How Much Is the Iran War Costing Americans?

In air wars, the biggest single expense is often munitions, and that is true in this conflict. The Pentagon has made extensive use of precision missiles, such as Tomahawks, which cost $2.6 million each, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (C.S.I.S.), and advanced air-defense systems, such as Patriot-missile batteries, which cost $4.9 million. A C.S.I.S. analysis of the war’s cost, published earlier this summer, said that the Pentagon has used more than a thousand Tomahawks and as many as fourteen hundred Patriots, in addition to roughly ten thousand unguided “dumb” bombs. This dramatic rundown in munitions accounts for $26.1 billion of a total military cost of about forty billion dollars, the analysis said.

It identified the second-largest cost item as damage to U.S. bases in places such as Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which it estimated at up to $9.2 billion. Although the Pentagon has tried to play down the effectiveness of Iran’s attacks, they appear to have destroyed, wholly or partially, hundreds of structures, including aircraft hangars, fuel depots, radar facilities, warehouses, and barracks—delivering a blow to U.S. military infrastructure without precedent in recent times. “You’d have to go back to the Second World War to see something like that,” Mark Cancian, a former Marine colonel and White House budget official who co-authored the C.S.I.S. study, told me. When the conflict ends, Cancian went on, the Pentagon will have to think seriously about whether to rebuild or abandon the damaged facilities, given their vulnerability to future attacks.

Some online estimates, which Cancian dismissed as unreliable, put the military cost at more than a hundred billion dollars. Whatever the true figure is, it’s a considerable sum that comes on top of the bloated trillion-dollar Pentagon budget that has already been approved for 2src26, and it is money that could, in theory, be used for other purposes. Take the seventy-three billion dollars in extra funding that House Republicans approved. The authors of an analysis published last week by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, pointed out that this amount of money would “provide full Medicaid coverage for 5 million more people, with $33 billion left over.” That money, in turn, could be used to substantially raise SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) for children from poor families and double the funding for the National Park Service and for emergency food-and-shelter assistance, the CAP authors said.

In broader economic terms, the biggest burden that the war has created is sharply higher energy prices. Since late February, the cost of gasoline has risen by more than a dollar a gallon, on average, across the fifty states: that’s more than a third. And petroleum isn’t the only fuel that has become more expensive. The price of diesel, which powers the trucks that traverse the country carrying goods of all types and sizes, has risen by roughly half. According to an energy-cost tracker maintained by the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, if you combine the rising prices of gas and diesel, the financial hit to Americans since the war began is about ninety-three billion dollars—more than seven hundred dollars per household.

That isn’t the final economic tally. The price of heating oil has shot up by about seventy per cent. The cost of fertilizers, which are largely made from methane gas, the price of which spiked after the war began, has also risen sharply, contributing to higher food prices. Given the complicated interconnections between the prices of inputs (such as energy and fertilizers) and outputs (such as food, consumer goods, and air travel), it’s hard to estimate the extent to which the war has raised the over-all price level. But the fact remains that, since February, the rate of inflation has risen from 2.4 per cent to 3.4 per cent. Market interest rates, which are influenced by inflation and inflation expectations, have also jumped up, raising the costs of mortgages, car loans, and other types of consumer credit.

Adding all these things together, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, put the total cost of the war for the typical American household at a thousand dollars—a figure he described as conservative. That was at the end of June. More recently, Zandi has raised his estimate to more than twelve hundred dollars. Rather than being taken as a precise number, this figure should be understood as a rough sketch that conveys the magnitude of Trump’s folly. “The war has been hugely expensive,” Allison McManus, the managing director for national security and international policy at CAP, told me. “Trump decided to launch it, and Americans are paying for it.”