The military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, considered together, will be the most expensive war in American history. There are many ways to tally the costs. The price tag is estimated by Linda J. Bilmes of the Harvard Kennedy School to total somewhere between four and six trillion dollars. The decision to finance the wars almost entirely through borrowing has already added more than 1.3 trillion dollars to the national debt. And then there’s the direct human cost: more than six thousand soldiers have died, and up to another six thousand contractors.

At the intersection of the enormous economic costs and the incalculable human price of the war is figure that is even more difficult to contemplate: the estimated lost economic value of America’s war dead. Bilmes puts it at 44.6 billion dollars, calculated by using a midrange figure from various government agencies’ estimates of the “value of a statistical life.” In that accounting, a single life is worth a little over seven million dollars, a number that far exceeds the hundred-thousand-dollar death gratuity that the Department of Defense pays to the survivors of those killed while on active duty. If anything, it’s a low estimate, one that doesn’t include the associated costs of family members having to alter careers and lives.

Illustration by Larry Buchanan.