The Costs of COIN

Judah Grunstein has a sharp take on the wages of counter-insurgency and its impact on the economy:

Quite a bit of the actual productive work (the building of infrastructure, for instance) takes place in the actual theater of operations, not on the homefront. Add to that the fact that COIN removes a disproportionate amount of young men and women from the productive workforce (some of them permanently), and returns a disproportionate amount of them disabled (due to improvements in force protection), and it becomes clear that COIN amounts to an enormous outflow of American wealth, with little in the way of productive stimulus to counterbalance it.

So long as policy-makers in Washington view a pax Americana in the Middle East as the ultimate goal of U.S. policy, then the "enormous outflows of American wealth" have only just begun.