<\/p>\n
The Trump administration<\/span> is drastically undercounting the price tag of the U.S. war with Iran, peddling fragmentary estimates that offer Americans a skewed understanding of the costs.<\/p>\n The Pentagon on Thursday said the U.S. spent about $11.3 billion in just one week of its war on Iran; Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett similarly put the figure at $12 billion<\/a> on Sunday.<\/p>\n But these sums are dwarfed by estimates offered by experts in the costs of war, lawmakers experienced with the Pentagon budget, and two government officials briefed on Operation Epic Fury who spoke on the condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n At the very least, they say the war is burning through between $1 billion and $2 billion per day<\/a> \u2014 or roughly $11,500<\/a> to $23,000 per second. The cost, the officials told The Intercept, could rise to a quarter trillion dollars or more over the coming months.<\/p>\n Even that is a drop in the bucket compared to the long-term expenses, which could cost the U.S. trillions of dollars in the decades to come. One of the officials lamented that Americans would be paying off the war for generations.<\/p>\n \u201cIf this war takes months rather than weeks, the costs will become astronomical,\u201d said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending,<\/p>\n Jules Hurst III, the War Department\u2019s acting comptroller and chief financial officer, called the Pentagon\u2019s initial $11.3 billion estimate a \u201cballpark number,\u201d speaking at the Reagan Institute\u2019s National Security Innovation Base Summit. Hurst said a more comprehensive figure would be provided with a supplemental budget request, which he said the Pentagon plans to soon submit to the White House and Congress.<\/p>\n Democratic lawmakers believe the true number is far higher because the Pentagon estimate did not include many expenses, including the massive buildup<\/a> of military assets, weapons, and personnel in the Middle East ahead of the conflict. Lawmakers have said they expect the\u00a0Iran War supplemental\u00a0request\u00a0to reach at least $50 billion<\/a> \u2014 on top of a $1.5 trillion War Department budget request for 2027.<\/p>\n When he appeared before the House Armed Services Committee recently, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of war for policy, said that the military campaign against Iran had been \u201cscoped out\u201d for up to five weeks, but that the president could extend it. He was, however, unable to tell Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., the cost. \u201cI can\u2019t give you an answer at this point,\u201d he said. The Office of the Secretary of Defense as well as Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson<\/a> were no more forthcoming with The Intercept.<\/p>\n Jacobs told The Intercept that Americans had been conned into an open-ended conflict, with unclear goals and no exit plan.<\/p>\n \u201cWe haven\u2019t gotten sufficient details in public or behind closed doors about the strategy, the objectives, the length of the operation, or how much this will cost taxpayers,\u201d she told The Intercept. \u201cThe American people are demanding an end to this illegal war to prevent more killings of children, retaliation against U.S. service members, skyrocketing costs to U.S. taxpayers, and yet another endless war.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hassett, the director<\/span> of Trump\u2019s National Economic Council, said the war was still expected to take four to six weeks. But without accurate information from the Pentagon on the cost of the war, experts, lawmakers, and government officials have stepped into the breach with estimates of the financial burden of Trump\u2019s war with Iran \u2014 his second<\/a> war on the country<\/a> within the span of a year.<\/p>\n The numbers are immense.<\/p>\n A three-week conflict could cost taxpayers between $60 billion and $130 billion, according to the two government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, with both stressing that the estimates were speculative. \u201cIt\u2019s a back of the napkin estimate,\u201d said one official.<\/p>\n \u201cThey really have no idea of the real cost.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n A five-week war could top out at $175 billion. Eight weeks could put the total at $250 billion. \u201cThey really have no idea of the real cost,\u201d said one of the officials, noting that bookkeeping is not a Pentagon strong suit. The self-styled War Department has never passed an audit<\/a>, despite almost a decade of attempts<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Pentagon\u2019s pre-war military buildup \u2014 which is missing from the $11.3 billion estimate \u2014 had already cost taxpayers an estimated $630 million, according to Elaine McCusker<\/a>, a former senior Pentagon budget official now at the American Enterprise Institute. (McCusker said those costs are likely to be absorbed within the Pentagon\u2019s existing $839 billion 2026 budget.) Initial estimates of the first 100 hours of the war tacked on around $3.7 billion in operational costs, munitions, and damaged or destroyed equipment, according to a cost breakdown<\/a> by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. This and other estimates turned out to be drastic undercounts as Pentagon officials, in classified briefings, disclosed that the military burned through $5.6 billion worth of munitions in just the first two days of the war. An updated analysis by CSIS now estimates that Epic Fury cost $16.5 billion<\/a> by its 12th day.\u00a0<\/p>\n Estimates by Linda Bilmes, the co-author of \u201cThe Three Trillion Dollar War,\u201d are in line with the government officials\u2019 projections. Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer\u00a0of the U.S. Department of Commerce under Bill Clinton and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, says that the price tag of the war will exceed $50 billion if the conflict stretches into its third or fourth week.\u00a0\u201cProbably higher,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n Bilmes cautioned that enormous short-term expenses \u2014 like spent munitions, the deployments of aircraft carrier strike groups, and aircraft shot down \u2014 will be eclipsed by even more significant expenditures like the long-term costs of veterans\u2019 benefits<\/a> and interest on the debt to pay for the war.\u00a0The ultimate cost, Bilmes says, may reach into the trillions of dollars.<\/p>\n Bilmes first called attention to the immense hidden costs of America\u2019s wars in her groundbreaking analyses of the Iraq War. The George W. Bush administration initially put the likely cost of the Iraq War at\u00a0$40 billion<\/a>. In 2015, Bilmes and economist Joseph Stiglitz<\/a> discovered that the real cost would be at least\u00a0$3\u00a0trillion.<\/a>\u00a0Just six years later, that figure had ballooned to around $8 trillion.<\/p>\n Asked about the analogous long-term costs of the Iran war by The Intercept, the Office of the Secretary of War clammed up. \u201cWe have nothing to provide,\u201d a spokesperson told The Intercept.<\/p>\n \u201cThe majority are being exposed to toxins, contamination, acid rain, dust from infrastructure destruction, and burning oil fumes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Bilmes notes that around 50,000 U.S. troops are deployed around the Middle East as the United States and Israel, as well as Iran and its proxies, strike fuel depots, oil facilities, and military sites \u2014 all of which release noxious substances shown to negatively affect human health. \u201cThe majority are being exposed to toxins, contamination, acid rain, dust from infrastructure destruction, and burning oil fumes, so we can estimate that at least one-third will be claiming disability benefits under the PACT Act,\u201d she said, referring to a landmark 2022 law expanding health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances. \u201cThat is a major long-term cost that almost nobody looks at.\u201d Bilmes said that if veterans claim benefits at the rate of the extremely short\u00a01990 Gulf War<\/a> \u2014 37 percent of whom receive compensation today \u2014 this alone would add around $600 billion in costs over their lifetimes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Iran war also increases the likelihood that Congress will approve a larger Pentagon budget than Trump would have secured without it, Bilmes said. \u201cIf the budget would have increased by $100 billion, this war might bump it to $200 billion,\u201d she told The Intercept. \u201cThat becomes the base budget and, over a decade, it\u2019s another trillion dollars added to the defense budget.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c Now the gross debt is $38 trillion \u2014 and about 30 percent of that is due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Bilmes explained that these long-term costs are exacerbated by the fact that all the money is borrowed. \u201cBack in 2004, the public debt was below $4 trillion. Now the gross debt is $38 trillion \u2014 and about 30 percent of that is due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,\u201d she said. A key contributor to that spike is the fact that the United States went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 while simultaneously cutting taxes \u2014 increasing spending while reducing revenues. \u201cThis combination had never happened before in the history of U.S. wars,\u201d\u00a0she said. With interest rates almost double what they were in the 2010s, Bilmes notes that 14 percent of the federal budget already goes to interest payments, which are destined to rise further with the Iran war.<\/p>\n Hurst, the War Department comptroller, declined to specify exactly how much money the War Department would ask for in the supplemental request. Most sources say it will top $50 billion. Asked about the likelihood the Iran war supplemental\u00a0request\u00a0would pass, given Democrats\u2019 opposition to the conflict, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., was optimistic due to bipartisan concerns about weapons stockpiles. \u201cThere is a need that was there before the Iran conflict,\u201d said Wittman, the vice chair of the\u00a0House Armed Services Committee, at the Reagan Institute summit last week. \u201cThere\u2019s a need there to build our weapons magazine depth. There\u2019s a need there to make sure we\u2019re building more expendable and attritable platforms. So those things extend even beyond the Iran conflict. This just makes it more immediate.\u201d<\/p>\n House\u00a0Minority Leader\u00a0Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., pushed back on talk of additional funding. \u201cThe administration has not even made the case to the American people as to why we are spending billions of dollars and dropping bombs every day in Iran,\u201d he said during a Monday press conference<\/a>. \u201cSo the notion that they would come up here and ask for additional money is beyond the pale at this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Murphy, the policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, noted that the reconciliation bill enacted last summer included over $60 billion for munitions, missile defense, and low-cost weapons. The lack of specificity in the bill would allow the Pentagon to easily utilize around $90 million for Trump\u2019s war of choice with Iran, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cBillions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent on this unauthorized war. We\u2019re facing a spiraling debt crisis, skyrocketing health care premiums, dire food insecurity, and natural disasters that are growing more frequent, extreme, and costly. These are national security issues,\u201d Murphy told The Intercept. \u201cIf Congress believes this war is a good use of taxpayer dollars, it should vote on an authorization for the use of military force. Congress has a duty to consider any supplemental funding requests, but absent an AUMF, Congress shouldn\u2019t approve additional funding.\u201d<\/p>\n The Pentagon, Murphy said, \u201cgot a boatload of extra cash, more than $150 billion, in last summer\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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