The US military and war: Arrogant, callous and expensive

A NYT article discusses injury to US Army and Marine troops who suffer from what appears to be serious, irreparable brain injuries from shock waves caused by firing thousands of heavy artillery rounds at the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2016:

To defeat ISIS, the United States relied on artillery crews firing more intensively than any had in generations.

The big howitzers used in the height of the offensive against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, from 2016 to 2017, could hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and gun crews fired them almost nonstop, day and night for weeks on end.

The strategy worked as intended, and the Islamic State was soon smashed to near oblivion. But keeping the number of U.S. troops involved to a minimum meant that each gun crew had to fire thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds than any American gun crew had fired at least since the Vietnam War. Some troops fired more than 10,000 rounds in just a few months.

Many members of the gun crews developed devastating and puzzling symptoms.

Members of the gun crews started to have memory and balance problems, nausea, irritability and crushing fatigue. Those symptoms were signs of concussion, but also what anyone might feel after working 20-hour days in the desert and sleeping in foxholes. Crews trained to endure didn’t complain.

The crews were screened for signs of brain injuries after deployment, but those screenings were designed to spot the effects of much larger explosions from enemy attacks — not repeated exposure to blast waves from routine firing of weapons. Few of the troops screened positive.

Crew members who were told they were healthy struggled to understand why they were stalked by panic and sleeplessness. Some thought they were going insane.

When the troops started to act strangely, they were often treated ineffectively or punished.

Nothing in the gun crew members’ records suggested they had ever been exposed to damaging blasts in combat, so when some sought medical help from the military, doctors repeatedly failed to consider the possibility of a brain injury.

When job performance deteriorated or behavior turned erratic, many crew members were seen not as wounded, but as problems. They were passed over for promotion or punished for misconduct. Some were forced out of the service with punitive discharges and cut off from veterans’ health care.

Their problems have spilled over into civilian life, wrecking marriages and making it hard to hold down jobs. Some are now homeless. A striking number have died by suicide. Many still have no idea that their problems may stem from blast exposure.

Studies are starting to reveal the risk posed by blast exposure, but progress is slow.

Research suggests that repeated exposure to the blast waves generated by firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable microscopic damage to the brain. Vast numbers of military veterans may have been affected.

But the damage is nearly impossible to document, because no brain scan or blood test now in use can detect those minute injuries in a living brain. Making diagnosis more complicated, many of the symptoms can be identical to those of P.T.S.D.

As things now stand, the microscopic damage from blast exposure can only be definitively documented by examining thin slices of brain tissue under a microscope once someone has died. Tissue samples taken from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to blasts during their military careers show a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

The Army and the Marine Corps both say that they now have programs to track and limit daily exposure for troops. But Marines in the field say they have not seen the new safety programs, and troops throughout the military are still training with weapons that the Defense Department is concerned may pose a risk.

The costs of modern American wars last a lifetime. American war is shockingly expensive. Costs include human, economic and social damage to the economy, society and soldiers and their families for their entire lives. I suspect it also causes some damage to democracy.

An analysis of Iraq war cost:

Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.** But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

** We were lied to.

Brown University data

This also means that the US is still incurring costs from the catastrophic Vietnam war. A 2022 analysis asserts that (1) based on the current dollar value, the Vietnam War cost the equivalent of about $1 trillion, and (2) the US pays $22 billion per year in war compensations to Vietnam veterans and their families.