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costs of war project
War No More: Veterans Reflect on the Meaning of Memorial Day
This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people, and its environment.
May 26, 2025
This Memorial Day weekend, Veterans For Peace is calling on its members and friends to reflect on the gravity of the day, whose official purpose is to “honor all those who died in service to the U.S. during peacetime and war.” Veterans For Peace chooses to honor ALL who have died in wars, both combatants and civilians. Our hope is that a sober accounting of the casualties of war will mitigate against the tendency to turn Memorial Day—like Veterans Day—into a patriotic celebration of U.S. militarism.
We remember the words of President Dwight Eisenhower, who during World War II, was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe:
“War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.” He also famously stated, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Medal of Honor winner Marine Corps General Smedley Butler took it a bit further:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the loss of lives.
Veterans For Peace is deeply familiar with the pain that emanates from the loss of those lives. We have lost too many friends in wars in foreign lands, and in their aftermath at home due to suicide and service-related diseases. We have spent countless hours with Gold Star families mourning the loss of their loved ones. We also recognize that the “enemy” killed by our bullets and bombs had family and friends who loved them too. Their pain is no different than ours.
Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that over 7,000 U.S. service members have died in the wars following 9/11. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that more than 8,000 U.S. “contractors” have lost their lives in these conflicts. These hidden deaths reflect the U.S. government’s deception regarding these wars and its disregard for those who perish in them.
The more than 15,000 deaths mentioned above do not account for over 6,000 veterans who died by suicide each yearbetween 2001 and 2022, totaling more than 145,000 people, as documented by the nonprofit Stop Soldier Suicide. Veterans face a 58% higher risk of suicide than non-veterans. While military contractors experience many of the same mental health challenges as veterans, reliable suicide and mental health statistics are not available.
We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature.
Civilian casualties are much greater. We must acknowledge that in modern warfare, it is civilians who make up the bulk of the dead and wounded. The number of civilians killed by the violence in the post-9/11 wars is staggering. Brown University estimates the low end of opposition deaths at 288,923 and civilian deaths at 408,749. The total number of direct violence-related deaths is estimated to be 905,000 people. And even more people die after the wars ends.
A May 2023 Brown University study estimated that there are 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths, with a total death toll of 4.5 to 4.7 million people in post-9/11 war zones. As we mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam, we will not forget that 3 million Vietnamese died in that unjust and unnecessary war, most of them civilians.
Endless war and suffering persists today, with tens of thousands dying in conflicts that are fueled by U.S.-supplied arms and “intelligence.” The U.S. was an instigator of the terrible war in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of young soldiers have perished. The U.S. continues to provide bombs and political cover for the unspeakable genocide in Gaza, where estimates of civilian death range from 50,000 to over 100,000, with an even greater number of life-altering wounds. A generation of young Palestinian amputees and double and triple amputees will be a sober reminder to the world for years to come.
Another victim of war is the U.S. economy, which is greatly distorted by the ever-ballooning military budget, now proposed to reach One Trillion Dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) a year, even as essential social programs vital to poor and working class families are being gutted.
The “modernization” of nuclear weapons is included in the budgets of both the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, totaling an estimated $946 billion over the next decade, and harkening a no-holds-barred era that could too easily lead to a nuclear war. Eighty years after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is high time to put an to end to war before it puts an end to human civilization. War must be universally deemed obsolete, illegal, and unacceptable.
Wars will not end, however—and nuclear war will not be averted—unless there is a sea change in the thinking of the U.S. people and our political leaders. We must abandon the military doctrine of seeking “full spectrum dominance” in every corner of the globe. We must embrace the emerging multipolar world and take our place as one nation among many. We must help to build a peaceful world based on mutual respect for the human rights of all, as well as for the rights of nature. As the Vietnam-era poster reads, “War is not good for children or other living things.”
This Memorial Day, let us honor the memory of the dead by pledging to protect our precious planet, its people and its environment. Rather than exalting war, we must come together to abolish war once and for all.
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'Lots of Psychotic Murderers': Ex-Elite UK Troops Break Silence on Iraq, Afghanistan War Crimes
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," said one Special Air Service veteran.
May 12, 2025
Dozens of former United Kingdom Special Forces troops or those who served with them have broken their silence to describe alleged war crimes they witnessed—including the execution of children—during the U.S.-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
BBC's "Panorama"—which has repeatedly aired episodes focused on war crimes committed by British soldiers during the so-called War on Terror—on Monday featured testimonies from 30 former U.K. Special Forces (UKSF) members, including Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and supporting troops who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"They handcuffed a young boy and shot him," recalled one SAS veteran who fought in Afghanistan. "He was clearly a child, not even close to fighting age."
"It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
Another veteran who served with the SAS said that killing was "intoxicating" for some soldiers and became "an addictive thing to do," adding that there were "lots of psychotic murderers" among the ranks.
"On some operations, the troop would go into guesthouse-type buildings and kill everyone there," he said. "They'd go in and shoot everyone sleeping there, on entry. It's not justified, killing people in their sleep."
One SBS veteran described executions of wounded people who posed no threat, including one man who was being treated by a medic when "one of our blokes came up to him."
"There was a bang. He'd been shot in the head at point-blank range," the veteran recalled, describing the killing and other like it as "completely unnecessary."
"These are not mercy killings," he said. "It's murder."
Another veteran recounted a fellow SAS commando who kept track of the dozens of Afghans he'd killed during his six-month deployment.
"It seemed like he was trying to get a kill on every operation, every night someone got killed," the former soldier said, adding that his colleague was "notorious in the squadron; he genuinely seemed like a psychopath."
The soldier allegedly slit the throat of an injured Afghan man after telling an officer not to shoot him again, "because he wanted to go and finish the wounded guy off with his knife."
Another veteran said "everyone knew" what was happening and that to avoid scrutiny for executions, British troops would plant "drop weapons" on victims' bodies to make it appear as if they were militants. U.S. troops—who widely engaged in this war crime—called it "dead-checking."
One veteran said that "there was implicit approval for what was happening" from commanders.
"We understood how to write up serious incident reviews so they wouldn't trigger a referral to the military police," he explained. "If it looked like a shooting could represent a breach of the rules of conflict, you'd get a phone call from the legal adviser or one of the staff officers in HQ. They'd pick you up on it and help you to clarify the language. 'Do you remember someone making a sudden move?' 'Oh yeah, I do now.' That sort of thing. It was built into the way we operated."
"Panorama" also confirmed for the first time that former Conservative U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was in office from 2010-16, was repeatedly warned that British troops were committing war crimes.
Gen. Douglas Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, told "Panorama" that then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who repeatedly condemned American war crimes in his country—was "so consistent with his complaints about night raids, civilian casualties, and detentions that there was no senior Western diplomat or military leader who would have missed the fact that this was a major irritant for him."
In 2020, the International Criminal Court determined that British troops committed war crimes in Iraq but declined to prosecute any alleged perpetrators.
Documented war crimes committed by U.S. troops, mercenaries, and other private contractors in nations including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Syria during the ongoing War on Terror include but are not limited to murder of civilians and detainees, extraordinary rendition, torture, rape, and jailing and sexual abuse of women and girls held as bargaining chips.
Whistleblowers who exposed these and other illegalities—including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, former NSA operative Edward Snowden, former Army analyst Chelsea Manning, former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou, and others—were almost always the only ones ever punished in connection with the crimes they exposed.
Other coalition troops—including Afghans, Iraqis, Australians, Germans, Poles, and Canadians—have allegedly committed atrocities during the War on Terror, as have Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and other militants.
According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, "at least 940,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including civilians, armed forces on all sides, contractors, journalists, and humanitarian workers" in U.S.-led wars since 9/11. This figure includes at least 408,000 civilians.
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Trump’s Policies Will Worsen the Military’s Sexual Assault Crisis
Particularly in a hierarchical institution such as the military, the leadership exemplifies the values that the institution expects all members to uphold.
Apr 29, 2025
During the Trump administration’s recent torrent of executive orders, the Navy paused sexual assault and prevention trainings in response to the administration’s demand to remove all DEI initiatives and programs. The U.S. armed forces are plagued by an epidemic of sexual assault, one of the most devastating markers of persistent gender inequality within the military. The Navy’s pause of just a few days signals the tenuous nature of protections for service members, especially women and minorities, who are by far the most numerous victims of assault.
The military’s sexual assault crisis speaks to the violence embedded within miliary institutions. Intimate partner violence, for instance, is disproportionately high among military and veterans populations. SAPRO, the Sexual Assault and Prevention Response Office of the Department of Defense (DOD), is the only resource that provides prevention and trainings on sexual assault and advocacy services to victims. It is the sole database for reporting and prevalence tracking of unwanted sexual contact in the military, making the Navy’s pause all the more alarming.
The U.S. military has been systematically tracking data via SAPRO since 2005 when the National Defense Authorization Act began to require information to be presented to Congress. However, independent reporting and data from organizations assisting sexual assault survivors indicate a spike in assaults immediately following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This is the year the United States declared an official “Global War on Terror,” which the U.S. military still carries out operations for in 78 countries as of 2023. Also in 2001, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center officially designated April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
In any other workplace, if 1 in 4 women were sexually assaulted by their coworker or superior, there would be a national outrage.
This Sexual Assault Awareness month, we must talk about sexual assault as a disastrous cost of war.
The military’s epidemic of sexual assault is much worse than the DOD is willing to admit. Our Costs of War project research compared the Department of Defense’s data on sexual assault prevalence to independent (non-DOD) data to estimate sexual assault figures within the military from 2001 through 2023. We found that independent data suggest that actual sexual assault prevalence is 2 to 4 times higher than official DOD estimations.
The Trump administration’s policies will only worsen this crisis. Particularly in a hierarchical institution such as the military, the leadership exemplifies the values that the institution expects all members to uphold. It is notable that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was himself accused of sexual assault in 2017 and has a long track record of sexist behavior.
Since 2001, 24% of active-duty women and 1.9% of active-duty men in the U.S. military have experienced sexual assault. That is almost one-fourth of all women in the U.S. military, and given low reporting rates, it is likely even more. Fear of retaliation is one of the primary reasons service members do not report sexual assault, with data showing that service members are 12 times more likely to face retaliation than to see their offender convicted. Nationwide, 81% of women and 43% of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime.
Experiences of gender inequality are most pronounced for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of racism and sexism and are one of the fastest-growing populations within the military. Furthermore, independent data also confirm that queer and trans service members face a disproportionately greater risk for sexual assault.
These numbers are staggering. In any other workplace, if 1 in 4 women were sexually assaulted by their coworker or superior, there would be a national outrage.
The sexual assault crisis should draw our attention to the contradiction of military policies aimed at greater gender and racial equity when this institution waged post-9/11 wars that displaced 38 million people, directly killed 929,000 people, and indirectly killed 4.5-4.7 million people worldwide. The wars waged by the U.S. are existentially linked both to the military as an institution and to the persistent racism and sexism within the U.S. Efforts such as the bipartisan, bicameral legislation recently introduced to help survivors of military sexual trauma (MST) more easily access care and benefits, as well as boost MST claims processing, must be resoundingly supported. One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Minn.) said, “This goes far beyond administrative shortcomings at the VA; it’s a fundamental breach of our moral and constitutional duty to those who served.”
Although there have been consistent internal interventions and resources intended to address military sexual assault, this form of violence continues to occur, illustrating that reforms have not meaningfully transformed institutional patterns of abuse. Military officials have themselves described, in retrospect, that the military prioritized training and deploying troops to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars over confronting a clear institutional problem of sexual assault. In fact, the deliberate cover-up of harassments, assaults, and disappearances of service members to protect sexual predators and their enablers in the U.S. military has been evident in numerous high-profile cases over the years.
The goal is not solely to have higher reporting numbers or more initiatives, but to completely eradicate sexual assault from occuring. Sexual assault in the U.S. military is fundamentally and inextricably linked to fighting wars abroad. Important as they are, better reporting infrastructure or training and prevention programs within the DOD are not enough. This Sexual Assault Awareness Month, we should ask for more—an end to sexual assault and an end to endless wars.
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