Following the 2003 Iraq war, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected the U.S. had spent $500 billion in direct costs on the conflict, but economics and policy experts Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes begged to differ. In a 2006 study, they calculated the war was in fact four times as expensive as what the CBO had calculated, costing U.S. taxpayers more than $2 trillion in their moderate estimate. In 2013, Bilmes revised the costs and concluded about $4 trillion to $6 trillion was spent on both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
The U.S. is once again locked in conflict in the Middle East, and Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy lecturer and author of “The Ghost Budget: U.S. War Spending and Fiscal Transparency,” is once again sounding the alarm on the true cost of war.
