Gonna write this up in longer form, but folks complaining that the $45bn Ukraine costs are high miss two key points:
1. The direct costs in (US) military aid are surprisingly small; in the order of $19bn this year, and $10.8bn committed (so far) for next year
2. The indirect economic costs of the Russian war to the US economy (i.e. to the private sector not via the government) are in the order of $600-700bn per year. To pick a random company, it's nearly $6-10bn in costs to Apple *alone*.
In other words, if the US upped it's spend by, say, 25% and that reduced the length of the war by *just a whole week*, it would *make money*.
It's a good example of how the size of war economics harms get truly insane really quickly, and get you to unintuitive places about just how much of the war costs end up as indirect, rather than direct costs.
Or if you want it put another way, every American is spending in the order of $50 a year in direct lethal assistance to Ukraine, but losing about $1700 a year in indirect economic costs caused by that war.
If you had a company that sold a widget that upped a business cost from $50 to, let's say, $100, but doing so saved the customer $1700 a year, how quickly do you think VCs in Silicon Valley would jump in to invest in that widget?
Economic costs get into stratospheric numbers when you start looking at global dampening effects, and get really hard for the human brain to comprehend. So you end up having to do the translation into comprehendible numbers.
So if you want to put it another way, the indirect costs of the Ukraine war is equivalent to, say, 6 million American jobs a year.
How much would Congress pay in subsidies to get 6 million people into new jobs? Idk. But $45bn sounds super cheap at those scales.
Taking OECD numbers of the cost of the war at 3% of global GDP, give or take, and assuming that's uniformly spread globally, ending the war would *double* US GDP growth.
So why is the US investing only $10.8bn of lethal aid next year into getting that to happen sooner?
@JDN5IX @SwiftOnSecurity @Pwnallthethings
After two decades, the US couldn't even evict the Taliban from Afghanistan. And you think evicting Russia from Ukraine is a feasible goal? When Russia has nukes?
@MisuseCase @JDN5IX @SwiftOnSecurity @Pwnallthethings
My point is that the US military seems unable to convert success in battles to achieving geopolitical goals.
I am not convinced that Putin would concede defeat before launching an ICBM or two. Is that a price the US should pay to help Ukraine?
I'm not seeing huge domestic support, especially as this drags on.
@grumble209 @JDN5IX @SwiftOnSecurity @Pwnallthethings It’s not the U.S. military in this case, it’s the Ukrainian military.
And “let’s just concede to him what he wants, otherwise he’ll get very angry, besides he won’t possibly escalate after this” didn’t work with the last guy who decided he was entitled to large chunks of Europe.
@MisuseCase @JDN5IX @SwiftOnSecurity @Pwnallthethings
I never advocated conceding. I hope Ukraine continues to fight, and I hope lots of US citizens who feel strongly about it support Ukraine directly with blood and treasure.
That's different from conceding, and it's different than the US government waging a proxy war which will doubtless cost us a lot in Russian / Chinese blowback even if it doesn't escalate directly.
It's not conceding to believe that regardless of the duration and outcome of the fighting in Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in creating a wasteland on his border that will last a decade.
Pwnallthethings
SwiftOnSecurity
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Grumble
Misuse Case