Bombarded

Occasionally I feel bombarded, usually by my "to do" list, which never seems to get shorter. Sometimes I feel bombarded by emails, but I delete a lot of them. When I am researching for a blog post there are times when I feel bombarded with information & have to spend a lot of time sifting the "wheat from the chaff". There is a lot of chaff!

But I am not being bombarded by bombs & missiles. It is beyond my capacity to imagine what that feels like. The thought of the harm done to children mentally & physically makes me feel sick. To be in a perpetual state of fear, knowing that each minute might be your last is beyond comprehension. 

The sheer number of drone attacks & missiles that aggressors are able to fire is frightening. Russia launched 288 missiles at Ukraine in February 2026, the highest monthly total since the beginning of 2023. In addition to the missiles, Russia deployed 5,059 long-range drones against Ukraine. As of May 2025, Israel had dropped approximately 100,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its military campaign on October 2023. The amount of explosives dropped on Gaza now far exceeds the combined bomb tonnage dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II.

Yet governments do not publish accurate, comprehensive, information about the costs of war. They do not say how many soldiers, non combatants, children are killed or injured. They do not publish the financial cost of the armaments & machinery of war, which must be astronomical. They do not publish the cost of clearing the devastation caused by the bombardment, or the cost of rebuilding the infrastructure & property. Long-term expenses like veteran care, interest on debt, or indirect economic losses are omitted, frequently hiding true costs from the public.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute tracks official budgets whose total expenditures often far exceed published figures. https://www.sipri.org/

But don't we have a right to know? War is paid for out of our taxes. There isn't a "War Fairy" or a "War Money Tree". We work and Income Tax is deducted from our wages. We pay National Insurance Tax. We buy things & pay Value Added Tax. We die & if we are lucky enough to have enough savings we pay Inheritance Tax. 

 

We have a democracy of sorts, it's better than none. We vote politicians in to make informed decisions on our behalf. (I use the term loosely, because I don't see a lot of evidence that is true). But we don't require them to give us enough information after the decisions have been made as to whether they were justifiable & right. We certainly don''t require them to give a full report on all the costs of taking us to war.

I'm not saying that war is wrong or unecessary per se. I do question how the vast amouts of money any war costs are found, when our infrastructure & systems have been failing for years through lack of funding. There are only a few ways the money is found, borrowing, quantitative easing, selling public assets or privatizing state-owned enterprises, (but we've already done that) & lotteries. 

Perhaps if the true costs of war had to be published, politicians would think twice. Especially if they had to face the consequences of their choices. Unfortunately they don't.