Nobody knows what the human or strategic costs of President Trump’s war against Iran will be, but the hard dollar costs are mounting by the day.
A week ago, U.S. Central Command said that more than 50,000 troops, bombers, 200 fighter aircraft and two aircraft carriers are participating in Operation Epic Fury. Our military is burning through munitions, striking thousands of targets and using hundreds of sophisticated — and expensive — defense interceptors and missiles. Last week, three American F-15s were downed over Kuwait in an apparent friendly fire incident. The aircrews were OK, but the aircraft would take at least $300 million to replace.
Elaine McCusker, a top Pentagon official during the first Trump administration, told me she estimates that by the end of its sixth day, the war’s cost exceeded $11 billion, including more than $5 billion worth of interceptors. To replenish its arsenal, the Pentagon is expected to ask Congress for an additional $50 billion. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump wants to add $600 billion to the Pentagon’s annual budget, for a whopping $1.5 trillion in the next fiscal year.
It’s an astronomical tally for a president who returned to office pledging to end wars, not start them. But it’s not just the figure that should unsettle Americans. There’s not much evidence that Mr. Trump’s use of our military to both clean up trash in Washington and arrest and kill foreign leaders is making Americans safer. With three years left in office, he may only be getting started.
The war in Iran is Mr. Trump’s costliest military operation to date, coming after he spent an estimated $2 billion bombing Iran’s nuclear sites last June. Our understanding of the broader costs of the war will emerge with time, but we’re already seeing instability, economic and otherwise: Russia is benefiting from the increase in demand for its oil as world energy prices rise because the conflict has disrupted the shipment and production of oil and gas. Law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe are on heightened alert for potential terrorist attacks. And Mr. Trump has opened the door for other countries to wage wars of choice and aggression.
In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the administration’s plans for Venezuela are “not going to cost us anything.” But his assertion essentially ignored the money it took to surge air and naval assets to maintain a legally dubious blockade of sanctioned oil tankers since the end of last year and eventually remove its president, Nicolás Maduro.
Last year, an American bombing campaign against the Houthi militia went through $1 billion worth of munitions in the first month alone before Mr. Trump halted it.
Mr. Trump has been quick to deploy forces at home, too, putting further strain on government coffers and the forces involved. Since June, he has sent the National Guard or active-duty Marines into half a dozen American cities, operations that have cost at least $500 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Putting the Guard on the streets here has come with other costs as well: In November, a gunman shot two members of West Virginia’s National Guard on duty in Washington, killing one of them and seriously wounding the other.
Mr. Trump has big, expensive plans for the future. He has proposed a “Golden Dome,” a homeland air and missile defense system that could cost trillions of dollars. He has also announced his intention to build a new class of warships — named after him, naturally — with costs potentially exceeding $20 billion per ship.
The Pentagon is also spending money on smaller, dopier initiatives, like renaming itself. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War could cost $125 million. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent millions of dollars flying the country’s top brass to Quantico, Va., to listen to him harangue on “fat troops” and “woke” policies. The Army spent $30 million on a parade that coincided with Mr. Trump’s birthday.
These expenses become indefensible when the administration is simultaneously gutting funding for scientific research and subsidies for health care coverage.
Mr. Trump now may be eyeing regime change in Cuba — yet another country that doesn’t pose an immediate strategic threat to the United States. On Friday he said, “Cuba is gonna fall, too.”
Without question, the most considerable cost of any war is the human one — people wounded and lives lost. Since it began on Feb. 28, the war with Iran has killed hundreds of people, including seven American service members. America’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, which many legal experts say amount to murder because the law of armed conflict does not apply, have killed more than 150 people.
There are intangible costs as well. The loss of American credibility and reliability can’t be purchased with additional funding. Mr. Trump’s pursuit of Greenland and his verbal jabs about Canadian sovereignty have altered the geopolitical landscape in ways that no defense budget can reverse.
The dollar costs of Mr. Trump’s adventures, though, are strategically important.
His proposal to increase military spending in 2027 would gobble up an even greater proportion of discretionary spending than the Pentagon already does.
Rather than gutting everything else, Mr. Trump’s military habit will very likely be paid for by borrowing money, adding to the nearly $39 trillion national debt. Which means that whatever the other results of his military adventures, Americans will be paying for them for years to come.
Kate Brannen is a former deputy editor of Foreign Affairs and a former national security reporter for Politico.
Source photographs by Jewel Samad and Vladimir Sukhachev/Getty Images.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post It’s Trump’s War. We’re Stuck With the Bill. appeared first on New York Times.
