Faculty Research Fellow Heidi Peltier Gives Talk on Post-9/11 Military Spending for MIT’s Radius Initiative

Heidi Peltier, a Research Professor at the BU Department of Political Science and a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow, recently gave a talk exploring the impacts of post-9/11 military spending.

In the talk, Prof. Peltier drew on her recent research for the Costs of War project to illustrate the scale of post-9/11 U.S. military spending as a percentage of the federal budget and as it relates to other countries around the world. She also highlighted the growth of military contracting and the opportunity costs associated with rising military spending compared with investments in clean energy, infrastructure, education, or health care.

The presentation was hosted Radius, an initiative of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT, as part of its “Global Peace and Insecurity” seminar series.

Prof. Peltier is the Director of the Costs of War project’s “20 Years of War” research series at the Pardee Center, launched in October 2019 in collaboration with Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. The ongoing Costs of War project at the Watson Institute has explored the human, financial, environmental, social, and political costs of the post-9/11 wars. The two-year “20 Years of War” series based at the Pardee Center is producing a new set of analyses to mark 20 years since the beginning of the post-9/11 wars.