What is the real cost of war?

Last year, the seven largest economies in the world spent over $1.2 trillion on their militaries. With the horrors of war escalating around the globe, imperialist powers are pumping a never-before-seen amount of cash directly into the deep pockets of the arms manufacturers. That’s a lot of money for bombs at a time when the vast majority are struggling to get by! If only there was something better the ruling class could be spending this money on… perhaps we can make some suggestions.

The US military budget for 2024 alone stood at a whopping $824.3 billion. With just a fraction of that money – a trifling $31.7 billion according to Oxfam – humanity could eradicate world hunger “in all its forms”!

$31.7 billion is less than four percent of the money the US ruling class alone gave to the weapons industry last year. Yet rather than feeding the hungry, these rotten imperialists would rather spend it supporting precisely the conflicts that have caused the horrors that they could so easily fix.

The money needed to end world hunger is a drop in the ocean compared to the military spending of the major imperialist powers. And yet, according to the World Health Organisation, no progress has been made towards solving world hunger in over 15 years.

Hunger is not the only problem that could be resolved by quickly dipping into the military budget. The UN’s World Institute for Development Economics Research found in June that its most conservative estimate for the amount of money needed to end world poverty is $325 billion per year until 2030. That would be hardly 15 percent of the $2.4 trillion spent by the world’s top 40 military budgets in 2023.

If the money available were put to good use, the research found that a sum of a mere $425 billion could in principle end world poverty “imminently with funds to spare”. To reiterate: this is barely half of what the US spent on its military in 2024 alone. Consider what a freeing of human potential ending poverty worldwide would mean.

And for less than the US military spends each year, that country could completely decarbonise its power grid for somewhere in the range of $330 billion to $740 billion.

Whereas dropping 2,000-pound bombs on innocent Gazans produces nothing but destruction, money thus spent on decarbonising the economy would have all kinds of salubrious effects. One of the ‘externalities’ of fossil fuel consumption by the power sector – so called because these effects are external to the energy companies’ balance sheets – are the 350,000 American lives lost each year due to fossil fuel-related pollution. Indeed, the annual cost to healthcare of fossil fuel is estimated at $886 billion, itself more than the US military budget!

In other words, this would pay for itself soon enough, and so one year of the US military budget would be enough to decarbonise the US energy grid and end world poverty.

Healthcare not warfare!

The barbarity of arms spending becomes more tangible if we look past the broader budgets and consider the price of individual tools of destruction. The much-vaunted Storm Shadow missiles – which the UK has supplied to Ukraine with the hope of striking long-range targets in Russia – cost $1 million each. For that price, you could pay all the monthly bills of the average UK household – food, rent, transport, utilities etc. – for 24 years!

For the price of one Storm Shadow missile, you could pay all the monthly bills of the average UK household for 24 years / Image: Владислав Демяненко, Wikimedia Commons

While the exact number of Storm Shadows that have been sent has been kept a closely guarded secret, the UK government has so far admitted to sending £13 billion to fund the bloodshed in Ukraine.

This money was of course readily available for the British ruling class to prove themselves a subservient participant in NATO’s proxy war, yet was conspicuously absent when it was revealed that it would take just £11.6 billion to completely fix all the crumbling infrastructure of the National Health Service. So British government spending on the slaughter in Ukraine alone would be enough to revamp every hospital in the country with £1.4 billion left over. That, in turn, would be almost enough to retrain the 23,000 doctors estimated to have left the NHS prematurely in 2023.

Last year the US sent 31 M1 Abrams tanks to slowly drown in the mud on the Ukrainian frontlines. At time of writing, an M1 Abrams can be yours for just $10 million, which is enough to pay the average American’s healthcare bills for over 740 years.

But rather than paying for a year’s healthcare for almost 23,000 Americans, the US ruling class sent 31 tanks for a brief and ineffectual stint in Ukraine, before being deemed useless and retired after just seven months’ service.

In total, the US has sent over $61 billion to Ukraine since the start of the conflict, as well as a further $22.76 billion which has been sent to Israel over the last 12 months. That makes a little over $83 billion.

According to the World Health Organisation, this is over double the $30.7 billion that would be needed to “significantly reduce” the possibility of future pandemics originating in tropical areas, such as COVID-19, swine flu, etc. COVID-19 took 7 million lives and, according to some estimates, will have cost the world economy $20 trillion. Yet it could cost little more than the sum the US has poured into the IDF’s murder-machine to prevent a rerun of this catastrophe.

With that little detail resolved, the remaining $50 billion could, for example, be used to completely eliminate the threat of malaria for over two billion people in the Asia-Pacific – conservative estimates put the cost at $36 billion. The remaining $14 billion would then be enough to lift 165 million people out of poverty, according to the UN Development Programme, should we lower our ambition from the wholly realisable target of eliminating poverty entirely.

Books not bombs!

UNESCO estimates that the cost of completely ending illiteracy in the 20 countries with literacy rates under 50 percent would be just $14 billion. This is the amount that the G7 countries spent on their military budgets in the first four days of last year.

In Gaza, 45,000 children have been unable to start their first year of school due to Israel’s genocidal war / Image: WAFA, Wikimedia Commons

During the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF published an estimation of what it would cost for every child in the world to have access to an online education from their home. This includes the costs of universal access to electricity infrastructure, good quality and affordable internet connections, etc. The total price was $1.4 trillion to guarantee universal online education from 2021-2030. One again: this is just half what the world’s 40 largest militaries spent in 2023 alone.

The unparalleled human potential that could be achieved by giving all the world’s children access to both the internet and to an education is almost unimaginable. We could create millions of new scientists, doctors, artists and engineers. But rather than furthering the enlightenment of humanity, the imperialists are intent on bombing us back into the Stone Age.

In Gaza, 45,000 children have been unable to start their first year of school due to Israel’s genocidal war. This is on top of the 625,000 children that have already missed an entire year of their education due to the invasion. Rather than bringing education to all, the imperialist warmongers have guaranteed the closure of every school in Gaza for the foreseeable future.

Make the warmongers pay!

These are the real costs of war. It is not just the uncountable innocents killed in the ruling class’ wars, or the permanent destruction of the homes and livelihoods of those that survive. Military spending also means that 26 percent of the world’s population is forced to live in poverty; it means that 250 million children have no access to education; it means that preventable disease is responsible for 74 percent of all premature deaths.

The money to alleviate or even completely solve these problems is there for the taking. But it will have to be taken, because the imperialists have proven themselves unable and unwilling to use the world’s immense resources for what is needed. Instead, our enlightened rulers are intent on further escalations, greater sums wasted on military spending and one inter-imperialist conflict after another.

The masses can trust no one but themselves to end this. We must seize imperialism’s tools of death and destruction from their grasp. With the enormous wealth that they turn to purposes of destruction, we could create a life worth living for all of humanity. We already have everything we need to unleash civilisation’s immense potential, but as long as capitalism continues to exist, the imperialists will relentlessly continue to push mankind down the path to barbarism.