American Families Pay The Cost of Long Foreign Wars

I wish some of those Republican presidential candidates who are clamoring for war with Iran would give a little consideration to the long-term consequences of their actions.

The United States is still recovering from two long-term military engagements which took up the good part of a decade. The nation is exhausted by war, and I can't believe the American public wants to commit to another conflict in the Middle East.

Of course part of the problem is the war is effectively fought by a small percentage of the population. According to Capt. (rtd.) Matt Gallagher, a panelist on MSNBC's "Up with Chris Hayes" and a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were fought by about 2 million military personnel, and in a nation of 300 million people, that works out to be about 0.5 percent of the population.

Is it any wonder why the political class clamors for more war, when their children are not doing the fighting? The all-volunteer armed forces has effectively led to a economic draft, where low-income young people join the military for a paycheck, job skills and increasingly to pay for college. And with the price of education going through the roof, we are probably going to see more young people signing up just so they can pay for college.

And it's not just liberal columnists, like me, who have expressed concern about this. Lt. Col. (rtd.) Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff in the State Department alongside Colin Powell, has also been critical of the all-volunteer force.

Unless you are a military family you don't feel the effect of a soldier being sent to the battle front four or five times. One of Wilkerson's main argument is that the all-volunteer force protects Washington from political criticism. The Vietnam War turned into a political hot potato for the Johnson administration and eventually cost him the White House. But with few college students being forced to fight, many young people are unconcerned about the human cost of our foreign military adventures.

According to a Huffington Post article the cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq war is estimated to be $3.4 trillion. And that money has to be repaid, in the form of tax raises and cuts. (It has to be a combination of both, because we simply can't cut enough from the budget to pay down the debt.) If that figure is not shocking enough, we really ought to consider the long-term cost returning troops will have on society in terms of health care, broken families, homelessness and prison costs. A few years ago, the Current TV show, "Vanguard," did a report on a Colorado military town that saw its crime rate skyrocket as battle-scarred troops returned home. According to a series of articles written by Colorado Springs Gazette writer David Phillips, one unit of 500 soldiers racked up eight murder charges, when they got home.  

Unfortunately their war experiences have left many veterans with hair trigger tempers and lethal reflexes that often explode into domestic violence and even murder. There were plenty of heartwarming stories about troops returning from Iraq reuniting with their families during Christmas, but give it a few months, and we are going to see a whole lot of domestic violence stories featuring the same returning troops.

It's no wonder that troops are joining the Occupy Wall Street movement, because the economic situation here is pretty bleak. The unemployment rate for veterans is about 12 percent and veterans, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, often end up living on the streets. (A recent USA Today article states that about 12 percent of homeless men were veterans.)

Just recently there was a story in the news about former Inland Empire resident Benjamin Colton Barnes, an Iraq war veteran, who fatally shot a park ranger, and was later found dead in the snow. Barnes was reported to have domestic problems with the mother of his child and said he wanted to commit suicide. He also had trouble adjusting to civilian life. I am afraid we are going to start seeing a lot more of these stories in the near future.