot of people don’t know is that wars actually cause far higher death rates for women and children in many cases than fighting-aged men. I’ll give you an example from Burkina Faso, where I have been doing some research.
I met a community of displaced people in Ouagadougou, which is the capital. They had fled their village due to militant attacks, and settled in this abandoned school building on the outskirts of the capital. The government, in an effort to discourage further refugees from settling in the capital, had not acknowledged this group or provided them any aid. The group was living simply on the donations of neighbors, who themselves were living hand to mouth. There was a little boy that I heard about who had gotten malaria. The community was about 40 people, and they did everything they could to put some money together and finally take him to the doctor. But by the time he got to the doctor, it was too late, because of his severe anemia. He ended up dying from malaria. These are the compounding effects of war.
Malnutrition and food insecurity lead to a child’s inability to fight off infectious diseases, and they’re more prone to them. So that leads to higher death rates. That’s why children and infants aged zero to five are, in fact, some of the most vulnerable populations to war-related deaths, because of these kinds of effects.
BC: Our work on famine or starvation as a war crime is connected to these conditions, but it’s slightly more concentrated and focused when it’s intentionally being used as a weapon versus those indirect deaths, where it’s the collapse of infrastructure that tears at people. But both of those pathways tend to impact the very young and the very old first. It’s one of the quirks of famine (versus conditions of chronic hunger) is that females tend to survive at higher rates than do males. But then those who survive are weakened and more vulnerable over the lifetime for increased poverty, poor health outcomes, and so on. It sets up a longer-term disadvantage.
SS: We are very pragmatic in our thinking about our positionality as researchers. We are U.S.-based, and we’re trying to hold the U.S. government accountable for improved policies.
We’re focused on those hidden and underlying costs, including the things that many people in the U.S. don’t think about, like the opportunity costs of spending on military parts of the economy versus investing in other things. The fact that more jobs are created, for example, per federal dollars spent in health care or green energy, versus military sectors of the economy.
Catherine Lutz, who founded the project and myself, we’re anthropologists. We merge the big picture critical thinking and questioning of anthropology with the interdisciplinary focus on data and quantifiable findings. At the heart of most of our papers is a through line of asking: what are the cultural pillars of belief in the United States about militarism that allow the U.S. to continue its military first approach to foreign policy, the turn to militarism as the first way of engaging in the world? And what is the political economy that enables that cultural belief system to continue? And each paper of ours tries to puncture those myths in a different way and to help people think differently and more critically about these issues.
BC: To your point about the militarization of US foreign policy, I believe that the current State Department budget is $33.6 billion with a “B.” And then Pentagon budget –which is just one sector of military, it’s the big one, but it’s not all defense spending – is already in for fiscal year 2018 was initially proposed at $1.5 trillion. It’s an enormous difference in scale. When you talk about a military first foreign policy, follow the money and one can see where the emphasis has been placed.
SS: Absolutely. I have a colleague at Costs of War named Linda Bilmes. She’s a public finance expert based at Harvard University. And she’s really helped me understand the difference in scale. As an anthropologist, it’s not my background or forte. But she explains it with a metaphor that I love: if you think about dollars as if they were seconds, then imagine a million dollars and you’re going back to last week. And if you think about a billion dollars in seconds, you’re going to go back to the early 1990s. If you think about a trillion seconds, you’re going back to the ice age.
It’s so easy to think of a million, a billion and a trillion as similar. And yet a trillion dollars is an ice age amount of dollars. That scale is something that we don’t reckon with enough.
The Pentagon might invest hundreds of millions of dollars in so-called security assistance to Burkina Faso. To the Pentagon, that is nothing. That is pennies. To Burkina Faso, where many people are living on less than three dollars a day, that is a huge amount of money and hugely influential in shaping the course of politics and political economy in that country. The magnitude of dollars involved helps ground us in what’s happening.
BC: It’s both the magnitude and disparity, as you said. Can you give us one or two of your favorite examples of ways in which cost of war has had an impact on policy?
I have a colleague, Anna Stavrianakis, who works on militarism in the U.K. And she’s always really careful to say to look, we’re fighting the uphill battle. The system continues as it is. And we have to always acknowledge that we are the underdogs. Not in the sense of give up — in any way — but in the sense of recognizing how hard it is to change a system that has so much momentum going with it. Our policy wins are actually huge. It’s like winning a race when you’re running up a mountain and someone else is on flat terrain. It’s enormously different.
SS: We’re up against the military industrial complex, which is the huge and growing political power of the economic forces at stake in that trillion dollars that we’re talking about –the trillion dollar annual Pentagon budget as it currently stands. There’s lots of people, I should say, that are working really hard to fight that five hundred billion dollar increase that Trump is asking for — we haven’t gotten to one point five trillion yet. Hopefully we won’t. Half of the Pentagon’s annual budget goes to military contracting companies, like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. They invest a huge amount of resources in maintaining the system as it is and continuing these federal investments. They have more lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are members of Congress — by at least twofold. There’s a revolving door between these companies and congressional staff. There’s all the money that the Pentagon pours into think tanks and funding U.S. foreign policy at the strategy level.
There are so many different ways that this military industrial complex secures the system as it is, which is just to keep the money flowing. That’s what they’ve been really excellent at. It is a big, massive challenge to struggle against. And yet we cannot stop. We must keep up the struggle because otherwise change will never happen.
So, with wins, as you say, we have to keep in mind the the kind of beasts that we’re struggling against. One of the impacts that I am proud of in recent years was the fact that at a time when very few groups were talking about the amounts of U.S. support for Israel and its violence in Gaza since October 7, 2023, we came out with reports [here, here, and here] showing how many dollars the U.S. had spent in supporting Israel in just that year of war and the human toll. Again, the money and the human toll go together. Then Senator Bernie Sanders in speaking about the importance of the U.S. to stop funding Israel and stop arming Israel used our research on both of those things in speeches to Congress. Our research was providing him the tools that he needed to make impassioned pleas for a halt to the military aid.
That’s one example that was really powerful and moving to me at the time because it felt like, OK, we’re getting our research to someone who’s in the position to work against this in a meaningful way.
Another example was President Biden when he made his speech to announce that the U.S. was going to pull out of Afghanistan. He cited Costs of War research on how much the U.S. had spent on the war in Afghanistan. One of the reasons why that’s a marker of impact is because when he cited a dollar figure, he was also citing an argument.
He said, two trillion, according to researchers at Brown University, as opposed to one trillion, which is what the Pentagon had at that point assessed was the cost of the war in Afghanistan. What we had said was, you have to take into account the fact that we have to care for veterans of these wars. You have to pay for interest on war borrowing. You have to account for increases to Pentagon budget and Homeland Security and all of these things are part of paying for war. So, when he cited our figures instead of the Pentagon’s figures, which would have been the more convenient number for him to choose, he was also, in effect, citing this larger argument about war costs. That felt like an important moment as well.
BC: Those are both really powerful examples, because, you know, as researchers, we don’t have a membership group and have advocacy component. We’re not running for office, right? We tend to be critical across the board. We’re nonpartisan. But what we do, is we put out information in a way that we hope will be meaningful to people who are doing those activities. Your examples powerfully show that impact.
We’re thrilled to collaborate with you this year. Our audience can look forward to some very insightful research coming out this year.
SS: Thank you. I’m so looking forward to it. I’m very grateful for this partnership.
