Since its foundation some 240 years ago, the United States has been directly involved in
at least a dozen, very expensive, major military conflicts.
Low end estimates place the US’s total expense in those wars at more than 5 trillion dollars,
without even including the past decade’s War on Terror.
With so much cash being spent on the US military, we wanted to know: What have been the US’s
most expensive wars?
Well, officially the most expensive war in US history was World War II, with a price
tag of about $4 trillion dollars in today’s figures.
At the peak of the war in 1945, the US was allocating more than thirty five percent of
their entire GDP towards the war effort.
Comparatively, today America only spends 3.5 percent of its GDP on defense.
World War Two’s massive death toll is perhaps the clearest representation of where all that
money went.
From 1939 to 1945, about 70 million people were killed, primarily non-combatants, as
a direct result of fighting around the world.
Unsurprisingly, World War Two accounts for a majority of the US’s military spending.
But other historically formative conflicts have cost barely a fraction of its 4 trillion
dollar price tag.
The foundation of the country itself: the American Revolution, only ended up costing
about 2.4 billion in 2011 dollars.
Similarly, the Civil War, which ended slavery after more than 600,000 wartime deaths, only
cost 80 billion, and that’s accounting for both sides.
The US’s other incredibly expensive war, was one that they actually lost: the Vietnam
War.
The two decade long war was America’s longest running from about 1954 to 1973, although
actual start and end dates are disputed.
It ran up a bill of what would today be more than $700 billion dollars.
But its length wasn’t the only reason it was so expensive.
Since 1946, before the war began, the U.S. had been funding and supplying France’s
military actions against decolonization movements in Indochina.
Perhaps most interestingly, the US’s most expensive war in history wasn’t an actual
war.
Although it lasted four decades, The Cold War never saw direct fighting between the
United States and the USSR.
What it did see was immense nuclear research and stockpiling, with the US’s estimated
cost hovering around $5.5 trillion dollars.
It is important to note that none of these estimates include ballooning costs like veteran
benefits or interest payments on money borrowed to fight the war.
Costs like these can add hundreds of billions to any 20th century conflict.
Clearly, America hemorrhages money when fighting a war, and the decade long War on Terror is
no different.
In fact, it actually might be the second most expensive war in US history, coming in at
more than $1.5 trillion dollars and counting.
To find out how the money for the War on Terror was actually used, and how much more we’re
probably going to spend, check out this video.
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