Armed Forces Journal, February 2012: I spent last year in Afghanistan…. I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level. Continue Reading and see New York Times article.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 8^th,2011: We could pull every last soldier out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, but the costs of caring for them will keep climbing until at least 2040…. the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far cost the American taxpayer a whopping $3.2 trillion…. the United States will spend another $800 billion in war interest by 2020. [And since military jobs cost more to create,] If we estimate that the Pentagon spent $130 billion a year directly on the wars, that money, if spent at home instead, would have created 900,000 US jobs in education or 780,000 US jobs in health care. Continue Reading….

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is desperate for emergency funding to meet the urgent needs of families and communities devastated by the storm, many of which are still without power or even under water. Rather than simply approving the funding “off-budget” – which is what Congress traditionally does in such situations – House GOP members are holding FEMA hostage, saying that the $3.6 billion in emergency storm relief funding must be offset by cuts in other federal programs.

If they’re looking for ways to offset FEMA disaster relief funding, here’s a good place to start: this year’s spending on the Iraq War ($47.4 billion) alone would pay for all the public disaster funding that FEMA disbursed from Fiscal Year 1999 through Fiscal Year 2010.

October 7, 2011 will mark ten years since the beginning of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. With this in mind, NPP has released new numbers, analyses and tools about the costs of a decade at war.  You can find a host of new information here.