Shooting the Messenger

Pentagon: If the facts don't back our conclusions, just change the facts

from InsideHigherEd.com

Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, calls her latest paper “pretty dry.” That hasn’t prevented it from riling high-ranking Pentagon officials — who called her and her dean to complain about her work. When they questioned her sources of material, they ran into a bit of a problem: She did most of her research with data on federal Web sites. So what did the Pentagon do? It changed the Web sites, and now continues to trash her research.

Bilmes has become a leading expert on economic questions related to the war in Iraq, and her experience the last few weeks demonstrates how social scientists can end up in the line of political fire when their findings — however dry — offend government officials.

The story begins with a paper Bilmes wrote last year with Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate in economics. In their study, they found that the Bush administration has seriously underestimated the economic costs of the war in Iraq. After the study was publicized, Bilmes was approached by some experts on veterans’ benefits who said that one cost of the war hadn’t received enough attention in their work (or from the government): the costs of caring for veterans injured in the conflict.

And that’s the question that led Bilmes to prepare a 21-page study that she presented this month in Chicago at the Allied Social Sciences Association meeting. The presentation of “Soldiers Returning From Iraq and Afghanistan: The Long-Term Costs of Providing Veterans Medical Care and Disability Benefits” went off without controversy and might have escaped Pentagon notice. But Bilmes also published an op-ed version of her findings in the Los Angeles Times. The Pentagon did notice that piece.

The central argument of the new Bilmes paper is that so many soldiers are being injured that the costs of caring for them over their lifetimes is likely to be $350 billion, or up to twice that, depending on how long the war lasts. The high cost is the result of huge advances in military medicine that have greatly reduced the chances that a soldier injured in Iraq will die. As a result, the ratio of injuries to deaths — 16:1 by her estimate — is higher than in any other war in U.S. history. (By comparison, in Vietnam the ratio was 2.8:1 and in World War II the ratio was 1.6:1.)

(The rest is here.)

TM comment: Support for the argument that Bilmes makes — that the Pentagon has underestimated the true cost of the war and the cost of caring for veterans — can be found on the GAO website (here, go to p. 43). For example the GAO shows an unfunded liability increase just in 2005 of almost $200 billion for veterans/survivors' benefits.

In a similar fashion, and for the same reason, the Pentagon has also understated the extent of violence in Iraq, as the Iraq Study Group reported. The ISG selected one day in July 2006 and compared the Pentagon's figure of fewer than 100 violent incidents with the actual count, which turned out to be close to 1000 incidents for that day. The Pentagon and the military in Iraq use several devices to avoid tabulating the real level of violence, such as not including incidents in which nobody was injured or in which the assailant or intended victim was unknown.