The Human Cost of Empire: Civilians and Children in U.S.-Backed Conflicts
/The Human Cost of Empire: Civilians and Children in U.S.-Backed Conflicts
By Peter Marina, PhD
A two-year-old boy named Yazan sits on a torn piece of foam in a refugee camp in Gaza City. His eyes are wide and heavy as his body shows every bone. His mother Naima tells aid workers they have not had flour or food assistance in two months. Yazan is not a symbol. He is a real child, documented by UNICEF field teams in the summer of 2025, one face among hundreds of thousands just like his. This is what U.S. foreign policy looks like when you trace it past the press briefings and into the camps.
Eight months ago in these pages, I argued that America’s military empire drains the resources that could house, heal, and educate the people living in this country. Since that August column, the wars have expanded, the death tolls have grown, and the evidence has moved from argument into overwhelming documentation. This article follows the facts where they lead.
Since October 2023, more than 75,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to independent research published in The Lancet and verified through multiple methodologies including peer-reviewed household surveys. Women, children, and elderly people account for 56 percent of those deaths. The Gaza Health Ministry released a 1,516-page document in March 2025 listing 50,000 confirmed dead by name. The first 350 pages contained entirely children under the age of 16. These are not statistics. These are names.
UNICEF reports that more than 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured since October 2023. Famine spread through Gaza City in the summer of 2025, with WHO documenting that nearly one in five children under five suffered acute malnutrition. UN projections now estimate that at least 101,000 children between six and 59 months will face acute malnutrition through October 2026, including more than 31,000 severe cases carrying a three-to-five-fold elevated risk of death. Four out of every five children in Gaza entered 2026 still facing crisis-level hunger, according to Save the Children. No children in Gaza currently meet minimum dietary diversity standards. They survive, when they survive, on bread and sugar.
Then on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched direct strikes on Iran. The attacks killed the Supreme Leader, destroyed military infrastructure, and hit residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, and cultural sites. The NGO HRANA documented over 3,100 deaths from airstrikes by mid-March, including more than 1,354 civilians. HRANA estimates that at least 15 percent of all casualties were under the age of 18. On the first day of the war, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab. At least 175 people died, most of them children. A U.S. military investigation found that outdated targeting data guided the strike. The Trump administration had previously cut 90 percent of the Pentagon teams responsible for reducing civilian casualties in military operations. The school burned.
Elected officials sign the authorizations. Defense contractors build the weapons. Taxpayers fund the flights. Masters of war make billions. Children die under the rubble.
The budget tells the story. In fiscal year 2025, the United States spent approximately $919 billion on national defense, representing 13 percent of the entire federal budget. The Trump administration now proposes boosting that figure to $1.5 trillion for 2027, the largest such request in decades, while simultaneously cutting non-defense domestic spending by 10 percent. Congress finds hundreds of billions for airstrikes within days. It cannot find the will to fully fund Medicaid, public housing, or mental health services after decades of debate. Brown University’s Costs of War Project calculates that every million dollars in military spending creates five jobs on average, while the same million invested in education generates thirteen. The money flows out. The need stays home.
Every officer reading this already knows what I am describing. They drive through it every shift. Research in criminology establishes clearly that relative deprivation, the experience of being systematically cut off from the opportunities others take for granted, drives social instability and crime. Officers spend their careers responding to the downstream consequences of decisions made far above their pay grade. Poverty does not create itself. Disinvestment creates it. The federal government then sends police to manage the disorder that austerity manufactures, asking officers to substitute for the hospitals, schools, and housing programs that budget choices eliminated. That is not policing. That is containment.
Communities with strong social infrastructure generate fewer crisis calls. Communities where children grow up with food, shelter, healthcare, and functional schools produce fewer desperate adults. This is not ideology. It is documented in decades of criminological research. Investing in people reduces the conditions that produce crime. Redirecting even a fraction of military spending toward housing, healthcare, and education does not just help the people who receive those services. It changes the environment that shapes behavior, reduces officer exposure to chronic social crises, and builds the community trust that makes policing possible.
The resources exist. The 2027 defense budget proposal allocates more money to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing than the entire discretionary budgets of the Departments of Education, Housing, and Health combined. Between 2020 and 2024, just five defense contractors received $771 billion in Pentagon contracts. That money did not build a single school, house a single family experiencing homelessness, or treat a single child for a treatable illness.
Look again at Yazan sitting on that torn piece of foam. Look at the 175 children in a school in Minab who did not go home. Look at the first 350 pages of a document that contains nothing but the names of dead children. Then look at a proposed defense budget of $1.5 trillion and ask what the United States values when it believes no one is measuring.
Children are always the clearest measure of a society’s true priorities. They cannot lobby, vote, or protect their own interests. What happens to children in Gaza, in Iran, and in underfunded American classrooms and emergency rooms is the result ofdeliberate policy decisions.
Ending these unnecessary wars and redirecting resources toward human life is not utopian. The resources exist but thewill doesn’t. That is a moral failure dressed up as a budget problem. Until that changes, Yazan sits on his torn piece of foam, and the money keeps flowing to the rich and powerful.
Dr. Peter Marina is a sociologist and criminologist. Along with his father, (retired) Lieutenant Pedro Marina, he teaches human rights policing to law enforcement professionals. He is the author of Human Rights Policing: Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2022) and the forthcoming Before the Sirens: Dispatch, Discretion, and Human Rights (Routledge).
