Counting the cost of war

One of only nineteen genuine American military heroes to receive two separate Congressional Medals of Honor, Smedley D. Butler is a Marine Corps legend. The Corps even named Camp Butler, its major base on Okinawa, for him. Thus, discovering that he, post-retirement from the Corps, had written a 1938 polemic against war, War Is a Racket, was a surprise.


Like any polemic, Butler's argument is overly simplistic. However, he reveals an ugly truth about most wars that too many people want to ignore. Butler contends that nations fight wars because the war benefits elites and businesses that supply the military. These groups bear little of the cost of war, which taxpayers and military personnel shoulder.

Butler’s analysis of the price that military personnel pay is especially worth noting (his statistics highlight the cost of World War I from the perspective of the 1930s):

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face." This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

This valiant, combat proven warrior wrote, long before anyone had coined the term, about “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). He wrote from personal experience and observation.

The true costs of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the United States are far higher than the national debt incurred to fund the war and death toll. (For a current count of the number of American and coalition personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, cf. iCasualties: Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom Casualties). The true costs Butler identified also included the non-quantifiable sacrifices military personnel and their loved ones incur through the forced separations (cf. my blog, “Ethical Musings: The price military families pay for war”). Nobody will full know the toll from PTSD and other, less visible wounds among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans for decades.

Of course, the total cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq include not only the costs borne by the United States and its allies, but also the costs to Afghanistan and Iraq: deaths, other casualties, destroyed infrastructure, ruined lives, etc. That a majority of people in both of those countries believe that the time has long passed when the U.S. should have withdrawn its forces is one excellent indicator that the people of those nations do not believe the war worth the cost they have paid. The people of those countries are in a much better position to know the cost and morally to make that assessment than are the leaders of this nation.