A Reflection on War and the Price We Pay

A story, quote, and lesson on what we really sacrifice

War is tragic.

There is unimaginable loss on both sides. People lose their lives, infrastructure is destroyed, communities are broken. And this is just during the actual conflict and violence.

Most wars leave behind them a brewing sense of resentment from the losing party, a world devoid of stability and even, in some cases, a desire for revenge.

It is with this mindset that recent news came to mind. I read a few days ago that, during the conflict in Iran, three American F15E Fighter Jets were lost due to a miscommunication and a friendly fire incident. Each one cost more than $100,000,000 USD.

I was baffled by this metric. We have gotten used to seeing these big numbers, especially when it comes to budgets, spending, and government projects, that we rarely stop to question the scale of what we are dealing with.

Here is a video of one of the jets that were shot down:

I kept digging on this topic until I came across an address given by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, shortly after the death of Joseph Stalin. Even as a former military man (and Supreme Allied Commander), Eisenhower likened arms spending to stealing from the people:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Keep in mind that the metrics for what a fighter cost back then were not even comparable to today’s prices. A front-line American fighter from Eisenhower’s era cost the equivalent of roughly $2–3 million today. A modern F-15E comes in at around $117 million, about 40 to 55 times more.

While doing some research, I came across the following metrics on what $117 million could roughly mean today:

• a new elementary school

• a small community hospital

• hundreds of permanent supportive housing units

• multiple homeless shelters

• full vaccines for ~1-3 million children

• providing clean water to ~3 million people

I don’t want to focus on the political finger-pointing but rather to put the numbers into perspective on an even playing field. I do believe war can be justified (especially when it comes to self-defense and preventing genocide), but it is only as a tragic necessity, never as something noble in itself.

So as we move into an age where war has gotten increasingly more expensive, I want to invite you all to not only think of war in terms of lives lost but in the good that could’ve come from that spending that could never come to light.

The real cost of war is not only what it destroys, but what the world never gets to build.

What would you do if you were given $100,000,000 to benefit society?

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