Billing a War

Every day, Linda J. Bilmes ’80 opens her e-mail inbox to find another message from a soldier stationed in Iraq.

She has received thousands of letters from veterans and their families.

Three years ago, Bilmes, a budgeting expert at the Harvard Kennedy School, asked a simple question: how much will the war in Iraq really cost?

Her answer—$3 trillion—has made headlines around the world.

But Bilmes has also found herself an unlikely resource for soldiers, veterans and their families as they struggle to cope with the human cost of the conflict.

In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush administration officials estimated the war’s price tag at as much as $200 billion—a figure officials quickly disputed as “too high.”

As of this December, Operation Iraqi Freedom has run up a bill of $406 billion, according to Defense Department spokesman Brian Maka.

But as Bilmes argues in her new book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” with economist and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, this price tag does not take into account the long-term and macroeconomic costs of the war. Her estimate includes decades of future veterans’ compensation payouts; oil price hikes as a result of supply disruption; and the loss not only to families but to the economy when productive Americans are injured or die young.

Bilmes said her investigation of the costs of veterans’ compensation brought her face to face with a health care system for veterans whose bureaucratic tangle often fails to help those who need it most, she said.

She has discussed her research with the secretary of Veterans’ Affairs and testified before Congress five times, and she said the response to her advocacy has been overwhelming.

After one of her public lectures on the cost of the war, Bilmes was approached by a group of Gold Star Mothers, women whose children have been killed in Iraq.

One woman gave Bilmes a photograph of her son, which Bilmes has taped above her desk.

“They said, ‘There’s nothing we can do for our sons,’ but they asked us to keep fighting for the soldiers,” Bilmes said.

Her $3 trillion estimate is not without its critics, including University of Chicago economist Steven J. Davis. In an interview, he rejected the claim that the war caused a five to ten dollar per barrel increase in oil prices, citing evidence to the contrary from historical price shocks such as the first Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq war.

But Bilmes said because her skills are applicable to this one facet of the Iraq war, she continues to be inspired to study budgetary and macroeconomic concerns of the war.

“The fact that I could make a difference for this problem...” she said. “I do believe this was my thing that I could do.”

­—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.

For comprehensive coverage of the Iraq War's impact at Harvard five years later, check out The Crimson's Iraq Supplement.