9/11/2001 was 22 years ago
8T/22 years means 360B/year USD
The US military expenses covers basically the global military security needs of all of the Americas and de facto a large percentage of Western Europe/EU, ASEAN, etc.. Let’s just say 1 Billion people who haven’t experienced major World War level conflict against their territory or against their civilians since 9/11 (or, for that matter, since WWII). The bill for US citizens for that over the last 22 years has been roughly $360/yr, USD. (There have been armed conflicts in the period and much suffering as a result. But there hasn’t been real worldwide suffering…World War level suffering.)
Imagine a US family in 1943. Someone offers to bring their loved ones home that very day from the moronic European/Asian conflicts safe and sound. Will cost them, say, $100/yr head tax (could call it Security as a Subscription but what an absurd acronym that would make). $100 was a lot of money in 1943, but a guarantee of no orphans, no widows, no funerals, no rations, no torture, no struggles, no threats to the Four Freedoms. Every single family in the US in 1943 would have taken that offer. And they would, and do, take that offer every year up to the present. And it has worked (for the most part). Certainly for the Americas, EU, Japan, British Commonwealth, ASEAN,…
Now imagine making the offer to those in concentration camps in 1943. Those conscripted to serve the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese empire. Those in occupied territories. They’d be lining up in droves to pay (instead of lining up to be fed starvation rations, be gassed, be forced to work in factories until they died, etc.). They’d die for the opportunity (instead of, you know, just dying).
Today’s “the West’s” military-industrial complex isn’t a perfect system and if the Department of State screws up the results are often haphazard and cruel. (Yeah, I know, let’s blame the State department.) But attempts at global political perfection haven’t succeeded in the modern era. One time they called it The War to End All Wars. Or was it the Glorious Communist Global Revolution (cf. pogroms, gulags, Mao’s great famine, Cultural Revolution, anything re: Cambodia, etc.). Sounds like a great objective to have, but when it fails in implementation, it fails catastrophically…only slightly better than the World War option, but without the psychopolitical cleansing that comes with deep trauma that does finally end.
And let’s not bring up what nuclear technologies bring to a future World War party. Really, let’s not. Weapons of policy, not of war.
From a historical perspective, it’s quite the deal the developed world has gotten in the 21st Century for their $8T. (Didn’t read the article, I assume this was their conclusion.)