The FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision—added by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA)—requiring the Defense Secretary and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner to post online all of the costs, “including the relevant legacy costs, to each American taxpayer of each of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.”  Defense One reports that, by October of next year, the Pentagon’s share of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Syria will have collectively cost taxpayers more than $1.5 trillion, according to the Defense Department’s figures. As the article notes, though, the figures do not include classified amounts spent on the wars by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

There are, however, other “costs of war” that are not as easily quantified.  A project at Brown University, the Watson Institute Costs of War Project tracks the the Economic costs—under which they include: veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.

The Project also has documented the Human and Social & Political costs. Regrettably, the pages and much of the information on Human and Social & Political costs have not been updated in the past couple of years. These costs are not counted by the Defense Department, and some of the Social & Political costs are classified, such as “major human rights and civil liberties violations, including detention without trial, torture, expanded US government surveillance…”