Fewer Wars, Fewer Disabled Veterans

More than 40% of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have received service-connected disability determinations. For Vietnam-era veterans, that figure was 16%. For World War II and Korea, fewer than 25%.

Post-9/11 veterans have service-connected disability rates exceeding 40%, far higher than earlier generations at comparable points after service.

These are not soft injuries. Burn pit exposure, traumatic brain injury, and toxic chemicals in the air, water, and soil of two combat theaters have produced cancers, neurological damage, and chronic conditions that will follow these veterans for the rest of their lives.

Two decades of regime-change wars have caused permanent, irreversible human damage. The raw number is over 1.8 million people.

Annual disability compensation already runs about $180 billion and is projected to reach $2.2 to $2.5 trillion by 2050.

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These figures will keep climbing as veterans age and injuries compound.

Injuries are compounding now. Since January 2025, the United States has conducted strikes in seven countries — Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, and Venezuela. Iran is now an active conflict with American casualties. Future disabled veterans are still being created.

These disabled veterans cost America far more than medical care. Someone rated at 70% disability is a person whose productive working life has been curtailed, and in many cases ended. Multiply that across 1.8 million people and the wars extracted something from the American economy that no spreadsheet fully captures.

The arithmetic is straightforward. The decision to fight these wars created the injuries. The injuries produce the cost and the lost capacity. Anyone looking for a way to reduce what America spends on veteran care is looking at the wrong end of the problem.

There is no other lever.

Further Reading

1. Bilmes, Linda J. The Long-Term Costs of United States Care for Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. Costs of War Project, Brown University Watson Institute, 2021.
2. Bilmes, Linda J. Current and Projected Future Costs of Caring for Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Harvard Kennedy School, 2011.
3. Congressional Budget Office. Veterans Benefits Baseline. February 2024.
4. Congressional Budget Office. Income of Working-Age Veterans Receiving Disability Compensation. 2023.
5. Council on Foreign Relations. A Guide to Trump’s Second-Term Military Strikes and Actions. 2026.
6. Jonathan Vespa. Those Who Served: America’s Veterans From World War II to the War on Terror. American Community Survey Report ACS-43. U.S. Census Bureau. June 2020.