NYT chart by way of WPR Media Roundup.
Charts speak for themselves. Warfare is less burdensome to the US population and economy, even as the per soldier price tag grows, along with overall cost relative to the size of theater (WWII was BIG!).
But that trend is about as surprising as the one concerning higher insurance totals for natural disasters. Simply put, we live more technologized lives and value life more completely now than in the past--and we're willing to pay for those biases.
But I will stick to an old premise of mine: if we had outsourced the complete rebuild of Iraq to the Chinese, it would have been far cheap and worked far better.
But we don't own that level of realism yet--at least not regarding the postwar.