The financial toll of the U.S. war on Iran may be running as high as $80 billion to $100 billion, more than triple the Pentagon’s publicly stated $30 billion figure, according to internal Department of War estimates reported by NBC News.
The Pentagon’s official tally reportedly accounts only for munitions expended, leaving out the cost of rebuilding U.S. military infrastructure across West Asia damaged by Iranian retaliatory strikes, a bill estimated at more than $30 billion on its own.
Also excluded, per the report, are logistics costs, the expense of maintaining two carrier strike groups, troop evacuations, and two additional months of fighting during which the U.S. carried out hundreds of further strikes.
Separately, the Iran War Cost Tracker portal estimated in mid-June that Washington had already spent upward of $113 billion on the war, while the Congressional Research Service reported in May that the U.S. Air Force had lost 42 aircraft, including F-15E and F-35A jets and MQ-9 and MQ-4C drones.
A war that was supposed to be over by now
Washington, of course, promised this would be quick.
After the first attacks on February 28, Trump told reporters the campaign was “intended” to last four to five weeks, framing it as an easy, short operation.
In the weeks that followed, the timeline drifted through two to three weeks, four to six weeks, and two to eight weeks, with officials repeatedly insisting the U.S. was “ahead of schedule” and that this would “not” become another Iraq.
Trump also hedged, at times saying the war would take “whatever the time is” and “whatever it takes,” a formulation that leaves considerably more room than “four to five weeks.”
By mid-July, roughly four and a half months after the war began, and following a two-week ceasefire from April 8 that collapsed, Trump formally notified Congress that the U.S. was “again at war with Iran.”
No clear way out
Whatever the final bill turns out to be, Washington does not appear to have a clear route to actually ending its reckless war of choice it originally sized at a few weeks. The Economist recently examined three options available to the Trump administration for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, from continuing the current strikes to escalating further to reimposing the naval blockade, and found none of them offered a workable resolution.
Continued limited strikes have already failed to change Iranian behavior despite hundreds of attacks, while further escalation risks drawing Gulf states into the crossfire and remains politically untenable at home.
Reimposing the blockade, meanwhile, would only return both sides to the standoff that produced the now-collapsing ceasefire deal in the first place, with no guarantee of a different outcome the second time around.