“We are at war with al Qaeda,” French Prime Minister François Fillon said a week ago today. These comments, a July 26 statement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and a trip last week to West Africa by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner lay the foundation for what may be a significant increase in French counterterrorism activities in West Africa.

A violent Islamist, al Qaeda-sponsored insurgency has raged in the region for almost two decades now – beginning in Algeria in the 1990s and spreading south to the Sahelian region of the Saharan desert in the last ten years. As of yet, the terrorists based in the area have not conducted a significant operation outside the region. However, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, has managed to target Western interests in the region and capture a number of Western hostages. The group strayed from its traditional practice of exchanging such captives for ransom payments in two high-profile incidents in the past year. In June 2009, it killed Edwin Dyer, a British citizen, after the British government refused to release Abu Qatadah, once known as bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe. Most recently, on July 24, the group executed the French hostage Michel Germaneau.

Germaneau’s death has gripped the French nation – understandably so – since AQIM released footage of Germaneau pleading for his life in mid-May and complaining that he had run out of medicine for a heart condition. Security developments in North Africa have long played a central role in the French national psyche: the Algerian war for independence from France hastened the downfall of the French Fourth Republic and Charles de Gaulle’s subsequent rise to power.

Terrorism, some of it linked to Algeria, continues to dominate French security policy today. AEI resident scholar and CDS contributor Gary Schmitt writes in Safety, Liberty, and Islamist Terrorism, “The French government’s assessment is ‘that the threat to our country has never been so great’ – quite a statement for a country that has been dealing with terrorism for many years and sees sangfroid as the epitome of virtue.” Schmitt, in an in-depth history of French counterterrorism policy, goes on to assess that the experience of the French national security infrastructure and judicial system in dealing with terror, along with a national acceptance of the necessity of potentially intrusive security measures and military action abroad, have uniquely protected France against the danger from violent Islamist groups. Indeed, in 2007, Schmitt and Reuel Marc Gerecht asserted “that France is the European country most serious about counterterrorism.” The continued lack of a major attack in France – despite the tragedies suffered in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 by France’s neighbors – undoubtedly has much to do with French measures to prevent terrorism on its soil. Continue Reading ››

In a speech delivered today to the Disabled American Veterans Convention, President Obama announced that the war in Iraq is about to reach another milestone—“the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq” and the reduction in forces to the promised 50,000 troop benchmark.  As he reminded the American people, however, “the hard truth is we have not seen the end of American sacrifice in Iraq.”  The latter remark highlights, perhaps, the key takeaway message.  Seven years after the war started, the Iraq war remains unfinished, its legacy indeterminate, its future uncertain.

This is the second time a president has declared that the war in Iraq was over.  In May 2003, then President George W. Bush gave his ill-fated address onboard the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.  Speaking against the backdrop of a large “Mission Accomplished” banner, he declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and that “in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”  As we now know, the war in Iraq was far from over.  And while the conventional side of the war in Iraq may have ended, we were just at the start of a protracted counterinsurgency—one that has continued until today.

Comparing the two presidential speeches, the contrast could not be starker.  Bush’s speech epitomized the so-called “Bush doctrine,” a Wilsonian-like vision of making the world safe for democracy.  It was chock-full of references to the end of tyranny, promotion of freedom, and the preservation of liberty, references that seem hopelessly naïve given the chaos that lay in store for the country over the next seven years.   By contrast, Obama’s speech lacked the same attempt at grand strategy.  It contained neutral, if anodyne, references to transitioning to “full Iraqi responsibility”—whatever future they might choose—and equally vague references to “progress,” defined as declining levels of violence, but no more.  Instead of Bush’s outward-looking vision, through which he and his administration had wanted to reshape the world stage, for better or worse, Obama’s Iraq speech was more inwardly focused—how the war divided and continues to divide the country.  Perhaps, most of all, however, the tone of the two speeches are dramatically different: if the Bush speech was optimistic to a fault, Obama’s speech suffered from being overly bland.  He did not forecast what lies in store for the country and the region, or express a more reflective opinion for what Iraq has meant for American foreign policy—good, bad, or otherwise.  He merely stated the unfalsifiable truth that operations in Iraq will change and thanked the veterans for their service.

In some ways, Obama’s speech is more notable for what it does not say: it reflects the unfinished legacy of Iraq, one that he is reluctant to write.  Understandably, he does not want to be caught in the same overstatements as his predecessor.  He finds himself trapped between his party and his own opposition to the war on the one hand, but also, his desire to not be the president who lost a war—which most admit, if reluctantly, was at least on the upswing when he took office.  To his credit and in contrast to his earlier Iraq speeches, Obama did not use the speech to bash the decisions of his predecessor, but nor did he want not to associate his administration with the still controversial war.  And so, Obama will let history give the verdict on the Iraq war—ideally with as little reference to himself as possible.

What that verdict will be, however, remains very much open to debate.  Indeed, we saw one reflection of this debate in the past couple days, as the Iraqis and the American military command debated casualty levels for the month of July.  More importantly, larger questions—such as who will comprise the next Iraqi government, what will be in the influence of Iran or how will Iraq cope with own ethnic and religious divisions—remain unanswered.  Arguably, whether the Iraq war is viewed as a success or a failure will depend largely on how these issues play out over the coming decades.  Iraq may very well live up to Bush’s hopes for it—becoming a functioning, if imperfect democracy in the heart of the Arab world, or it may relapse into sectarian strife or worse, become an Iranian proxy state.

For most Americans, Iraq has already begun to fade into history—supplanted in the headlines by the war in Afghanistan, the financial crisis and the Gulf oil disaster.  Indeed, it is striking how little Iraq is mentioned in mainstream media these days, especially considering how much it dominated the daily news coverage for a half dozen years.  While the Iraq war may be out of sight and out of mind for most Americans today though, it is not a done deal. And so, perhaps, the lesson of today’s speech is some ways the same as the first “end of combat” in Iraq speech seven years ago.  Presidents may be able to declare the end of formal hostilities, but the actual end of wars, much less their historical impact, is something else entirely.

A former active duty US Army intelligence officer, Raphael S. Cohen is a Government Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University.  He served in Iraq between August 2005 and July 2006 and again, between September 2007 and October 2008.

(U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway)

Once in a while, we stumble across a simple solution to a seemingly impenetrable conundrum.  And there is no more confusing process on the planet than Pentagon procurement.  That it results in many amazingly effective combat systems for U.S. troops is a mystery and a tribute to the men, women, and companies that build the gear.  But, especially since the end of the Cold War and the resulting drawdown, the process has become increasingly sclerotic.

The periodic intrusion of human greed into the process further fuels the unfortunate impulse to reform by ever-more-complex regulation.  Rather than simply holding people to account for their misdeeds and, where laws are broken, prosecuting them, Congress—where the urge to regulate the defense industry transcends party or ideology—has added layer upon layer of red tape.  Alas, this only increases the opportunities and incentives for further mischief, while deep-freezing an already glacial procurement system.

And when war imposes change—as it did beginning in Iraq after the invasion—and enemy action demands that new equipment be fielded rapidly, the system short circuits.  To begin with, the normal order of business cannot satisfy the need.  Think of how difficult it was to get the Army and Marine Corps to buy the first Mine Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicles.  And so then purchases are made outside the set procurement rules.  Too often, the final act of the tragedy is the after-the-fact investigation that “uncovers” program irregularities.

But suppose that the Pentagon’s procurement system put a value—even a premium—on time.  As it happens, this is the key to untying the Gordian knot of acquisition, as the Independent Quadrennial Defense Review Panel argues in its just-released report.  The panel’s recommendation that new systems be fielded within just 5 to 7 years—as opposed to the decades now required—is both the simplest but potentially most important procurement reform.  There is an almost perfect correlation between rapid fielding, good program management, low cost, and system performance.  Conversely, long development times make for program nightmares.

This near-term development horizon does not mean that systems shouldn’t, can’t, or won’t be upgraded over long service life.  Quite the contrary: Air Force pilots are flying an “E” model of the F-15, and tankers are driving a who-knows-what edition of the M1 Abrams.  Yes, the particular platforms are aging, but the models have been consistently superior.

This would also reverse the common and conventional calculus of the past generation.  But the Pentagon has gotten itself into trouble by developing more systems than it could ever buy and then parking them in a holding pattern, jacking up the cost while the technology becomes obsolescent.

Rapid procurement would also be a boost to the defense industry, making its business cycle—and its ability to finance itself—more predictable.  And, while it wouldn’t change human nature or abolish greed, imposing such limits would also limit the opportunities for hanky-panky.

The QDR panel was brought to life by a Congress increasingly frustrated with the problems of defense planning.  And with a procurement funding now under strain, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is searching his department for $10 to $15 billion in “overhead” savings.  In the context of a near-$140 billion procurement budget, implementing a sensible buy-it-quick policy might well meet Gates’ target.

(DoD photo by Cherie Cullen)

For the past several months I’ve been helping former defense secretary William Perry, ex-national security advisor Steve Hadley and the other members of the “Independent Quadrennial Defense Review Panel”—a blue-ribbon body created by Congress to assess the Pentagon’s aging and infirm four-year strategy-and-force-planning process.  Today Perry and Hadley will present the report to the House Armed Services Committee, and their unstated but obvious goal is to provoke a long-overdue national discussion about U.S. defense requirements.  What follows is one staffer’s spin—a kind of reader’s guide—to the report.

Coverage of the report thus far—here’s a surprise—has focused on the panel’s critique of the QDR.  And it’s certainly true that the panel strongly felt that although the 2010 QDR’s focus on fighting current wars was correct, that the Pentagon had failed to properly prepare for the future.  If anything, the Obama Administration is proving itself more myopic than the Bush Administration.

But the rear-view mirror criticisms are not really the news; what would really mark success for the panel is to spark a conversation about the future.  To begin with, the panel’s succinct definition of the enduring missions for U.S. armed forces gives clearer guidance to defense planners than the entire library of past QDRs or national security strategies.  Rather than trying to divine a planning benchmark from these impenetrable texts—how many aircraft carriers are needed to fulfill the 2006 National Security Strategy’s mandate to “engage the opportunities and confront the challenges of globalization?”—the panel chose to study how Americans have actually made strategy over the course of the last 100 years. Across a broad political spectrum, panel members agreed that the structure of U.S. strategy reflected a global perspective with four components: defend the American homeland; retain assured access to the so-called “commons” of the seas, air, space and cyberspace; preserve a favorable balance of power across the Eurasian landmass; and provide for the global “common good.”  The panel’s consensus was that these strategic principles should be followed in the 21^st century as well, and that “America cannot abandon its leadership role.”

Having determined what they wanted the future to look like—rather than attempting, as past such reports have done, to precisely predict the future—the panel then found it fairly easy to understand the challenges of the coming decades.  Salafist terror groups will remain a clear and present danger.  But the panel recognized that, in the middle distance, larger geopolitical forces were at work—the rise of new global great powers in China and India—and that the acquisition of nuclear weapons would fuel Iran’s long-held desire to dominate the volatile and critical Persian Gulf.  Further heightening the prospects for conflict in the region was the developed and developing world’s need for natural resources, especially energy.  The panel also expects irregular wars in failed and failing states to be a constant feature of international life, providing sanctuary not only for terrorists but criminal groups with global reach, great wealth, and very dangerous military capacity.

The panel concluded that while these emerging conditions did create the need and opportunity for international cooperation, the most striking feature for the foreseeable future would be the continued demand for American “hard power.”  As through history, security is the first order of international business.  No other nation has the “system operator” capacity to provide anything like the guarantees that America gives, and the new rising powers of China and India have little immediate desire to take on such responsibilities; they have the ability to disrupt the current order, but not the power to bring order out of chaos.

And so the panel found it relatively easy to do what the 2010 QDR did not: establish a force-sizing construct for defense planning purposes.  (Of all the problems of the recent QDR, this represents a cardinal failure; setting the size and capabilities of the U.S. military is the prime directive of any defense review.)  With overwhelming conservative and Republican-appointee agreement, the panel looked back to the very first post-Cold War review, the Clinton Administration’s 1993 Bottom-Up Review, as the minimum expression of the requirements for U.S. global military power.  As the report puts it:

U.S. defense strategy for the near and long term must continue to shape the international environment to advance U.S. interests, maintain the capability to respond to the full spectrum of threats, and prepare for the threats and dangers of tomorrow. Underlying this strategy is the inescapable reality that, as a global power with global interests to protect, the United States must remain diplomatically, economically, and militarily engaged with the world. To do so requires confidence, both at home and abroad, that the United States can and will continue to play a leading role in world affairs and can and will defend its homeland; guarantee access to global commerce, freedom of the seas, international airspace, and space; and maintain a balance of power in Europe and Asia that protects America—all while preserving the peace and sustaining a climate conducive to global economic growth.

To do this our nation needs adequate military force levels. In the absence of a force planning construct indicating otherwise, the Panel recommends the force structure be sized, at a minimum, at the end strength outlined in the 1993 Bottom Up Review. We further recommend the Department‘s inventory be thoroughly recapitalized and modernized, and special emphasis be placed on continuing the improvements in cyber defense and the effective use of the reserve components in civil defense and to respond to an attack on the homeland.

In such light, the inadequacies of the Obama Administration’s defense plans are plain, particularly in regard to the Navy, now just 288 ships, whereas the Clinton Administration planned for 346.  Such an expansion, along with accelerated Air Force modernization, is key to preserving a favorable global great-power balance, and the panel also saw the need to shift U.S. posture toward the Asia-Pacific:

First, as a Pacific power, the U.S. presence in Asia has underwritten the regional stability that has enabled India and China to emerge as rising economic powers. The United States should plan on continuing that role for the indefinite future. The Panel remains concerned that the QDR force structure may not be sufficient to assure others that the United States can meet its treaty commitments in the face of China‘s increased military capabilities….[W] e recommend an increased priority on defeating anti-access and area-denial threats…. Specifically, we believe the United States must fully fund the modernization of its surface fleet. We also believe the United States must be able to deny an adversary sanctuary by providing persistent surveillance, tracking, and rapid engagement with high-volume precision strike. That is why the Panel supports an increase in investment in long-range strike systems and their associated sensors. In addition, U.S. forces must develop and demonstrate the ability to operate in an information-denied environment.

Finally, if delicately, the panel understands the need, despite the government’s fiscal problems, for increased defense spending. Nor did it agree that “management efficiencies,” reductions in “overhead costs” or the elimination of “waste, fraud and abuse” would be sufficient.  “We cannot reverse the decline of shipbuilding, buy enough naval aircraft, recapitalize Army equipment, modernize tactical aircraft, purchase a new aerial tanker, increase our deep-strike capability, and recapitalize the bomber fleet just by saving the $10 billion–$15 billion the Department hopes to save through acquisition reform—even if those savings can be achieved and even if they are left in the defense budget. Meeting the crucial requirements of modernization will require a substantial and immediate additional investment that is sustained through the long term.”

Blue-ribbon panels are too often apt to merely enshrine Establishment wisdom.  When they don’t—and the Independent QDR Panel’s report is nothing if not a challenge to the emerging consensus on the Left and Right about American imperial overstretch—they deserve at least “man-bites-dog” attention.  Sure, I’m being an advocate for a report I helped draft, but I’m only echoing the sense of urgency the members felt: “The potential consequences for the United States of a business-as usual-attitude towards the concerns in this Report are not acceptable.”

(DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class John M. Hageman, U.S. Navy/Released)

Tomorrow, the bipartisan independent panel tasked by Congress to review the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review will release a report of its conclusions and recommendations. The panel’s chairmen, former defense secretary William Perry and former national security advisor Stephen Hadley, will also be testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on the group’s findings.

Early reports suggest that the panel pulls few punches in its critique of current DOD force structure, modernization, and cost-saving plans. According to Defense News, in the report’s introduction, panelists state that “We are concerned by what we see as a growing gap between our interests and our military capability to protect those interests in the face of a complex and challenging security environment.” Later, the panel notes that “We cannot reverse the decline of shipbuilding, buy enough naval aircraft, recapitalize Army equipment, buy the F-35 requirement, purchase a new aerial tanker, increase deep strike capability, and recapitalize the bomber fleet just by saving $10-15 billion dollars that the Department of Defense hopes to save through acquisition reform.”

In a statement released this morning, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, explained that “The Independent Panel report accomplished what the 2010 QDR failed to do: it took a look at the challenges our military will face beyond the next five years and made recommendations—free of budgetary constraints—about the type of force and capabilities our military will need for tomorrow.”  McKeon went on:

The report rightly states that our nation ‘cannot afford business as usual’, and warns that a ‘potential train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition and force structure.’ Most importantly, the report offers a realist view of the global security environment: to maintain and grow our alliances will place an increased demand on American hard power and require an increase in the military‘s force structure.

This bipartisan report repudiates those seeking a peace dividend and reaffirms the need to prioritize investment in our national defense.

Rep. McKeon’s statement features a number of other key excerpts from the forthcoming report. Expect further analysis of the document here tomorrow, following its official release.

(Photo: flickr/mindfrieze)

It was, as Stanley McChrystal himself said, an occasion “that had the potential to be awkward:” a retirement speech from a commanding general whose own shortcomings precipitated a tragic fall.  Fifty years ago, Douglas MacArthur rose to a somewhat similar occasion with his melodramatic “Duty, Honor, Country” address, a beautiful bit of speechifying but one, in retrospect, that seems also rife with the treacly sentiments that came so easily to MacArthur.

But at his Fort McNair farewell last week, McChrystal chose self-deprecation over self-pity, wry humor over grandiose rhetoric, specific names and places over faceless long gray lines and the crash of guns.  It was fitting of a war and a man who had to measure half-steps toward victory in a small war rather than the oceanic shifts of battlefronts in a world war.

Indeed, the longest segment and most ambitious part of McChrystal’s speech honored his wife, Annie.  This is, of course, a mandatory rite in any retirement speech, but McChrystal’s career has hardly been one of a garrison soldier, and one can well imagine that Mrs. McChrystal has spent many, many hours alone, not knowing her husband’s whereabouts but sure in the knowledge that his mission was a dangerous one.  McChrystal honored her with a long passage from Stephen Pressfield’s The Gates of Fire, his evocation of the Spartans at Thermopylae.  As King Leonidas explains to one of the wives of the 300 sent to defend the pass:

“I chose [these warriors] not for their valor, lady, but for that of their women….[W]hen the battle is over, when the 300 have gone to death, then all Greece will look to the Spartans to see how they bear it.  But who, lady, will the Spartans look to?  To you.  To you and the other wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of the fallen.

If they behold your hearts riven and broken with grief, they too will break and Greece will break with them.  But if you bear up, dry eyed, not alone enduring your loss but seizing it with contempt for its agony and embracing it as the honor that it is in truth, then Sparta will stand and all Greece will stand behind her.”

McChrystal summarized in his own words: “To all who wear no uniform but give so much…my thanks.”

One of the results of America’s experiment in a large-scale, professional, “all-volunteer” force has been a distancing of the warrior class from society at large.  There is much reason to worry about this, and to try to break down the distance even while understanding that the condition is chronic and all but inevitable.  Most of us wear no uniform and never will.  We don’t give much, beyond paying taxes and perhaps passing up an airline seat—for which we expect bonus miles.  Nor can we directly know the grief that the wives and families of the dead and wounded know.  But the practice of bestowing honor on soldiers uplifts the rest of us as well as them.  It is an essential expression of a virtuous society and a critical component of healthy civil-military relations.

It is too much to say that nothing became Stanley McChrystal like the leaving of service, for his service was superb; Defense Secretary Robert Gates remarked at the ceremony that no one had done our post-9/11 enemies more harm than had McChrystal, and I can quite believe that.  Nonetheless, his retirement speech was a lovely grace note under what might have been awkward circumstances indeed.  To the last, the general sublimated self to service.

(Photo: flickr/U.S. Embassy Kabul Afghanistan)

Last Friday, Rajiv Chandrasekaran reported in the Washington Post on the increasing regional uneasiness about Pakistan’s growing influence in Afghanistan. India in particular is concerned about Hamid Karzai’s recent rapprochement with Islamabad and his apparent enthusiasm for reconciliation with elements of the insurgency.

The United States faces a difficult balancing act in managing its strategic partnerships with South Asia’s archrival duo. On the one hand, Pakistan’s cooperation and assistance remains vital to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, as well as to the United States’ drone campaign along the Af-Pak border.  As Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke noted during his recent visit to New Delhi, “You cannot stabilize Afghanistan without the participation of Pakistan as a legitimate concerned party.” On the other hand, India is a rising power with enormous potential as a partner beyond the region, and it continues to make valuable contributions to Afghanistan’s reconstruction and development.

Last week, the rhetorical scales seemed to tip slightly in India’s favor. While in New Delhi, Holbrooke made clear that “the links between the ISI and the Taliban are a problem” and “[the] U.S. has spoken to the Pakistan government and the military on ISI links with the Taliban.” Admiral Mike Mullen, who was also in the Indian capital last week, reiterated during a brief trip to Pakistan his concerns about the growing regional, even global, threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group which India rightly perceives as one of the chief threats to its security. His comments, along with the launch of the new U.S.-India Counterterrorism Cooperation Initiative, should go some ways in reducing Indian anxieties about the United States’ commitment to combating terrorism and extremism regionally.

In the Post story, I was most surprised to see an unnamed U.S. official acknowledging that “India, perhaps more than any outside country, has the greatest stake in our success in Afghanistan.” I was recently cited making a similar observation in an article about India’s evolving strategy in Afghanistan: in short, of the states in the region, India’s interests in Afghanistan are most thoroughly aligned with those of the United States. India’s advisory efforts within key Afghan ministries represents a desire to see an Afghan government that functions effectively and, eventually, independently. At the same time, its infrastructure development projects, medical missions, and academic exchange programs have won India broad support among the Afghan population.

The United States has not always provided full-throated support for India’s role in Afghanistan’s reconstruction, as it was believed that Pakistan’s inevitable protests would derail U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in the country. But to the degree that this view continues to wane, the United States, Afghanistan, and India will only find their shared interests better served.

(DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/Released)

Back in April, I wrote about the delayed release of DOD’s annual report on Chinese military power. The report is now four months late, and Senators John Cornyn (R-Tx.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), James E. Risch (R-Idaho), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), and James Inhofe (R-Ok.) have written a letter to Secretary Gates asking for its immediate delivery to Congress. That the White House continues to hold up the report’s release—in contravention of the law, by the way—is further evidence of this administration’s questionable support for a strong defense. The report is due annually in March so that it can inform the summer’s debates over the new year’s national defense authorization act. In delaying the report, which DOD finished drafting months ago, the White House is ensuring that Congress does not have an honest discussion about the threats facing the country and about how best to respond to those threats.

This, of course, is part of a pattern. The 2009 QDR, which should have informed the FY2010 NDAA, was not released until four months after the NDAA was signed. In similar fashion, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review was released in April only two days before the signing of New START—not exactly enough time to allow for Congressional input on the treaty.

For political, budgetary, and ideological reasons, the Obama administration has certain things it wishes to accomplish. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it’s not going to let the country’s defense requirements stand in its way.

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication 1st Class Tiffini M. Jones/Released)

Yesterday, the New York Times featured an article comparing the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to those of previous major U.S. conflicts. Titled “A Trillion Can Be Cheap,” the piece explains that the wars since September 11, 2001, with their combined $1 trillion price tag, are the second most expensive American military endeavors in U.S. history; the first is World War II, which cost $4 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

The story then goes on to make a number of critical points that put those figures in greater perspective. The most important of these illustrates the burden of the wars on the economy, by calculating the costs of the conflicts as a percentage of GDP. Whereas at the peak of spending, the costs of World War II amounted to nearly 36% of GDP, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have at their highest point only ever represented 1.2% GDP—less than World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. (The graphics associated with the story illustrate this well).

Other factors that have driven up the costs of the current conflicts, the article notes, include the extent of the advanced technology employed on the battlefield today, as well as the expense of fielding and maintaining an all-volunteer force. As Gary Schmitt noted recently in related testimony, the wars in Vietnam or Korea would have been far more costly had they been fought with professional, volunteer forces instead of conscripts.

There’s no denying that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been expensive endeavors—a fact of which Americans will be increasingly reminded as calls grow in Congress to limit defense spending. But it’s important to consider the costs of the conflicts in historical context, keeping in mind their relatively minimal impact on the economy as compared to wars of the last century. It’s equally important not to overstate the potential for dramatic savings to accrue as the conflicts eventually wind down, as some analysts have recently suggested. What that argument fails to consider is the steep cost of resetting a force that has been badly strained over years of continuous combat. Even when we have finished fighting the wars, we will still be paying for them.

(DoD photo by Cmdr. Erik Etz, U.S. Navy/Released)