Ep. 28 - Blood and Billions: The Cost of War

War feels abstract until the price shows up in bodies, bills, and broken trust. We’re staring at a new conflict with Iran, and I don’t think the right question is “whose team are you on?” The better question is whether we’ve learned anything from the last hundred years of U.S. war and the difference between wars of necessity and wars of choice.

We walk through the key case studies that still shape American foreign policy: World War I’s senseless grind, World War II as the clearest example of justified force with clear objectives, then the drift into Korea and Vietnam where strategic clarity collapses and public trust fractures. From there we hit the warning Eisenhower gave about the military-industrial complex and why a nation built to fight can start looking for reasons to use the tools it has.

We also dig into what “doing it right” can look like by revisiting Gulf War I: a coalition, a limited mission, and the smartest decision of all, stopping. Then we trace how 9-11 turns into Afghanistan and Iraq, how mission creep creates forever wars, and why the real costs are always higher than the first estimates, especially when you include long-term veterans’ care and debt.

Finally, we bring it back to the Iran war: the Strait of Hormuz, the risk of an oil shock, the danger of overestimating control, and the political reality that executive power has grown while Congress rarely asserts its role. If you want a radical moderate take, it’s simple: war needs the highest justification, transparent funding, and a public that shares the burden so leaders feel pressure to end it. Subscribe for more, share this with someone who disagrees, and leave a review with your answer: what would make American leaders think twice before starting the next war?

Transcript

Why Talk About Iran Now

Wars Of Choice And Necessity

World War II Sets The Standard

Korea Vietnam And The War Machine

Gulf War I Done The Right Way

9-11 Afghanistan And Iraq Blowback

Congress Transparency And A Draft

Iran Costs Oil Shocks And Control

Have We Learned Anything From War

Final Takeaways And Sign Off

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back, everybody, to the Radical Moderate Podcast. I am your host, Pat O'Brien. And this week, we are going to talk about wars. Uh, the the reason why I'm bringing this up right now is because the U.S. has currently initiated a war in Iran. And so we're going to talk about that in more in-depth. Uh, but war in general, like what is the radical moderate view of war? What are, you know, what are the solutions? What have we not tried? But more than anything, probably is what's the history of it? What's the context? What's what in you know, in modern day war, how does all this work? What's really possible? And I think where we're going to end up is there are lessons that I think are to be learned. I'm just not sure that we've actually learned them or that we've taken heed of them. And so that's that's the impetus for this is the fact that President Trump on February 28th decided to initiate a war in Iran. How did we get here in general? And what's possible? And will it turn out better than maybe we think that it will, or, you know, or will it be a big disappointment, which several other wars in recent memory have certainly become. So I want to I want to set the stage by saying, and I wrote this in the book, there are really two types of war to keep it simple. There are wars of choice and there are wars of necessity. So to understand that uh that idea, that principle a little better, let's just do a quick review going back a little over a hundred years. So I'm gonna start with World War I. So this was a war, of course, initiated in Europe. It was clear the U.S. was not wanting to get involved with this. And by, but we just kind of had to. But we we did not get involved at the beginning, and it wasn't a situation like you're gonna have with the bombing of Pearl Harbor decades later. No, this was a war that we kind of only got into late. We were only in it for 19 months. We probably were the reason why it ended at all, is because of our involvement was going to become clear that that it was gonna have to come to an end. As far as wars go, uh the death toll was, I would say, significant. I mean, any loss of life is significant, but there was about 116,000 Americans that died. From a cost standpoint, though, it was$330 billion in inflation-adjusted uh money. That is a low, low number compared to modern-day wars and certainly what happened in uh World War II. Like I said, it was 19 months and not much else to say. We really didn't want to be in it. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. What I think it really became was more the seeds of World War II. And the uh the Germans were very disgruntled by what happened, but the lines of battle, I think, moved less than 20 miles. It was it was a senseless war, I think, is the way most historians look at it. I would say more so a war of necessity. We had to get involved. It was inevitable that we're gonna get involved, and it probably our involvement probably helped finish the war. World War II. So World War II is gonna be the benchmark for war. It's clearly a war of necessity. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December uh 7th, 1941. Germany was gonna take over all of Europe, and shame, you know, fascism was gonna roll. We had we had no decision except to be a part of that war. And there's there's not a credible argument on the other side. Now, I will say American public opinion was not really for it until the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and then immediately everybody got on board. This was a real war. And I say that not to diminish anything that would later happen in other wars, but to say this is the standard of why you actually go to war. Over 400,000, maybe 405,000 Americans died in this war. In today's dollars, it was four or five trillion dollars. Like it was incredibly expensive. It at one point at the peak, it was 40% of the GDP of the country. And I mean, you can go read your history books about the rationing of gas and food and rubber, war bonds that funded the war. Like these, this is completely foreign to somebody, really, even who was born in 1969, like I was. But certainly, if you were born, you know, if you're under 30 years old, you only know about this stuff from your history books. But I want to make two comments about World War II before I move on. The first comment is that there were very clear objectives. We were attacked by the Japanese. There was an alliance between uh the those Axis type powers. We had no choice. So you got that, you got that as the backbone of it. The foundation of it is that we had to we had to defend ourselves, and the objectives were clear. We needed unconditional surrender of Japan. Period, end of story. We had to have unconditional surrender of Germany. Period, end of story. Italy was also, you know, trying to be part partners with Germany. That didn't really work out well for them. But I mean, same thing, unconditional surrender of Italy. So I would move on, except I want to say one more thing. I think for a lot of people, there's still an abstractness about World War II because it was so long ago. It's not for me. It really isn't because my father, Michael Truman O'Brien, served in World War II. He was in the Navy in the South Pacific. He saw battles that I he never talked about to me, but I'm sure scarred him for the rest of his life. But this was he and every person who served in that war and all the different fronts, and all those who died and the effects that had it. This was a frickin' war that was real and justified, and we had to win, and everybody was a part of that. And the people back home were doing their part to support the war effort abroad. Everybody was united in this goal. And if you're gonna have to go to war, that's the way you want to do it. And I think sometimes in modern times, you're people who are making decisions about war or people who don't know anything about it. And while I've never served in the military, and I'm not gonna wrap myself in the flag and say that I'm some kind of expert, I will say that the O'Brien's did their part. And not just uh not just my father, who, by the way, was in Nagasaki two weeks after they dropped the bomb. So how it doesn't get any more real than that. But all the O'Brien's and spouses of O'Brien's whose husbands were in the war, like the O'Brien's did our part. So I don't take a backseat to anyone when you're like, oh, you know, so you you you don't believe in in defending your country. Screw you. I mean, really, the O'Briens have done our part. And my father fought so that I didn't have to. You know, he fought to defend democracy and freedom. So the O'Brien's did our part in the war effort. So anyone who would ever listen to anything that I say and say, you know, we're soft on on going to war, that's that's just total bullshit, really. End of story. So in rant with that, Korea is the next war. They call it the Forgotten War. There were actually over 36,000 deaths of American soldiers. The cost was maybe in today's dollars, uh,$500 billion. We throw numbers around that, like that around pretty casually. But it was it was a war that we didn't end up really with much. And so it it the lasting effects is you got North Korea and South Korea. It's really, I think, a break from the the justified nature of World War II. We get involved in Korea at the end of the day. I don't know that anybody really knows why. And then you come to Vietnam. And Vietnam was a quagmire to kind of break it down in bullets real quick. There was poor strategic clarity. Why are we there? We kind of inched into the war. Even the way that we finally got in with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution possibly was a made-up reason and just an excuse by the Lyndon Johnson's administration to fully go in. Uh, there was a massive long-term cost. 58,000 Americans died in that war, over a trillion dollars. And that's, by the way, 300,000 people wounded. I think more, you know, recent generations, there's somebody might be listening to this podcast who fought in Vietnam. Certainly your father might have fought in Vietnam. I think that's more real. I did a I did a semester-long class at the University of Arkansas on this, taught by uh Dr. Randall Woods, who was kind of one of the authorities in the Vietnam War. And at the end of the day, my takeaway was the Vietnam War was a civil war. It was a civil war. It was not, it did, American interests were not at play. You got to keep in mind the Cold War was going on at that time. And so we thought maybe it was the right thing to do. I think clearly it was a mistake. And I think it it leads to a break in trust. And there's a lot of other things that that affect that, the Pentagon Papers, which I'm not going to do a deep dive on now. But it it also kind of illustrates the reality that after World War II, we we in this country had created a military industrial complex. And uh General Eisenhower, who who was then president Eisenhower, and in his outgoing uh address to the nation, kind of warned us of this military-industrial complex. And basically, this what that means is if you have a massive arsenal and you have huge numbers of troops and bases, not just everywhere in the country, which we have had before, but everywhere in the world, when you are holding a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. And so the proclivity, the incentives, even economic incentives to wage war or use weapons are there. They're very real. And that's why the people who are making the decisions for us, they need to be the most restrained. The justifications to go to war need to be the highest justifications of anything we do. You know, you pass a tax cut or whatever, they got to debate it forever, everybody's gonna go on record, people lose their jobs, et cetera. It's important. Our tax rates are important. Nothing's more important than a use of four rec uh use of force resolution. And I think with Vietnam is where things really started to change. And you've got some, maybe at least one good example and several bad examples of how we've handled it. To start with, the good example was Gulf War One, which was in 1990 and 1991. Clearly, over a hundred plus years, the power of the president as commander-in-chief has simply expanded as it has expanded with, you know, into the legislative arena also over that time period. And I think President Trump is pushing the limits of executive authority to the breaking point. And prior to him going to war in Iran, he had shown a lot of restraint and there had been a lot of political rhetoric of he was the president who would keep us out of wars, but that's all gone. Now he owns this Iran war. But going back to the first Gulf War, you had Bush won. You had President George Herbert Walker Bush. And this is very interesting, I think, his personal history, which is he was a pilot in World War II for the Navy. He flew combat missions. This guy understood the consequences of war. And so when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Gulf War I was really a war of necessity. We had to do something. We couldn't just let this guy bully around the Middle East without any consequences. And yes, it was about oil. Let's be crystal clear about that, economic incentives. But it was also about just, you know, we're allies with Israel, and that's just the reality of it. I don't love everything that they do by any means. I'm not a fan of Netanyahu really at all, but it is what it is. We can't just let, we could not just let Hussein rule over the Middle East. And so we had to push back. What was brilliant about this, and again, I don't ever want to diminish the loss of an American soldier's life. We only lost 300 soldiers in Gulf War I. Like, that's as far as wars go, and true, we're talking about troops on the ground, that is astounding. That is brilliantly pulled off. It was$100 billion in cost. That ain't much as far as wars go. I don't remember how many Allied nations were a part of it, but there was scores, maybe as many as 40. Like everyone agreed this incursion, invasion into Kuwait could not stand. And Bush won, did it the right way, man. He he brought the world together. James Baker is, I believe it's his Secretary of State, brought the world together and he said, we're gonna have a very clear objective. And they kicked the hell out of the Iraqis and knocked them out of Kuwait. And then they did something that was remarkable. They stopped. They did not go to Baghdad. They could have rolled over the Iraqi troops like a hot knife through butter, and they chose not to. And that was so smart because I think President Bush won understood we don't want to occupy this country. We had we had a war of necessity. Remember, he was born of World War II, a hero, an American hero. He knew that although we had the power to do it, that's not a reason to do it. He was holding a hammer in his hand and he saw nails in front of him, and he chose not to use that hammer after he eradicated uh the Iraqis out of weight. Brilliant. Great job. And then comes 9-11. And we know the history there. We know that uh, you know, we immediately, in response to 9-11, go into Afghanistan. I was absolutely for that war. It was justified. We're trying uh to get bin Laden, et cetera, et cetera. We we we did it for the right reasons. And like many things, and and perhaps how Iran's gonna go, it looked great in the first couple of months. It looked like if things were going amazing. And then we stayed for 20 years. Okay. We stayed for literally 20 years at the cost of maybe$2.3 trillion. We lost 2,400 American soldiers during that time period. Again, this isn't like World War II or in Viet in Vietnam. And we've we've the technology is different. You you don't have to have troops in a forward position the way that you did in these other wars, but it's still 2,400 Americans. And you got to ask yourself, like, what did they die for? Because as soon as we left Afghanistan, the country fell apart again. And we know that uh somewhere maybe 13 or 15 soldiers died in under Biden's watch uh when we were leaving, but we had to leave, you know, and at least now no more Americans are gonna die in Afghanistan, and we're not spending any more money there. But Afghanistan at least had proper justification going into it. And then comes Gulf War II, the second entry into Iraq. The short of it is it was bad. Um two to three trillion dollars in spending, 4,500 US US deaths, but more than anything, what did we accomplish? It it was just it went on forever. It probably cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016 because of her vote on it. The war on terror, folks, I mean, is a lot like the war on drugs. Like it just it just didn't work. And I think that it's an example of just because you have the military might doesn't mean that you should use it. And if you're really if you're trying to fight or kind of get rid of radical Islam, uh you're not gonna do it through military might. I mean, you're just not to say that you should let people do whatever they want. It's gotta be in a war of necessity. And and the war on terror started out as a war of necessity and it ended up as a war of choice and a forever war, and we don't have much to show for it. The hope was we'd learn some lessons along the way. So let me transition now to what we should be doing? You know, what is the radical moderate's view on all this? Well, a couple of things. And really, World War II is that benchmark. That that's like the best way to understand what a war should be. Congress should have involvement. Uh, there is a War Powers Act, and and it came out of Vietnam in, I believe, 1973. It's never been used effectively. I'm not, I'm not even sure how many times they've tried to use it. It's been an ineffective tool. Congress should be much more involved. They clearly have the power to declare war, and that's what Roosevelt did in World War II. And of course, they were all going to vote for it. But Congress should have a role because we have too much power in the president. And it doesn't matter if it's a Bush, a Clinton, Obama, or a Trump. The president has too much ability to wage war, especially like forever wars. We need to fund the war. And this goes back to a basic radical moderate principle of every there's no free lunch. So everything has a cost. And I think to keep it simple, wars should have that should be part of your tax bill. Like it should be broken down. And maybe everything should. Here's how much you pay for Social Security, here's how much you pay for the National Endowment of the Arts. But war is something that should be the lead up to the war and the costs of the war should be transparent, and we should have to pay for the war with real money, like a burden to the public so that it's seen and understood, and we can hold ourselves accountable for it. And the other thing is there needs to be some type of draft for wars. Now, to me, this is the real dichotomy here. I think the Vietnam War probably eventually ended because people were like, this draft stuff is ridiculous. I mean, I'm not going, I'm not doing it. And they basically, we get away from the draft, we get into a voluntary military. And look, you sign up for the military, you know what can happen. You know you can be in a forward position, you know you can die for your country. I choose not to do that. I I would have done it in World War II. I mean, I would have had to, but I would have, I probably would, I was of age in Gulf War I, and I said to myself, you know, I was in college, I said to myself, I'll I'll go if we needed. Well, I didn't know anything about anything. The thing was over before, you know, you could you could blink because it was masterfully executed. But there has to be everybody's got a share in the pay if you're gonna be really be at war. And that's why, quite frankly, we really haven't been in a war, a true war since World War II. They call Vietnam a war, and we were there, and the troops on the ground, and a lot of people died, but it wasn't truly a war in this. I mean, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution is the only resolution that says we even were gonna be there that Congress put forward. We didn't really have a true war resolution. We don't do that anymore. And we should. And under the way the Constitution is currently constructed, I don't know that that anything's gonna change. I'm just throwing out some ideas that Congress should have an actual role in this, and it it's much more than it is currently. We should fund these wars transparently and we should share in the pain. Uh, we should have some type of draft system, even if it's a limited draft system, so that everybody has to participate. And then we'd have a much more robust debate of whether or not we should be involved in these things at all. So let's talk now about the war in Iran. And I talked about this last week, so I'm not gonna cover all of that same ground, but I want to start with the concept of you know, in the context of war in general, was this a good idea? Is it gonna work, et cetera? So the first thing I want to say is we tend to underestimate the cost of war. I think we did that for sure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Billions, you know, is the initial estimate of what it's gonna cost. And then over time, that just becomes trillions. Okay. So like we underestimate the cost. We underestimate casualties and deaths, but more so we underestimate the money. Cost because these things get expensive. And the first year of the war is like always the least expensive. And then you got to think about the fact when people are wounded, when people are losing arms and legs, like they're going to be in the veterans administration hospitals for the rest of their life. Forget about their quality of life, which is it's horrendous for them. But the care and the money that we're going to have to spend just simply because we decided to make war on somebody in any given war, there's a huge cost and it's got a long tail to it. We also overestimate our control of the situation. Now, in Iran specifically, I think the thing that that is on the news and that we can all appreciate is the Strait of Harmuz, you've got 20% of the global oil supply going through that one narrow area. And I think there's certain areas where it's only like 20 miles wide. So, and it butts to Iran. So Iran has tremendous uh authority, tremendous uh, you know, they're in the region and can do quite a bit to stymie or even completely stop the flow of oil. Now, President Trump made a presidential address on April 1st, and you know, with his rhetorical style, he said things like, We've completely wiped out the Iranian Navy and taken away their capacity, et cetera, et cetera. He made it all sound pretty peachy king. I don't think that's probably as true as he's making it sound, but they're still gonna have some missiles. They're still gonna have drones. It's like living in a very high crime area. You can roll out the National Guard for a period of time, but then the criminals are just gonna hide for a while. And then when the National Guard leaves, they're gonna come back out. Like it's not gonna change the overall situation. So we have an oil shock. We know that price per barrel was gonna go up over 100 and probably stay there. We know that the price uh at the at the pump is gonna go up. I said before, like that doesn't affect my life that much, but it it affects a lot of people's lives uh tremendously. And but it is what it is. It's the price that we pay, and we know that there are risk factors involved, but I just think we're overestimating our control. And quite frankly, I don't know that there was a good plan. Uh I said that President Trump, I think, was just making a very large gamble by going to Iran. It's his gamble to make. I mean, whether he did it the way he did it, which was no real justification ahead of time, and and waiting 32 days to give his real first substantive presidential address, he ultimately we knew he could do this if he wanted. He could have gone to Congress. He didn't, but he could have gone to Congress. The Republicans would have said, oh, sure, President Trump, whatever you want to do. They weren't gonna, they weren't gonna go against him. Um it's just the American people would have had more understanding of the justification. But at the end of the day, I think that it's kind of a fool's errand if we think that this is gonna be simple or easy. And I will say it was interesting in that address on April 1st that the president made, he talked about several other wars and how long they were. And then he made the comment, you know, we're only 32 days into Iran. If he pulls out of it now, he could argue that it was to stymie Iran's nuclear ambitions and that it worked. He could really declare victory and then just walk away from Iran for the rest of his presidency. And that's probably, quite frankly, that's probably the smart move, the smart move politically for him, but also probably the smart move for us. If he goes into Iran with Kran troops, whether that's to get uranium that's under a bunch of rubble or even more ambitious, he tries to go to Tehran and and take out the leadership, you know, like it's something akin to what he did in Venezuela, which by the way, Iran and Venezuela are just not comparable situations in any regard. But if he were to do that, I think it's gonna go really badly. And I've told people, I don't think he will, but if he does, he's 100% made this a war of choice. Currently, the way it stands right now in April of 2026, I think President Trump could argue this was a necessity. They were gonna get the bomb. He's saying they were weeks away. I I mean, I think Netanyahu and Israel's been saying that for like 40 years. So it's not believable. It's it's the it's the chicken little, the boy who cried woof type scenario. But let's say that Iran ultimately was always gonna try to get nukes, um, then that's at least a justification because it's different, right? This isn't World War I or World War II where we have an ocean between us and Germany had no capacity to hit us. This is different. Nuclear bombs, if you put them into an intercon intercontinental ballistic missile, can go anywhere in the world. Now, I don't know that Iran has that, I don't think Iran has that type of technology, but they have drones and they could also, you know, there's the scenario of they could smuggle a nuke in nuke into the United States by boat somehow, and somebody can detonate it in Manhattan. I mean, there's been movies made about this. I don't think any of that was gonna happen. I don't. But I don't have national security briefings. We all have we we're stuck with having to just trust the president of the United States, whoever that person may be. It just happens to be President Trump at the moment. So here's the thing Iran war is dominating the headlines right now, but history is gonna tell us that the real story of a war is rarely written within the first few months. The question isn't whether the war is justified, because that is ambiguous at this moment. It really is. I I I'm not gonna be reactionary and say that there's no justification for the war because there are some. Uh I'm not convinced at all, but there are justifications to be had. The real question I would say it's it's whether we've learned anything from the last hundred years of war, right? We have test cases. We have a history here. And folks, if we're not going to do anything else, let's learn from our history, right? Anyone listening to this podcast, unless they work in the White House or what's now called the Department of War, everyone else who listens to this podcast, we don't have authority to stop President Trump from waging a war in Iran. We don't. That was decided in November of 2024 when he was elected president of the United States. He has that authority, and the Congress could step in. They're not going to. I don't think anything, the only thing is going to change in the executive authority of President Trump at least until January of 2027. And that's only if a Democratic majority gets Democrats get a majority at least in the House, possibly in the Senate. So we're stuck with it. He's our commander-in-chief. I support the office of the presidency, I support our troops. I'm highly concerned that this war in Iran was kind of reckless, that it the justifications were super weak. The American public's not behind it. But the bigger lesson here is can we can we at least recognize our history and the contextual uh put Iran into the context of what we've learned for the last hundred years? If we could do that, if we could just do that one thing, I think that would honor people like my father who fought in wars so that other people didn't have to fight in wars. Folks, I appreciate you listening for this week. That is the POV of POBIC.