You might think that once wars stop, you stop paying for them. That's never been the case. You're always paying for wars after wars end, for a couple of reasons. There's reset costs - buying new equipment, and there's also veteran care. For example, we're not yet seeing the peak of the cost for the Vietnam War veterans care. Think about that. Decades after that war has ended, the costs are still rising. We won't see a peak in the number of post 9/11 war veterans getting services from the VA until about 2040.

Political scientist Neta C. Crawford examines the brutal, ongoing cost of America's wars in the 21st century - from the politics obscuring the human toll of sustained conflicts across the Middle East, to the corrosive effects of running endless wars on credit as the internal crises of healthcare and climate change take their own toll.

Neta is author of the paper Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency for Brown University's Watson Institute.