The Cost of War

Abstract

Spending almost US$700 billion to combat insurgents in Afghanistan, the U.S. population should be hopeful that they “bought” something of value as the Afghan War concludes. This exploratory study focuses on evaluating operations within Afghanistan by accounting for enemy and civilian losses. Integration of civilian losses offers an opportunity to evaluate operations that represent societal losses to the Afghan people. Regression estimates using zero-inflated negative-binomial models indicate that military operations resulted in more civilian casualties than enemy losses.