Linda Bilmes

The munitions are the things that get fired, and then you have the things that fire them.

So all of that together is the largest component.

Something that is not considered upfront, but which becomes a cost of war, is the fact that we have, in the first two weeks, 50,000 US troops who were exposed to toxins and contaminants, which will make them eligible for

in many cases, lifetime disability benefits and medical care and so forth.

And that's a very, very significant cost.

So just to put this in perspective, right now in the government financial statements, we owe $7.3 trillion.

Wow.

in just disability benefits, not even counting medical care, to living veterans.

They're basically veterans of the first Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and some from Vietnam.

So it's a huge number.

And in the first Gulf War, which was a six-week war, 37% of those troops have claimed and have been approved to receive lifetime disability benefits.

in large cases for inhalation of toxins and things like that.

I mean, it was a ground war, but a lot of the inhalants were similar to the things that some of the troops who are stationed in the theater now are inhaling.

And so if we assume that

say, a third of those 50,000 who are there and who are inhaling this stuff now for weeks on end will develop some kind of respiratory problems, some of them more severely.

We've had several hundred who have been wounded more severely.

I mean, that leads to this long tail of costs, which go on for the next 30, 40 years.

They're totally deleting that.

We have no long-term mechanism for even really tracking those costs.

So if you think about Social Security liabilities that the U.S.