USA. Washing, DC. 2018. The Senate Armed Services Committee, tasked with legislative oversight of the military, is one of the most powerful entities in government. According to a study released by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the wars since 9/11 have cost approximately $5.9 trillion, caused 480,000 deaths, and created more than 10.1 million refugees. Funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and 76 other global counter- terrorism missions comes from deficit spending and borrowing, not new tax- es. According to Neta Crawford, a political science professor at the institute, “The U.S. continues to fund the wars by borrowing, so this is a conservative estimate of the consequences of funding the war as if on a credit card, in which we are only paying interest even as we continue to spend.” The interest alone could be trillions of dollars.