# Costs of War Project The research project at Brown University's Watson Institute, founded in **2010** by political scientist Neta Crawford and anthropologist Catherine Lutz, that produces the standard independent accounting of what the post-9/11 wars actually cost. Its significance to this vault is methodological. Official Pentagon figures count **appropriations for named operations**; the Costs of War accounting adds the pieces that are structurally excluded — interest on the borrowing that financed the wars, State Department and Homeland Security war-related spending, and the multi-decade obligation to care for the veterans the wars produced. That is the difference between roughly $2 trillion and roughly $8 trillion, and it is why the project's numbers are the ones cited by critics across the political spectrum. It is also the source of the **indirect-death** estimates, which count deaths from destroyed water systems, hospitals, and food supply rather than from munitions. Headline figures are collected in [[Forever Wars]]. [[Andrew Bacevich]] is among its contributors. ## See Also - [[Forever Wars]] — the ledger - [[War on Terror]] · [[Militarism]] · [[Andrew Bacevich]] [[Organizations Hub]]