Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way? Without a war US would still have aircraft carriers, they would just be floating somewhere else.
On the other side, it seems like this is not tracking interceptor costs (presumably due to it being classified), which have certainly been used extensively and are extremely expensive. For that matter i doubt we have a very clear picture of how much ordinance has been used in general.
[To be clear, im not doubting war is very expensive]
A carrier operating at sea on the other side of the world is a ton more expensive than a carrier in port at home. The Ford in particular would probably be in port now if not for these back-to-back expensive adventures, they’ve been deployed for a remarkably long time now.
(As for whether this reflects only those added costs, I don’t know)
> The US has protected global sea lanes for 80 years.
But rather than protect global sea lanes, the US is bombing Iran. That’s not the same thing.
The idea that the war isn’t costing money for personnel because those people would be doing something anyway makes no sense. They could be doing something else. In fact, they could be doing something that increases the wealth and wellbeing of the world, rather than destroying things. So from that perspective, the cost is far higher than what is shown here.
Then there’s the loss of innocent lives. It would be unconscionable to put a price tag on the lives of dozens of Iranian girls killed when their school was flattened and to show it on this website, and yet, this is not “free” either.
> But rather than protect global sea lanes, the US is bombing Iran. That’s not the same thing.
Arguably the primary threat to modern sea lanes is Iran.
Right now Iran is harrasing traffic. Previously the Houthis, generally considered an Iranian proxy, were harrasing traffic. Its all kind of the same war, this is just the end game.
The first gulf war was 1990. The US has been at war with various factions of the Middle East more or less continuously for thirty five years. The current president specifically campaigned on no new foreign wars and repeatedly tried to bully the Nobel committee into awarding him a peace prize before accepting a second hand one from another world leader and a sham one from FIFA of all things.
What makes anyone think that this latest attack is the "end game" vs just the latest expensive chapter?
If it were that straightforward, right now the US would (A) have a consistent set of demands/goals that include shipping security and (B) a large international coalition of support.
People should begin quantifying the commercial freight global costs incurred from the Houthi harassment. There is a basic ROI one can do that impacts not just US interests, but global interests.
who bombed them first and repeatedly? and embargoed and sanctioned them before that? and tore up the nuclear deal? and before that installed the shah so we could get the oil?
Houthi harassments was also a byproduct of the Israel-US "self defense" against the Iranian backed hamas attacks. Maybe it is pointless to pontificate whether the the tic-for-tat would have been initiated had the Israel-US coalition had stopped at punishing the Oct. 7 terrorists rather than leveling half of gaza, although I'm not convinced it was an inevitable byproduct.
What about tens of thousands of peaceful civilians who have been killed by the Iranian regime during past decades? The alternative to this war is allowing the Iranian government to keep doing that, business as usual.
In my opinion bombing people responsible for these atrocities increases the well-being of the world. Most Iranians seem to agree.
This justification for bombing Iran is dumb as fuck. In a few days the number of civilians killed by US-Israeli bombings will surpass the number of civilians killed by the regime in decades.
Exactly: that protection isn't happening right now because those resources are doing something else. The money would be spent anyway, but doing something that is normally considered useful, and that useful thing is not happening to the same capacity as before. Therefore there is an opportunity cost to consider.
The strait of hormuz is the opposite of protected right now. Insurance companies aren't willing to cover ships if they enter the strait to pick up a load of oil, so little commercial traffic is occurring.
The real cost should include the spike in oil prices, the world consumes about 100 million barrels a day, so every $10 increase costs the world a $1 billion a day. We're already up ~$10, and it might continue to rise depending on how things go. You probably should include LNG in there too. If this oil halt is protracted, your stocks and bonds will be dragged down as well.
We have surplus carriers specifically to allow them to average a large percentage of their time at home unlike container ships who spend the vast majority of their time in service. Many systems that are both bespoke and complex means lots and lots of maintenance issues.
Sure the Navy can Airlift in parts etc, but that’s obviously very expensive and less obviously more dangerous.
They aren't all deployed at all times and the Ford is more than overdue to be in Port. The sailors are notably suffering on this deployment and there is a ton of deferred maintenance.
> Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way?
This is a fair way to account for the cost, because the assets were procured and personnel hired years ago for just this purpose.
Put another way: we would not need this fleet at all if we did not expect to use it in a manner like this. (For example, Spain did not choose to have this capability and so has not borne a cost of maintaining this option for the preceding decades.) Through that lens, the true cost of this war would involve counting back to before this round of hostilities began.
It's only fair to count _at least_ the "time on task" for all the assets.
Right, consider the personnel costs that are displayed here. They were already getting paid this past weekend either way (admittedly the military may have had to hire some last minute contractors to help with the operation).
There's someone quoted here who estimated UAE by itself cost in fighting off the Shahed drones at $23-28 per $1 spent on Shahed drone at $55000 (they know how many got through and the claimed success rate and the methods they are using to defend UAE)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/shahed-drones-iran-us...
I think that's true, but I like that this site includes a "ESTIMATED MUNITIONS & EQUIPMENT COSTS" section that shows the value of actual, expended munitions which are all one-time costs directly resulting from the war.
Seems like a massive understatement given how much of this war has been shooting down iranian missiles. According to wikipedia, a single patriot missile cost 4 million, and you often have to use multiple to get a succesful shoot down.
I think when people are asking about the cost of a war, they are asking about excess costs. How much extra money would be saved if the war didn't happen.
Yes. Their repeated warnings that Iran would no longer tolerate the kind of back-and-forth blame shifting that think-tank policy papers openly described years ago as a strategy to keep Iran off sides, and that any attack by Israel would be considered an attack by the USA too and that American assets that surrounded Iran would be attacked; since under all the clownish “who? Meeee?”act gaslighting and stupid pathological lies, everyone knows they are one and the same.
It’s like dealing with psychopathic toddlers who think people aren’t smart enough to know they are lying when they deny killing the family pet even though their hands are covered in blood and you just watched them mid act of slaughtering the family pet.
Nobody was desperate to invade North Korea prior to their acquisition of nukes. It's a horrific war field and combat prospect. Iraq and Afghanistan were each a cakewalk next to going into North Korea (again). North Korea was safe as they were.
The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad.
The primary threat to Iran's regime is internal. Nobody is invading Iran. It's a gigantic country with 93 million people. It can't be done and it's universally understood. Trump won't even speculate about it, even he knows it can't be done. What would nukes do to protect Iran's regime? Are they going to nuke their own people? Are they going to nuke Israel and US bases if the US bombs them?
So let me get this straight: the US bombs Iran, Iran nukes Israel and some US bases, maybe even a regional foe - then Iran gets obliterated.
That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
Take any American, and treat them the way Americans treat others, and they would be forming terrorist cells (gorilla war), building nukes, basically every single thing they could to fight back. To never surrender.
Remember Red Dawn? That would be an American Response, to what America is doing.
That is it basically. If shoe was on other foot, Americans would never surrender.
So, why are we expecting others to give up quietly?
Not sure why this comment is downvoted: the facts are established, as is (among others) the Mosaddegh coup d'état co-organized by the US:
> On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. It was instigated by the United Kingdom (MI6), under the name Operation Boot[5][6][7][8] and the United States (CIA), under the name TP-AJAX Project[9] or Operation Ajax. A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalized the country's oil industry.
(...)
> In August 2013, the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. (...) was in charge of both the planning and the execution
Or the US backing of Saddam Hussein from 1982 onwards during the Iraq-Iran 8-year war of aggression, with “massive loans, political influence, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites”. During this war, Iraq employed chemical weapons leading to 50.000 - 100.000 Irani deaths.
What would have happened if the US dis not get involved in WWII. We would probably not be here...
Not everything is short sighted bean counters. Having major cities explode by nuclear devices in the US will surely cost more.
This doesn't include generational damage in sentiment:
* Europe is in trouble because they can't get gas from Russia, Qatar stopped supplying gas
* Japan is in trouble because Middle East supplies its 75% of oil, which is blocked now
* Ukraine is in dilemma, because US giving every support to Israel, but not to Ukraine
* Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain is asking questions, if US can't defend us and is moving all defensive missiles to protect Israel, why should we even be ally with them in the future, they're scared even more (except UAE) that people might overthrow those kings if things continue this way
* Africa understood its better to work with China, than with US
I think citizens in those countries recognize that allowing a repressive regime to exist simply for cheap oil costs is not necessarily a good solution, either.
until your energy bills impact your pocket directly, while you were laid off from your manufacturing plant, because their cost structure is not competitive without cheap Russian oil/gas
Almost nobody thinks like that, what are we 5 year olds? Especially when most left leaning folks in western world has hard sympathies with hamas which are just left and right hand of the same regime (maybe not US left which is far from left elsewhere).
Did US population en masse lost sleep during past decades till now and some future due to sweatshops full of kids making their jeans or iphones or Christmas toys for their kids in highly undemocratic regimes?
No, we realize US americans elected gerontoidiot Trump, and we constnantly ask ourselves what the actual fuck after every third act of this senile imbecile. Do you not have young (like at least < 60) people who can actually think critically, have strategy, hold ideas for more than 30 seconds. Are you impressed by senility? Why do you support someone who attacks european countries frequently just on the basis of whimsy shit like not wanting to go to war with you into wars of aggression agaisnt third countries, like you attacked Spain most recently? What the actual fuck?
The disruption in gas supply will be very short. Weeks, at most. The gulf states will be very happy to see the Islamic Republic gone, they are living in its shadow for a long time now. Now, Ukraine and Israel need very different kinds of support, and things like US withholding intelligence from Ukraine have nothing to do with Israel.
Iran has been bombing production facilities across a bunch of US allies. It's unclear how quickly those will be rebuilt. Also, the US is probably bombing Iranian production, which means countries like China will be looking for additional sources.
I wonder why Israel should get any support, do you support killing children and bombing schools?
Ukraine, I understand, because it was attacked, but Israel, who was oppressing people for so many years with prisons full with Palestinian kids and teenagers long before Oct 7th, I really don't understand.
Except, for Epstein reasons (blackmail), other than that, there is no reason US should support Israel, in any way
Israel should get support because supporting Israel right to exist, for me, is the right thing, and because its strategic goals and values align with those of the US.
This seems really low considering one of the early warning radars taken out cost around $1bil on its own.... and it's possible a second one was at least damaged. (one in Qatar the other in Bahrain)
We do have actual video of that one radome in Bahrain getting directly struck (from multiple angles). It's possible it was a satellite communication antenna and not a radar.
But the still images shown with before/after are AI generated. (the surrounding buildings are completely different in the before/after image).
For the prospects of the freedom and subsequent prosperity of the oppressed Iranian people, peace in the Middle East, and safety of the commercial shipping routes, I fully approve my tax dollars to the matter.
That news piece was officially dismissed after investigation by the IDF and CENTCOM. I would bring to your awareness that you're using an emotional argument with no substance, and it discounts the decades of complex history in the region.
Would you still approve if the cost is 20x, the Iranian people are worse off, and the shipping routes and Middle East are dramatically less safe due to drones?
OK, I don't. I wonder if we could set up some sort of legislative system that could debate this on our behalf and make a reasonable plan that accounts for our differing viewpoints.
I've found that if two people sit together and are willing to talk long enough, they'll eventually be able to actually hear each other, and usually they are more in agreement than the media-installed reactions and assumptions we have. Only with a few would we vehemently disagree. I'm talking about reasonable people though, like your calm reply.
Venezuela is undergoing tremendous freedom and hope. My fellow Venezuelans and I are super grateful for the well-planned, surgical mission of the US. They can have all the oil they want and help restore our industries in exchange for their financial benefit and partnership, which is the most recent track record.
Likely the actual goal, as dictated by Israel and the Jewish Lobby in the US, is to destabilise Iran long term in a sort of Syria situation, so they cannot threaten Israeli hegemony in the region.
Remember even a non Islamic Iran is still a threat to Israeli power if it remains unified and intact.
Given 50 million schoolkids in the US and a cost per meal per child of $4, the current number represents 10 meals. At 1 meal a day that would be 2 school weeks, at 2 meals a day that would be 1 school week.
The government's job is not to maximize its ROI. For example, (and I make no argument about whether the current situation does this), protecting its citizens is of extreme moral importance, even if it's very very expensive and unlikely to somehow feed back into the economy in a way that recoups the cost long term.
Then surely universal health care, strict anti-pollution measures, and worker safety efforts are next on the list, alongside access to healthy food and efforts to reduce the number of miles the average person needs to drive daily.
2 school weeks of lunches for less than a week of war costs is a pretty good argument for school lunches. Especially as costs of this start to balloon the longer it goes on.
The Sentinel ICBM project (already at 2x initial budget, and set to balloon further) will be the most expensive project since the interstate freeway system was built.
Honestly, a lot of these programs become substantially more expensive when you add the bureaucracy and hoops required by means testing. The economics are easier if you just give kids food and skip sorting out whether they deserve it or not.
Those meals would most likely help a lot of kids become healthy productive members of society. That money would be saved by the families of those kids and used in other parts of the economy. A lot of the cost would therefore be returned. The money spent of this war is producing only destruction.
The question is fundamentally poorly formed, and as a consequence, so is the rebuttal. A state can pay for anything, since it doesn't have to be in a budget surplus.
Household budget analogies emerge any time someone wants to limit spending, or criticize spending, but one of the biggest points of Wealth of Nations (which is the foundation for modern macroeconomics) is that the budget of a state is fundamentally different to that of a household.
If a household fails to maintain its budget, it's game over. People know this, which is why it's a punchy analogy. But it's also a bad analogy.
If a state fails to maintain its budget, it can either print more money or raise taxes. Neither is a great long term fiscal policy, but it's not the end of the world either, and budgetary deficit something most states utilize fairly regularly.
What's missing with the school lunches and present with the Iran War is political will. (I get that is what your point was all along.)
Is this missing interceptors? My understanding is those probably dominate total costs at the moment, especially if you include the costs of allied Gulf State and Israeli interceptors. Thousands have been expended already on ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Those range from hundred of thousands to multiple millions per shot.
Reductive tropes?OP is pointing out a serious flaw in US federal spending. Namely our lack of spending on healthcare and our intensive spending on killing people from a distance
The federal govt spent about 2.6-2.8 trillion dollars[1] on healthcare in 2025 - including Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, VA/DoD health and federal employee benefits). In what world is that "lack of spending" ?
This is a valid criticism. Whenever there is a push to improve life for US citizens, we are told that we do not have the funds. Yet, here we see an essentially unlimited budget to fight Israel's war of aggression against Iran, with zero benefit to US citizens. In fact, the costs (financial, moral and human) that we will pay for this excursion will be astronomically high.
If budgets are what interest you, maybe consider why Iran spent over $500B developing offensive nuclear weapons. Instead of peaceful pursuits or defenses against its supposed aggressor over 1,000 miles away.
To protect themselves from the exact scenairo happening right now? The reason why Putin is sleeping peacefully in his bed while Khamenei is dead under rubble is that one has nuclear deterent while the other din't have that protection.
> supposed aggressor
I don’t know if there is anything “supposed” about that aggressor given the present situation.
not providing universal healthcare is a choice, as seen directly here. Its distressing to have US politicians make false claims that Europe's universal healthcare being something they "indirectly pay for", because even if Europe spent all their money on defence the US (albeit mostly the GOP) would still resist providing universal healthcare both tooth and nail.
Universal healthcare is cheaper than our system of healthcare by a factor of 2 (comparing other OECD countries). If we raised taxes and implemented universal healthcare we’d save about $1T a year.
Cost isn’t the relevant factor, it’s politics. Or more accurately, naked bribery that we, for some insane reason, call “lobbying”.
> You must unfactor the European models getting subsidized by the current US model.
But they don't. This is clearly a pro-insurer talking point. Europe just negotiates on a state based level so therefore is able to negotiate better prices.
America needs to have never-ending perpetual wars to sustain its own economy. If we woke up tomorrow and there was just world peace, and America got rid of its military budget millions of people would probably instantly lose their jobs.
That's the ultimate reason. They could just as easily declare war against Venus and spend hundreds of billions of dollars sending rocks into space and it would have the same net effect. Actually it would be a bit more positive because to my knowledge nobody's really living on Venus right now.
> America needs to have never-ending perpetual wars to sustain its own economy.
People don't realize that the Pentagon has strategically, over decades, invested and distributed its supply and manufacturing needs to every single congressional district. Basically ensuring that any representative that votes against the DoD budget will run afoul of constituents employed in some fashion by the military industrial complex.
More accurately, Israel was going to attack Iran, and US intelligence stated that Iranian retaliation planning was to target US forces, along with most gulf nations and shipping lanes, so US preempted that retaliation.
If the retaliation was preempted they wouldn't have retaliated, but they have. What the US actually did was provide justification for the retaliation against US bases in the region by joining in the opening salvo.
That's quite a preemptive form of preemption! Was the US intelligence from the same source that stated that Iraq was acquiring "yellowcake" from Niger?
Because, like Venezuala, they were selling their oil to China, which would allow China to attack Taiwan and take the US's supply of advanced semi-conductors for its weapons and military dominance
For any particular person, you can tell a story that satisfies "Why?". But for a large number of people, you have to answer "Why?" for one sub-group at a time.
In other words, there's not a single answer that will answer this in a satisfying way.
To answer a different question: It appears that the Israeli government and military wanted to bomb Iran again, and the United States executive branch and military decided to help out. This is an incomplete and unsatisfying answer. Sorry.
> In other words, there's not a single answer that will answer this in a satisfying way.
There could be one, but it would be a book-sized answer (and probably a Tolkien one, if not more).
Every conflict is multi-faceted and happened for a variety of reason, some mattering more than other. Any conflict involving the middle east and you have to go back almost 80-years of history to really provide a satisfying answer. Control of world oil supply, trades with China, opportunistic war to appease local voter pool, diversion from problematic affairs, diplomacy with Israel (which as it own thousand fold reasons for this war), Iran being left weak after losing most of their local allied militia, internal uprising due to a economical crisis caused in part to the removal of the agreement on nuclear and the trade ban that followed ... They all probably play a part.
People should be able to separate the man from his politics and look at this apolitically. I don't see how anyone can see the way his speech patterns have changed over the years and not conclude that he has had a sharp cognitive decline. It's baffling that we don't talk about it, especially after we just went through this with Biden and had the whole retrospective about how that was ignored. Now here we are doing the exact same thing again immediately.
Anybody who has observed somebody age over decades knows that there is a huge difference between being 70 and 80. And it’s another big decline when they approach 90.
The democrats denied this with Biden and now the republicans are denying it with Trump.
Maybe we should get people that are way beyond normal retirement age out of political Leadership?
Voters primarily vote for people that look and act like them, and retired people are a massive voting block. Chris Christie saying off-the-cuff that if young people voted in any significant numbers then he would care about what they had to say was a huge money quote. We get geriatrics because people moan about how our vote doesn't matter while not voting.
See, it's okay if it's the person you voted for and he's doing things you like. But when it's someone you didn't vote for and you don't like what he's doing then the cognitive decline is suddenly a huge problem.
because when you give someone the keys to the US military to some people, they lack the imagination to think beyond piracy and raiding.
The war in its current inception is Hamas levels of planning.
1. Do a big attack
2. ????
3. Profit!
Depends of if the Iranian state is weak enough to collapse on its own, because I imagine a land assault in Venezuela or Iran would be a horrific mistake due to the terrain.
This strike isn't even close to Hamas-levels of planning.
If anything Hamas got the US to make an unforced mistake in a game of checkers three moves out.
According to the IDF's analysis of captured Hamas documents, step 2 was:
"Get Israel to commit so many war crimes that we actually have the moral high ground. Then, regional partners will be forced to support us again, and our recruitment numbers go back up. Do everything we can to ensure the conflict expands across borders to secure future funding and alliances."
The crazy thing is the IDF knew this and published the report. Only after acknowledging that it was their only losing move did they start committing a bunch of war crimes!
Hamas' public support, funding and recruitment levels were rapidly approaching zero until the Palestinian genocide started. Now they're part of a regional conflict and arguably still hold the moral high ground, depending on how you tally things up. That was fantasy-land for them before the strikes.
It's almost like the IDF's funding is contingent on Hamas' continued existence, and, barring that, perpetual regional conflict.
It's too bad that civilians always lose in these conflicts, and right-wing criminals almost always win.
> This strike isn't even close to Hamas-levels of planning.
Yes it is, its an attack without any surefire plans for later stages of the war. While they might fluke it, I don't see how just missiling a bunch of targets and murdering a nation's leader really achieves tangible change. Its like a bully taking a swing at someone in class, they can, so they do, but there's no thought about end outcomes. They might get lunch money, or get away with doing it, but they could also get detention, or be suspended or expelled.
The Hamas plan was something like:
1. we murder them
2. they retaliate horrifically
3. ???
4. the intifada goes global and lebanon and syria and maybe other arab nations all rise up and attack israel.
and that remains my issue with the US plan, there isn't one. Either have ground troops ready or militias in place and armed. Don't just start a war for a laugh and don't take it seriously.
According to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday, we are at war because we knew Israel was going to assassinate Iranian leaders and we would be expected to defend them (and our foreign bases) when they go to war, so we might as well go to war right away. 4D chess.
The cost doesn't really matter. The US led financial system (which is a glorified Ponzi scheme) is on an unsustainable path. The war in Iran is about resources (force Iran to use US dollars to trade oil, give US more leverage in dealing with China...etc.) and to delay the collapse. You build "digital pyramids" like AI data centers and consolidate power/resources while you still can. Financial cost of the war is largely irrelevant. Whether the outcome will be to your advantage is a different issue but pattern is predictable with historical precedence (Romans...etc.). Unfortunately innocent people pay the price.
Cost is not the first thing I care about in war, but I felt like this is a useful site for tracking the money we're lighting on fire in order to pursue this conflict
Civilian costs are real, unjustified, and incalculable.
That’s good. But it seems that the American anti-war discourse is slanted towards the cost of it. Maybe because the whole political spectrum can relate to “our tax dollars”, while (1) the cost for the military personell might not be a concern for all because it is all-volunteer, and (2) some Americans don’t care what happens to people in other countries.
Certainly: American progressives can use this to counter the “fiscally conservatives” (for domestic spending) who are also hawkish.
Remember: The opinions of people that either didn't vote or voted for Trump are all that really matter this November (unless the Democrats somehow lose voters, but the polls suggest that is unlikely).
Those are the votes that need to be won over to make any sort of difference during the second half of the Trump administration.
We better get a liberal democratic Iran government out of this.
We better remove and halt nuclear powers for the rest of my life.
I suppose pick either, and it was successful.
My personal polymarket says we wont get either. Trump and Israel ruin their reputation. But reputation matters close to 0 in international relations, which is why they don't care.
There's next to no chance that whatever comes out of the end of this will be a "liberal democratic Iran government". Obama started a route in that direction with the lowered sanctions and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action from 2015. Iran having a democratic government doesn't really help the GOP war hawks so of course they trashed it. The same happened with North Korea in the 90s with the Agreed Framework that had some promise before GWB torpedoed it to please his oinking base.
I also think that nuclear powers mean regional stability. Ukraine gave up its nukes in the 90s and we saw what happened there.
> We better get a liberal democratic Iran government out of this.
I doubt it. US intervention seems to have a habit of creating weakened nations for its rivals to benefit from. In Iraq's case: Iran and in Iran's case maybe the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There are a bunch of videos showing how expensive it is to fire certain weapons eg [1]. Not only are there our direct costs but we're also supplying several allies with munitions and weapon systems and paying for them ourselves.
Also, yes carrier groups exist anyway, but operating them in a combat zone halfway around the world is way more expensive.
Operation Epstein Fury [sic] is a giant white elephant and I think more Americans should know how much this is costing as well as why we're doing it, which is simply to support American imperialism with a lie similar to the IRaq WMD lie and that is that Iran is "weeks away" from nuclear weapons, a lie that's been told and propagated since at least 1992 [2].
President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the expanding military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address [3]. Every bomber, every plane, every missile has an eye-watering cost when you put it int erms of schools, houses or healthcare. The recent ICE budget, for example, could've ended homelessness. Not for the year. Forever.
Israel begged every president since Reagan to invade Iran. They all declined. Until now. And many suspect we're going to run out of anti-missile munitions long before Iran runs out of ballistic missiles.
Just remember, every used munition eneds to be replaced. That's a new contract and new profit opportunity. It's why in so many post-WW2 conflicts you'll find American weapons on both sides.
How much more is the US going to spend on Israel ?
Huge swaths of the US populace is impoverished and struggling, health insurance is non existence, the quality of education is in free fall, yet they decide to spend trillions for Israel.
"Interests." I'd love to know what the price per barrel the U.S. has paid in the last few years when you factor in additional costs incurred due to involvement in Iraq and Syria.
Almost all of our representatives have been bought by the Israel lobby. We will spend many billions more, and questioning it will continue to cause people to be labeled as antisemitic.
Israel is seeking a new Memorandum of Understanding now which will guarantee them aid for twice as long as normal (20 years instead of the usual 10).
The Israel lobby is the most powerful and feared lobby in Washington. As a politician, getting on their bad side means almost certainly losing your next election. Just look at how much money they are putting into trying to replace Thomas Massie.
Their power and influence has a huge chilling effect on all criticism of Israel, even representatives who represent people who overwhelmingly are against Israel like AOC and Omar, largely remain silent on the genocide and our foreign policy toward them because of this chilling effect.
I highly recommend the book "The Israel Lobby" by Mearsheimer and Walt. It was published in 2007 and detailed this entire thing almost 2 decades ago.
It's hard for laypeople to comprehend such large numbers. Could you add a counter that measures it in miles of California high-speed rail? It's got to be over three miles by now at least.
Maybe it will be offset by selling LNG at 50% higher prices to the dumb Europeans. Blowing up Nordstream was the first step, Qatar stopping LNG production the second. Perhaps take Greenland while the EU is completely dependent.
On the other side, it seems like this is not tracking interceptor costs (presumably due to it being classified), which have certainly been used extensively and are extremely expensive. For that matter i doubt we have a very clear picture of how much ordinance has been used in general.
[To be clear, im not doubting war is very expensive]
(As for whether this reflects only those added costs, I don’t know)
But rather than protect global sea lanes, the US is bombing Iran. That’s not the same thing.
The idea that the war isn’t costing money for personnel because those people would be doing something anyway makes no sense. They could be doing something else. In fact, they could be doing something that increases the wealth and wellbeing of the world, rather than destroying things. So from that perspective, the cost is far higher than what is shown here.
Then there’s the loss of innocent lives. It would be unconscionable to put a price tag on the lives of dozens of Iranian girls killed when their school was flattened and to show it on this website, and yet, this is not “free” either.
Arguably the primary threat to modern sea lanes is Iran.
Right now Iran is harrasing traffic. Previously the Houthis, generally considered an Iranian proxy, were harrasing traffic. Its all kind of the same war, this is just the end game.
What makes anyone think that this latest attack is the "end game" vs just the latest expensive chapter?
Neither are true.
He said Europe should pay their fair share for protection since 40% of their trade passes through those lanes but only 3% of America's.
gee, I wonder why they're doing that.
who bombed them first and repeatedly? and embargoed and sanctioned them before that? and tore up the nuclear deal? and before that installed the shah so we could get the oil?
This seems like a perfect opportunity for a revival of David Cross's standup career.
In my opinion bombing people responsible for these atrocities increases the well-being of the world. Most Iranians seem to agree.
"do nothing"
and the clusterfuck the current administration has embarked on.
Your opinion is respectable, but not compatible with any idea of “justice”.
Iran's Islamic regime has provided material and monetary support to the Houthis.
Crippling their capabilities aligns with the goal of protecting global shipping.
The real cost should include the spike in oil prices, the world consumes about 100 million barrels a day, so every $10 increase costs the world a $1 billion a day. We're already up ~$10, and it might continue to rise depending on how things go. You probably should include LNG in there too. If this oil halt is protracted, your stocks and bonds will be dragged down as well.
Sure the Navy can Airlift in parts etc, but that’s obviously very expensive and less obviously more dangerous.
Honestly i think my main opinion is that we have no idea what the number is, but its probably a large one.
This is a fair way to account for the cost, because the assets were procured and personnel hired years ago for just this purpose.
Put another way: we would not need this fleet at all if we did not expect to use it in a manner like this. (For example, Spain did not choose to have this capability and so has not borne a cost of maintaining this option for the preceding decades.) Through that lens, the true cost of this war would involve counting back to before this round of hostilities began.
It's only fair to count _at least_ the "time on task" for all the assets.
But you are keeping people on high alert, refueling further away, etc...
It’s like dealing with psychopathic toddlers who think people aren’t smart enough to know they are lying when they deny killing the family pet even though their hands are covered in blood and you just watched them mid act of slaughtering the family pet.
Now the message we’ve told the world is: If you don’t want to eventually be at risk of the US attacking you, you better be nuclear armed.
The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad.
The primary threat to Iran's regime is internal. Nobody is invading Iran. It's a gigantic country with 93 million people. It can't be done and it's universally understood. Trump won't even speculate about it, even he knows it can't be done. What would nukes do to protect Iran's regime? Are they going to nuke their own people? Are they going to nuke Israel and US bases if the US bombs them?
So let me get this straight: the US bombs Iran, Iran nukes Israel and some US bases, maybe even a regional foe - then Iran gets obliterated.
That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/9/22/us-threatened-to-bo...
Take any American, and treat them the way Americans treat others, and they would be forming terrorist cells (gorilla war), building nukes, basically every single thing they could to fight back. To never surrender.
Remember Red Dawn? That would be an American Response, to what America is doing.
That is it basically. If shoe was on other foot, Americans would never surrender.
So, why are we expecting others to give up quietly?
We're not. That's why we're bombing the regime and associated military targets. Iran was never expected to give up quietly.
> On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. It was instigated by the United Kingdom (MI6), under the name Operation Boot[5][6][7][8] and the United States (CIA), under the name TP-AJAX Project[9] or Operation Ajax. A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalized the country's oil industry. (...) > In August 2013, the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. (...) was in charge of both the planning and the execution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Or the US backing of Saddam Hussein from 1982 onwards during the Iraq-Iran 8-year war of aggression, with “massive loans, political influence, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites”. During this war, Iraq employed chemical weapons leading to 50.000 - 100.000 Irani deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War
This (and other pieces of historical context) help very much understand the Iranian insistence on a ballistic missile program.
Look it up. Every case of Iran attacking US infrastructure has been in direct retaliation to the US blowing up some Iranian stuff.
Sure Iran has funded tons of proxy attacks by anonymous militias but these are generally not at the same kind of scale.
* Europe is in trouble because they can't get gas from Russia, Qatar stopped supplying gas
* Japan is in trouble because Middle East supplies its 75% of oil, which is blocked now
* Ukraine is in dilemma, because US giving every support to Israel, but not to Ukraine
* Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain is asking questions, if US can't defend us and is moving all defensive missiles to protect Israel, why should we even be ally with them in the future, they're scared even more (except UAE) that people might overthrow those kings if things continue this way
* Africa understood its better to work with China, than with US
Look at the correlation here starting from 2022: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/recent-weakness-german-manufa...
Did US population en masse lost sleep during past decades till now and some future due to sweatshops full of kids making their jeans or iphones or Christmas toys for their kids in highly undemocratic regimes?
Ukraine, I understand, because it was attacked, but Israel, who was oppressing people for so many years with prisons full with Palestinian kids and teenagers long before Oct 7th, I really don't understand.
Except, for Epstein reasons (blackmail), other than that, there is no reason US should support Israel, in any way
1. Does US fight to support only right things?
2. Is Palestinian right to exist is the right thing as well?
Some values those are. Yikes.
We do have actual video of that one radome in Bahrain getting directly struck (from multiple angles). It's possible it was a satellite communication antenna and not a radar.
But the still images shown with before/after are AI generated. (the surrounding buildings are completely different in the before/after image).
The radar that is likely to have been damaged is the one in Qatar, here is reporting from an NPR editor using Planet satellite imagery: https://nitter.net/gbrumfiel/status/2028227786750476627
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/world/middleeast/girls-sc...
Because that is a realistic possibility.
Likely the actual goal, as dictated by Israel and the Jewish Lobby in the US, is to destabilise Iran long term in a sort of Syria situation, so they cannot threaten Israeli hegemony in the region.
Remember even a non Islamic Iran is still a threat to Israeli power if it remains unified and intact.
I suspect the long term ROI on free school lunches is going to far exceed that of this war, as well.
> protecting its citizens is of extreme moral importance
Given the number of our citizens that die from, eg, preventable diseases, that seems like a far, far higher moral call than a war against Iran.
If you are relating protecting citizens with current situation, NO country dares to attack US citizens in the US soil.
US, at this time, doesn't need to protect its citizens, especially in the US, from attacks by other nations, 0, none. No threat.
No one knows how this will end. Anyone claiming to is either lying or stupid or both.
Either they have a lot of information I'm missing, are complete idiots, or are being dishonest.
No one can know at this stage. It’s called fog of war.
Those who pretend offer easy explanations because people crave easy answers.
It’s not satisfying to say: "it’s very complex, we can’t know, here are the odds". But that’s the current state of affairs.
Can you imagine the scale of this number?
3 days of war vs 2 week of meal for every school kid
Now do the math for Afghan war, probably US could have easily cancelled 70% of loan for every college grad, or could've been built large rail network
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/the-air-forces-new-icb...
So, an all-city high-speed rail network would certainly be achievable for a small fraction of the total US military budget.
Household budget analogies emerge any time someone wants to limit spending, or criticize spending, but one of the biggest points of Wealth of Nations (which is the foundation for modern macroeconomics) is that the budget of a state is fundamentally different to that of a household.
If a household fails to maintain its budget, it's game over. People know this, which is why it's a punchy analogy. But it's also a bad analogy.
If a state fails to maintain its budget, it can either print more money or raise taxes. Neither is a great long term fiscal policy, but it's not the end of the world either, and budgetary deficit something most states utilize fairly regularly.
What's missing with the school lunches and present with the Iran War is political will. (I get that is what your point was all along.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_airstrike
we shall see
2025 United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_strikes_on_...
2026 Iran massacres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
2026 Iran conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_conflict
The federal govt spent about 2.6-2.8 trillion dollars[1] on healthcare in 2025 - including Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, VA/DoD health and federal employee benefits). In what world is that "lack of spending" ?
[1] https://www.pgpf.org/article/healthcare-spending-will-be-one...
To protect themselves from the exact scenairo happening right now? The reason why Putin is sleeping peacefully in his bed while Khamenei is dead under rubble is that one has nuclear deterent while the other din't have that protection.
> supposed aggressor
I don’t know if there is anything “supposed” about that aggressor given the present situation.
Thank you for your very high effort, insightful and valuable comment on this matter.
(Civilian casualty ratios in recent conflicts and declared wars)
Cost isn’t the relevant factor, it’s politics. Or more accurately, naked bribery that we, for some insane reason, call “lobbying”.
Some very smart people have looked at fixing the system, and there's no golden goose (except ozempic maybe). We'll need pharmacological breakthroughs.
Also, regrettably - A LOT of medical care is unnecessary but we love grandma.
But they don't. This is clearly a pro-insurer talking point. Europe just negotiates on a state based level so therefore is able to negotiate better prices.
If it saves $1T, then why does it require raising taxes?
Quick quick, give me a quote on the coffee maker on the AWACS.
so $7 per person?
That's the ultimate reason. They could just as easily declare war against Venus and spend hundreds of billions of dollars sending rocks into space and it would have the same net effect. Actually it would be a bit more positive because to my knowledge nobody's really living on Venus right now.
People don't realize that the Pentagon has strategically, over decades, invested and distributed its supply and manufacturing needs to every single congressional district. Basically ensuring that any representative that votes against the DoD budget will run afoul of constituents employed in some fashion by the military industrial complex.
For any particular person, you can tell a story that satisfies "Why?". But for a large number of people, you have to answer "Why?" for one sub-group at a time.
In other words, there's not a single answer that will answer this in a satisfying way.
To answer a different question: It appears that the Israeli government and military wanted to bomb Iran again, and the United States executive branch and military decided to help out. This is an incomplete and unsatisfying answer. Sorry.
There could be one, but it would be a book-sized answer (and probably a Tolkien one, if not more).
Every conflict is multi-faceted and happened for a variety of reason, some mattering more than other. Any conflict involving the middle east and you have to go back almost 80-years of history to really provide a satisfying answer. Control of world oil supply, trades with China, opportunistic war to appease local voter pool, diversion from problematic affairs, diplomacy with Israel (which as it own thousand fold reasons for this war), Iran being left weak after losing most of their local allied militia, internal uprising due to a economical crisis caused in part to the removal of the agreement on nuclear and the trade ban that followed ... They all probably play a part.
The democrats denied this with Biden and now the republicans are denying it with Trump.
Maybe we should get people that are way beyond normal retirement age out of political Leadership?
The war in its current inception is Hamas levels of planning.
1. Do a big attack
2. ????
3. Profit!
Depends of if the Iranian state is weak enough to collapse on its own, because I imagine a land assault in Venezuela or Iran would be a horrific mistake due to the terrain.
If anything Hamas got the US to make an unforced mistake in a game of checkers three moves out.
According to the IDF's analysis of captured Hamas documents, step 2 was:
"Get Israel to commit so many war crimes that we actually have the moral high ground. Then, regional partners will be forced to support us again, and our recruitment numbers go back up. Do everything we can to ensure the conflict expands across borders to secure future funding and alliances."
The crazy thing is the IDF knew this and published the report. Only after acknowledging that it was their only losing move did they start committing a bunch of war crimes!
Hamas' public support, funding and recruitment levels were rapidly approaching zero until the Palestinian genocide started. Now they're part of a regional conflict and arguably still hold the moral high ground, depending on how you tally things up. That was fantasy-land for them before the strikes.
It's almost like the IDF's funding is contingent on Hamas' continued existence, and, barring that, perpetual regional conflict.
It's too bad that civilians always lose in these conflicts, and right-wing criminals almost always win.
Yes it is, its an attack without any surefire plans for later stages of the war. While they might fluke it, I don't see how just missiling a bunch of targets and murdering a nation's leader really achieves tangible change. Its like a bully taking a swing at someone in class, they can, so they do, but there's no thought about end outcomes. They might get lunch money, or get away with doing it, but they could also get detention, or be suspended or expelled.
The Hamas plan was something like:
1. we murder them
2. they retaliate horrifically
3. ???
4. the intifada goes global and lebanon and syria and maybe other arab nations all rise up and attack israel.
and that remains my issue with the US plan, there isn't one. Either have ground troops ready or militias in place and armed. Don't just start a war for a laugh and don't take it seriously.
Civilian costs are real, unjustified, and incalculable.
Certainly: American progressives can use this to counter the “fiscally conservatives” (for domestic spending) who are also hawkish.
Those are the votes that need to be won over to make any sort of difference during the second half of the Trump administration.
We better remove and halt nuclear powers for the rest of my life.
I suppose pick either, and it was successful.
My personal polymarket says we wont get either. Trump and Israel ruin their reputation. But reputation matters close to 0 in international relations, which is why they don't care.
I also think that nuclear powers mean regional stability. Ukraine gave up its nukes in the 90s and we saw what happened there.
> We better remove and halt nuclear powers for the rest of my life.
Neither of those things is a guaranteed outcome of this. Depending on who you ask, it's not even a likely outcome.
The IRGC remains the most powerful group in Iran. Probably a military junta is a more likely outcome, plus or minus a civil war to establish it.
I doubt it. US intervention seems to have a habit of creating weakened nations for its rivals to benefit from. In Iraq's case: Iran and in Iran's case maybe the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Where does that fall in relation on the righteousness rubric?
Also, yes carrier groups exist anyway, but operating them in a combat zone halfway around the world is way more expensive.
Operation Epstein Fury [sic] is a giant white elephant and I think more Americans should know how much this is costing as well as why we're doing it, which is simply to support American imperialism with a lie similar to the IRaq WMD lie and that is that Iran is "weeks away" from nuclear weapons, a lie that's been told and propagated since at least 1992 [2].
President Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the expanding military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address [3]. Every bomber, every plane, every missile has an eye-watering cost when you put it int erms of schools, houses or healthcare. The recent ICE budget, for example, could've ended homelessness. Not for the year. Forever.
Israel begged every president since Reagan to invade Iran. They all declined. Until now. And many suspect we're going to run out of anti-missile munitions long before Iran runs out of ballistic missiles.
Just remember, every used munition eneds to be replaced. That's a new contract and new profit opportunity. It's why in so many post-WW2 conflicts you'll find American weapons on both sides.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6mWI8Q6IwA
[2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@therecount/video/7612744750713589023
[3]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
Huge swaths of the US populace is impoverished and struggling, health insurance is non existence, the quality of education is in free fall, yet they decide to spend trillions for Israel.
Why ?
USA is still playing at being world hegemon in competition with china and to a lesser extent russia. Maintaining alliances is a part of that.
Retail fuel prices are already higher than that, even ignoring subsidies, military operations and environmental externalities.
It will help multiple industrial military complexes on both sides of the conflict.
Citation needed.
Israel is seeking a new Memorandum of Understanding now which will guarantee them aid for twice as long as normal (20 years instead of the usual 10).
https://www.stimson.org/2025/a-20-year-mou-with-israel-is-no...
The Israel lobby is the most powerful and feared lobby in Washington. As a politician, getting on their bad side means almost certainly losing your next election. Just look at how much money they are putting into trying to replace Thomas Massie.
Their power and influence has a huge chilling effect on all criticism of Israel, even representatives who represent people who overwhelmingly are against Israel like AOC and Omar, largely remain silent on the genocide and our foreign policy toward them because of this chilling effect.
I highly recommend the book "The Israel Lobby" by Mearsheimer and Walt. It was published in 2007 and detailed this entire thing almost 2 decades ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Fore...