Costs of War Project Releases Updated Estimates of Human and Budgetary Costs of Post-9/11 Wars

The Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs has updated its estimates of the total human and budgetary costs of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, estimating that 929,000 people have been directly killed, and that the United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend over $8 trillion.

The new estimates were presented in a webinar on Wednesday by Prof. Neta Crawford, co-founder and co-director of the Costs of War project and a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow. The webinar also included a panel discussion hosted by Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept and featuring Catherine Lutz and Linda Bilmes of the Costs of War Project and Maha Hilal of the Justice for Muslims Collective.

Read more about the updated estimates of the human costs here and the budgetary costs here.

Since 2019, the Pardee Center has maintained a collaboration with the Watson Institute called 20 Years of War: A Costs of War Research Series to expand the Costs of War project with a new set of analyses of the human, financial, environmental, social, and political costs of the post-9/11 wars.