Donald Trump, the president who promised no more “stupid” foreign wars, as Vice President J.D. Vance called them, spent $11.3 billion of taxpayer money in the first six days of the war against Iran.
If that rate held through today, then the war has cost almost $25 billion.
The New York Times’ report on the almost $2 billion per day price tag comes after news that U.S. forces expended almost $6 billion on munitions in the war’s first two days.
Not the Full Estimate
The Times reported that Pentagon officials delivered the bad news about the war’s cost to lawmakers on Tuesday behind closed doors. Worse still, that figure doesn’t include the full cost of it.
The estimate did not include many of the costs associated with the operation, such as the buildup of military hardware and personnel ahead of the first strikes. For that reason, lawmakers expect the number to grow considerably as the Pentagon continues to calculate the costs that accumulated just in the first week.
As The New American reported yesterday, the Times also disclosed how much money the Israeli-driven war cost in munitions the first 48 hours: $5.6 billion.
“That is a far larger amount and munitions burn rate than had been publicly disclosed,” the latest Times dispatch said:
The Center for Strategic and International Studies had estimated that the first 100 hours of the operation cost $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million each day.
The first wave of the bombardment used weapons including the AGM-154 glide bomb, which can cost from $578,000 to $836,000. The Navy bought 3,000 of them nearly two decades ago. Since then, the U.S. military has said it will switch to using far less expensive bombs, such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition. The smallest size of warhead costs about $1,000, and the guidance kit runs about $38,000.
Some Republicans — including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Pentagon — have urged over the course of multiple administrations that the United States ramp up its spending on munitions production.
Back-of-the-napkin math shows that the first six days of the war cost $1.89 billion per day. If that rate of spending continued until today, then war has thus far cost $24.57 billion.
And again, those figures, as the Pentagon told congressmen, are only partial.
An expert told CNN the war could cost as much as $95 billion for just two months.
“Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told CNN that a two-month war could cost between $40 and $95 billion, depending on whether the US puts boots on the ground and how quickly munitions are replenished,” CNN reported.
Smetters opined that the cost is worth it because if Iran obtained and used a nuclear weapon, the result could be “trillions upon trillions of dollars of damage.”
That aside, whatever the per-day cost of the war now, if Trump sends American soldiers and Marines to invade Iran, the price tag will be staggering, the losses incalculable.
The fiscal cost of the Iraq War was between $2 trillion and $3 trillion. That doesn’t count the lives that have been and will be lost.
Another “Stupid” War?
Vance explained the cost of war in an interview during the 2024 presidential campaign.
“If you look at who serves, who fights and dies in American wars, it is disproportionately middle-class people from the industrial Midwest,” he said, noting that a Marine Corps base when he served was the site of many license plates from Ohio and Texas.
“That means that those people, those sort of patriotic Americans, they’re sending their kids to the United States Marines Corps, to the United States Army,” he continued:
They don’t want to send those kids to fight for Volodymyr Zelensky. If we send American boys and girls to war, they want it to be for America’s interests. And I think Trump, better than anybody in American politics today, can go and make the argument that we are for peace when we need to [be], and we’re only going to fight a war when we have to. But when we do, we’re gonna punch hard and we’re going to win.
We’re not doing these sort of global wars of democracy, which, again, is something the Biden administration has really doubled down on. I think Trump would take us in a different direction. But we’ve got to make that pitch to people, that if you want your kid to go and fight some stupid globalist war, vote for Joe Biden. If you want to send American Marines and soldiers to fight only when we have to, vote for Donald Trump.
Trump has confessed that Vance was skeptical about bombing Iran.
“He was, I would say, philosophically a little bit different than me,” Trump told reporters in Miami on Monday. “I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going but he was quite enthusiastic.”
During an interview with Fox News, Vance said Trump would not involve the United States in a prolonged war.
“There’s just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight, and no clear objective,” he told Fox talker Jesse Watters:
What is different about President Trump, and it’s frankly different [from] Republicans and Democrats of the past, is that he’s not going to let his country go to war unless there’s a clearly defined objective. He’s defined that objective as Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and has to commit long term to never try to rebuild their nuclear capability. It’s pretty clear. It’s pretty simple. And I think that means that we’re not going to get into the problems that we’ve had with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe. On that note, as The New American reported yesterday, American Marines and soldiers might soon be fighting in Iran.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground,’” Trump told the New York Post on March 2:
I don’t say it…. I say, “probably don’t need them” [or] “if they were necessary.”
If those troops are “necessary,” wasted taxpayer money won’t be the only cost.
