Tulsi Gabbard on military spending: what the evidence says · JRE #1295

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Gabbard, speaking in May 2019, stated the United States was spending $4 billion every month on the war in Afghanistan. Department of Defense accounting shows Afghanistan-specific war obligations of $36.0 billion in fiscal year 2018 and $38.5 billion in fiscal year 2019, equivalent to roughly $3.0-3.2 billion per month for those years. A Congressional Research Service brief published in April 2019, about three weeks before this episode aired, found that total DOD war-related obligations, mostly tied to Afghanistan operations, averaged $47 billion annually over the prior three fiscal years, or about $3.9 billion per month, a figure much closer to Gabbard's number. Official monthly estimates for this period therefore range from roughly $3 billion to just under $4 billion depending on whether narrower Afghanistan-only obligations or broader war-related overseas contingency operations spending is used. Gabbard's $4 billion figure sits at the high end of that range and is presented as a precise, unsourced number rather than an approximation, so the claim is in the right ballpark but somewhat overstated and imprecisely sourced.