Launching WarCosts: 250 Years of US Military Interventionism in Hard Numbers

Today we're launching WarCosts — a free, comprehensive data platform documenting every major US military intervention from the Revolutionary War through the 2026 Iran conflict. The site spans 211+ pages of data covering 36 conflicts, with the numbers that rarely appear together in one place: $11.6 trillion in total cost, 1,049,463 US military deaths, and 5,241,380 civilian deaths.

The Numbers They Don't Put on the Recruiting Poster

American military spending is often discussed in annual budget terms — $886 billion this year, a 3% increase over last year, roughly what Congress approved. But this framing obscures the cumulative reality. When you add up every conflict the United States has fought over 250 years — adjusted for inflation, including long-tail veterans' care, interest on war debt, and reconstruction costs — the total reaches $11.6 trillion.

That's not a Pentagon budget figure. That's the actual cost of choosing war, again and again, across two and a half centuries.

The human toll is harder to contextualize but impossible to ignore. Over one million American service members have died in these conflicts. More than five million civilians — in countries most Americans couldn't find on a map — have been killed. WarCosts puts every one of these numbers in context: by conflict, by president, by decade, by region.

What's on the Platform

WarCosts is built to make this data explorable from every angle. The platform includes:

• 36 conflict detail pages: Each war and intervention gets its own page with costs, casualties, duration, key events, and historical context — from the Revolutionary War and Civil War through Korea, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and the 2026 Iran conflict.
• Presidential analysis: Which presidents presided over the most military spending and casualties? The data tells a story that crosses party lines.
• Country, region, decade, and era views: See where the US has intervened geographically, how interventionism has shifted across eras, and which decades have been the most costly.
• 750 overseas military bases across 80 countries — mapped and documented, illustrating the scale of America's global military footprint.
• 17 analysis articles: Long-form pieces examining patterns in the data — the rise of the military-industrial complex, the cost of empire, the economics of intervention.

Four Interactive Tools

Raw numbers only go so far. WarCosts includes four interactive tools designed to make the data personal and tangible:

• War Clock: A real-time counter showing the ongoing cost of current US military operations — dollars accumulating by the second.
• Tax Receipt Calculator: Enter your income and see exactly how much of your federal taxes fund the military, broken down by program and conflict legacy costs.
• Jobs Calculator: What could military spending buy if redirected? See how many teachers, nurses, or infrastructure workers the same dollars could employ.
• Cost Calculator: Compare the cost of specific conflicts to domestic programs — what the Iraq War could have funded in healthcare, education, or infrastructure.

Data-Driven, Not Dogma-Driven

WarCosts is built from the data, not around a predetermined narrative. Our sources include SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), Brown University's Costs of War Project, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Every number on the platform is sourced and verifiable.

That said, we don't pretend the data is neutral in its implications. When you lay out 250 years of military interventions — the costs, the casualties, the countries invaded, the bases built, the debt accumulated — the pattern speaks for itself. The United States maintains a global military empire that dwarfs any in human history, funded by trillions in taxpayer dollars and paid for in millions of lives. Whether you call that security or imperialism, the numbers are the numbers.

Our perspective is straightforward: the data suggests that the costs of interventionism — financial, human, and strategic — have far exceeded the benefits. But we present the data openly so readers can draw their own conclusions.

Part of TheDataProject Portfolio

WarCosts joins our growing suite of government transparency platforms:

• OpenSpending — $11.2 trillion in federal contracts, grants, and agency expenditures
• OpenMedicare — $854B in Medicare payments with ML fraud detection
• OpenMedicaid — $1.09 trillion in Medicaid provider payments
• OpenFeds — 2.07 million federal employees, DOGE tracking, brain drain analysis

WarCosts adds the missing dimension to this picture: not just where the money goes, but what it buys — and what it costs — when it goes to war.

Explore WarCosts

Visit warcosts.org to explore 250 years of US military interventions — every conflict, every cost, every casualty. Browse by war, president, country, decade, or era. Use the interactive tools to see what the numbers mean for your own tax dollars. Everything is free, open, and requires no account.

WarCosts is built by TheDataProject.AI — making public data usable, searchable, and accessible to everyone.