Costs of All U.S. Major Wars in Table Form

Costs of All U.S. Major Wars in Table Form

Earlier this week we posted a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on the costs for the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and for the war in Iraq: $439 billion and $319 billion, respectively. CRS has also distributed on Capitol Hill a table showing the costs of all previous major wars the United States has been involved in. In the interests of history and comparison, we present the CRS data in a more simplified table form below.
Table: Costs of Major U.S. Wars (All dollars in billions; source: Congressional Research Service)
War
Current (Then Year) Dollars
Constant (FY 2007) Dollars
American Revolution
0.12
3.577
War of 1812
0.89
1.126
Mexican War
0.82
1.987
Civil War (US)
2.3
56.297
Civil War (CSA)
1.0
24.506
Spanish-American War
0.27
7.286
World War I
33
642
World War II
296
3,211
Korea
67
691
Vietnam
111
650
Desert Storm
61
92
GWOT
n/a
439

The current war is now the fifth most expensive in U.S. history (behind World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War). If the Congressional Budget Office correctly projects 2007 to 2016 GWOT costs at $371 billion, the current war’s total becomes $810 billion, which would make it America’s second most expensive war (second only to World War II).
Click here to see the CRS table, as distributed on Capitol Hill.

From http://tinyurl.com/kalup www.cdi.org