Powerful video as an enraged veteran, Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas, rants against the NYPD for their harsh tactics against protesters in Times Square. Watch the horde of blue and white shirts silently back off from him: What could they possibly say?
"This is not war! This is America! How do you sleep at night? There is no honor in this! There is no honor in this! None!
Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.
Wounded soldiers attend the opening of the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio, Texas on January 29, 2007. To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Ben Sklar / Getty Images)
Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.
To date, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon spending spree that accompanied it and a battery of new homeland security measures instituted after Sept. 11.
How have we paid for this? Entirely through borrowing. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than one-quarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And not only did we fail to pay as we went for the wars, theGeorge W. Bush administration also successfully pushed to cut taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, which added further to the debt. This toxic combination of lower revenues and higher spending has brought the country to its current political stalemate.
There is only one other time in U.S. history that a war was financed entirely through borrowing, without raising taxes: when the Colonies borrowed from France during the Revolutionary War.
Even if we were to leave Afghanistan and Iraq tomorrow, our war debt would continue to rise for decades. Future bills will include such things as caring for military veterans, replacing military equipment, rebuilding the armed forces and paying interest on all the money we have borrowed. And these costs won't be insignificant.
History has shown that the cost of caring for military veterans peaks decades after a conflict. Already, half of the returning troops have been treated in Veterans Administration medical centers, and more than 600,000 have qualified to receive disability compensation. At this point, the bill for future medical and disability benefits is estimated at $600 billion to $900 billion, but the number will almost surely grow as hundreds of thousands of troops still deployed abroad return home.
And it isn't just in some theoretical future that the wars will affect the nation's economy: They already have. The conditions that precipitated the financial crisis in 2008 were shaped in part by the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq and the resulting instability in the Persian Gulf were among the factors that pushed oil prices up from about $30 a barrel in 2003 to historic highs five years later, peaking at $140 a barrel in current dollars in 2008. Higher oil prices threatened to depress U.S. economic activity, prompting the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and loosen regulations. These policies were major contributors to the housing bubble and the financial collapse that followed.
Now, the war's huge deficits are shaping the economic debate, and they could keep Congress from enacting another round of needed stimulus spending to help the country climb out of its economic malaise. Many of these war debts are likely to continue to compromise America's investments in its future for decades.
For years, the public failed to adequately question how it was possible that we could spend and borrow so freely, with so few consequences. But now the painful legacy of these decisions has become clear. Throughout the past decade, Congress routinely approved huge "emergency" appropriations to pay for the wars. This process preempted the usual scrutiny and debate that accompanies large spending bills. In part, this is because the U.S. lacks the basic accounting tools necessary for informed debate. Our future debts from the war are not listed anywhere in the federal government's budget. We don't even know for certain where the money has been spent. The Pentagon hasn't produced a clean financial audit in the 20 years since government auditing began, nor has it developed an accounting framework that would allow an assessment of the future costs of current decisions. This has almost certainly increased the overall cost of the war.
Our response to Sept. 11 has weakened both the current economy and our future economic prospects. And that legacy of economic weakness — combined with the erosion of the credibility of our military power and of our "soft power" — has undermined, rather than strengthened, our national security.
Nearly 10 years into the Afghanistan war, the violence in that country shows little sign of abating. August was the deadliest month of the war yet for U.S. troops, and there were also multiple attacks on Afghan security forces, government officials and civilians. The surge in violence comes as NATO is drawing down and handing over security control to national forces. But tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through the end of 2014.
The costs of fighting the war on terror have already been far higher than they needed to be. The U.S. should not take on even greater war debt without understanding the true costs of continuing down that path.
On February 15, 2011, fifteen female and two male military veterans filed a class action lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and current Defense Secretary Robert Gates. A second round of plaintiffs will likely be announced in early April. These veterans have charged the defendants with the wholesale and systematic failure to protect service members from being oftentimes repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted while serving in the military; and with a failure to investigate and subsequently prosecute and punish perpetrators.
The complaint reads like a horror story. One gruesome account after another detailing brutal assaults; sometimes repeated and sometimes committed by multiple perpetrators. Rapes and sexual assaults that are ignored and if not ignored so callously prosecuted within the Military Code of Justice as to suggest that rape is nothing more than a minor infraction deserving of little punishment, if any. A system set up to hide evidence, encourage victims to recant, and when the victim tries to receive some semblance of justice they are generally rewarded with demotions, harassment, and shockingly further rapes and sexual assaults as punishment. Victims are warned to stay quiet or face dire consequences. The brave victims are blamed – the women in particular were just asking for it.
One victim in the lawsuit recounted being gang raped; the perpetrators videotaped the rape and then circulated it among other soldiers. When the victim reported the rape to her superior officer, who then viewed the video recording, he told her bluntly that he did not believe she was raped because she “did not act like a rape victim” and “did not struggle enough” in the video. This same victim was seriously injured and covered in severe bruises after the assault --- particularly from her shoulders to her elbows from being held down during the repeated rapes.
Another victim was threatened with a court martial if she continued to “lie” about being raped by her superior officer. Because she deigned to report the rape, as well as the months of sexual harassment and physical abuse she had endured prior to the actual rape, her identity was revealed to others on the military base by her commanding officers. She was subjected to harassment from other soldiers who spit on her, called her names, and one commanding officer said “let her burn” because “she ruins careers.”
Yet another victim that reported her rape to the military chaplain was told that “it must have been God’s will for her to be raped” and he then suggested that she needed to go to church more. Still another victim who was raped in 2007 was later murdered and then buried in a shallow fire pit six months after reporting the rape.
The ramshackle investigatory apparatus and reporting system in place is staffed with military personnel who are often completely unqualified to investigate these crimes. The Department of Defense’s (DOD) token attempt to address the epidemic by creating the very limited and still underfunded “…Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), which distributes posters, collects data, but has no enforcement or investigative authority…” has been a constant reminder of how the military thumbs its nose at any attempts to implement genuine reform. In fact, the director of SAPRO, Dr. Kaye Whitley, has absolutely no experience or training dealing with sexual violence. Greg Jacob, the Policy Director for the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), said that Whitley, a social worker, has no real access to policy makers. She has no enforcement, or investigatory authority, and no actual authority to really do anything at all. The Pentagon even went so far as to ignore a subpoena and prevent Dr. Whitley from testifying before the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs in July 2008.
Specifically, Secretary Gates is accused of ignoring specific Congressional mandates and deadlines designed to implement a sexual assault and harassment prevention system. Instead, plaintiffs allege that Gates hired an inexperienced contractor to implement that prevention system – and that the contractor that was selected had only three employees and their prior contracts were solely for janitorial work. The Washington Post reported on this specific contractor story debacle on November 26, 2010. The inexcusable lack of seriousness with which this epidemic has been treated by the Pentagon truly shocks the conscience.
SWAN Policy Director and former Marine Greg Jacob recently detailed the crux of the investigatory deficiencies within the military for these types of crimes. He stated “[t]here’s no investigatory training. They don’t tell you to look for evidence…Instead, they hand over a manual for courts martial, which explains, among other things, that the investigating officer should consider, first and foremost, ‘the character and military service of the accused’.” Jacob described the assessment of each reported crime as “…an HR approach to criminal conduct…Military justice imbued me with the ability to be judge and jury. Honestly, I had no idea what to do.”
It almost sounds impossible to believe – how the DOD has ignored this growing epidemic for years and still no one has been held accountable. Where is the outrage – and where are the resignations? Donald Rumsfeld has not been held to answer for his knowing refusal to implement reform measures mandated by Congress. And on Rumsfeld’s recent book tour, not once during his numerous interviews did any journalist ask a single question about this issue. Meanwhile, Secretary Gates has responded with vague acknowledgments of a clear problem but with no specific response regarding his own failures to address the problem of what can only be characterized as complicity in perpetuating the problem.
An August 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report detailing the results of a 2006 survey of 3,750 servicemembers stationed in the U.S. and overseas concluded that:
…occurrences of sexual assault may be exceeding the rates being reported, suggesting that DOD and the Coast Guard have only limited visibility over the incidence of these occurrences. At the 14 installations where GAO administered its survey, 103 servicemembers indicated that they had been sexually assaulted within the preceding 12 months. Of these, 52 servicemembers indicated that they did not report the sexual assault. GAO also found that factors that discourage servicemembers from reporting a sexual assault include the belief that nothing would be done; fear of ostracism, harassment, or ridicule; and concern that peers would gossip.
Despite the inescapable evidence that this problem is getting worse with each passing year the DOD still maintains that it has a zero tolerance policy for sexual assault in the ranks.
So now these seventeen brave veterans have gone public – with news conferences and repeated interviews – detailing the horrific assaults they have endured and the aftermath of deigning to report these crimes.
The problems for these victims do not get any better when they return home. Shamed, traumatized, and psychologically scarred – suffering from a form of post traumatic stress disorder known as military sexual trauma (MST) – these victims are so disabled that they cannot function let alone find employment. To add further insult to this disgraceful treatment of the women and men victimized by the DOD’s recalcitrance, these victims have found it next to impossible to receive disability compensation from the Veterans Administration (VA) for their resulting MST. The main reasons being a lack of evidence, evidence being destroyed, and a patently unfair evidentiary burden that victims finds nearly impossible to satisfy. Representative Chellie Pingree (D - ME) recently introduced legislation to redress this specific compensation issue. H.R. 930 will “…mandate that survivors of military sexual violence get the same service-connected disability compensation for their mental health conditions and physical injuries that combat veterans are currently awarded for wounds of war.”
A previous lawsuit filed last December has also charged the DOD with a failure to comply with numerous and ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documentation regarding the military’s records detailing the reports, investigations, and subsequent dispositions of these crimes.
And the statistics are indeed staggering. In December 2010, the Pentagon released its annual report on sexual harassment and violence – and the number of reports increased 64 percent from the previous year.
Last December, Al Jazeera reported the following shocking statistics:
Every year, rape increases at an alarming rate within American military institutions – and even males are victims of the cycle. In fact, due to raw demographics, one can roughly surmise that most victims of sexual abuse in the military are male. Regardless of gender, reports of victims of military sexual assault have been increasing. In 2007, there were 2,200 reports of rape in the military, whilst in 2009 saw an increase up to 3,230 reports of sexual assault. Many of the victims suffer from Military Sexual Trauma (MST) and are shamed into silence, with numerous cases not even reported. A disturbing trend, however, is how military officials seem to be sweeping this damaging issue under the rug and deflecting blame.
Even more disturbing is the fact that “[a]ccording to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the rate of sexual assault on women in the military is twice that in the civilian population.” Furthermore, “[c]ompared with a 40 per cent arrest rate for sex crimes among civilians, only eight per cent of investigated cases in the military lead to prosecution.”
In 2006 Congress required the Pentagon to begin tracking these reported crimes and their subsequent disposition. Al Jazeera reported that in 2006:
…there were 2,974 reported cases of rape and sexual assault in the military. Of these, only 292 cases resulted in trials, and those netted only 181 prosecutions of perpetrators. Nearly half the cases are dismissed for lack of adequate proof or due to the death of the victim. Less than 11 per cent of the cases result in a court martial. Often, those prosecuted merely suffer a reduction in rank or pay, and 80 per cent receive an honourable discharge nonetheless. The victim, on the other hand, risks ending his or her career when they file charges.
Last week the Air Force released a study finding that 1 in 5 women and 1 in 20 men have been sexually assaulted while serving in the Air Force.
Speaking with SWAN’s Policy Director Greg Jacob, he discussed the current status of the litigation and how SWAN has been working to garner increased bipartisan support for legislative and regulatory reform within the military and the VA. He believes Congress has the political will to act and that the issue is being taken seriously now that the class action lawsuit has been filed. He told me that even though the victims desperately need to be compensated for their disabilities, what these women and men are really seeking is real reform and justice for their suffering and help for those women and men dealing with the threats of sexual violence each and every day while still trying to serve the nation with honor.
But real change can only be achieved when the military begins to consider the seriousness of the crimes and the impact on the victims as paramount to any potential impact on the careers of the accused servicemembers; right now the concern within the military is focused solely on protecting the accused and not the victims. The military has become an entrenched system that all too easily blames victims – and retaliates against those victims with systematic harassment and intimidation. Victims are subjected to ridicule and they all too often become convinced that the shame will be too much to bear.
Real change will take time – but before that change can even begin the military and Secretary Gates must take responsibility for refusing to confront the problem and acknowledge the military’s complicity in obstructing justice for so many years and creating what Greg Jacob called a “climate of impunity.”
You can visit SWAN’s Change.org page to take action and let Congress know that the Armed Forces must be held accountable for perpetuating this rape and sexual assault epidemic.
