Box Score: American militarism

From a study by the Institute for Policy Studies

Since Vietnam, the United States has waged an ongoing war against diffuse enemies, The current annual military budget, at $668 billion, dwarfs the $190 billion allocated for education, jobs, housing, and other basic services and infrastructure.

Out of every dollar in federal discretionary spending, 53 cents goes towards the military, with just 15 cents on anti-poverty programs.

With private contractors now performing many traditional military roles, there have been almost 10 times as many military contractors per soldier in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as there were during the Vietnam War, many of them making far more money than underpaid U.S.  soldiers.  Army privates in combat earned less than $30,000 in 2016. In 2016, the CEOs of the top five military contractors earned on average $19.2 million — more than 90 times the $214,000 earned by a U.S. military general with 20 years of experience, including housing allowances and extra combat pay and approximately 640 times the amount earned by Army privates in combat .

According to the United Nations , almost one - third more civilians died in Afghanistan during the first nine months of 2017 than during that same period in 2009 when the counting began. Compared to the same period in 2016, there was a 52 percent increase of civilian deaths from airstrikes in 2017, with women and children comprising 68 percent of these deaths.

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