About
What this site is, who built it, and what the data is — and is not.
What this is
The War You Know takes public numbers — the enacted defense budget, IRS income-tax data, Census population figures, Pentagon casualty records — and does arithmetic on them. It makes a national number personal: what your community pays toward defense, and what that money could have funded instead.
That is the entire design. This site argues neither for nor against defense spending. You cannot honestly weigh whether something is worth its cost if you never feel the cost — so this site makes the cost concrete and leaves the weighing to you.
Who built it
One software engineer. Self-funded, unaffiliated, and unpaid: nothing here is sold, no ads run, no donations are collected, and no organization — political or otherwise — funds or directs this site. It is not affiliated with any government agency, campaign, or advocacy group.
No name is attached, deliberately: the numbers are meant to be judged on their sourcing, not on who compiled them. Every figure links to where it came from, so you never have to take the author’s word for anything.
What the data is
Every figure on this site carries a source and an as-of date. The core datasets: IRS Statistics of Income (ZIP-level income tax), Census Bureau (population), DoD Comptroller and Treasury statements (budget totals), the Defense Casualty Analysis System (casualties), USAspending (defense contracts), and — for active conflicts — primary reporting from official announcements and independent monitors such as Brown University’s Costs of War project.
Where sources disagree, the figure is labeled contested and the competing counts are shown with who claims each. Where only a floor is verifiable, the floor is shown — accuracy over sensationalism. Active-conflict figures are re-verified weekly against their sources; the full trail is on the methodology page.
What the data is not
The ZIP figure is not spending in your area. It measures what a community pays toward defense via its share of federal income tax — not what the military spends there. Higher-income ZIP codes show larger shares because they pay more income tax. That is the intended measurement, not a bug.
The ZIP data is not current. The IRS releases ZIP-level data roughly three to four years late; the site says so where the number appears and never presents lagged data as current. The live headline uses the current enacted budget and is labeled separately.
Casualty figures undercount. Wounded counts include hostile wounded-in-action only (a limit inherited from the Pentagon’s own data), and some active-conflict death tolls cannot be attributed to a single country’s strikes — where that is true, the label says so.
Nothing here tracks you. No cookies, no individual tracking, no accounts. Analytics are aggregate page counts only; the ZIP code you look up is never logged to analytics.
Corrections
If a number is wrong, or a cited source does not support a figure, say so — thewaryouknow@proton.me. Verified errors get fixed promptly and noted. How a site handles being wrong is the part of its credibility you can actually watch.