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The writer is chair in defence and strategy at the Brookings Institution and the author of ‘To Dare Mighty Things: US Defense Strategy Since the Revolution’
The Pentagon has stated that the first two days of the current war against Iran cost the US about $5.6bn in munitions alone, and the first week about twice that in total costs. Considering the mix of offensive and defensive weapons fired against thousands of targets — perhaps as many as 15,000 to 20,000 already — this is a plausible pace of expenditure. Advanced defensive interceptors like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) and long-range attack weapons like Tomahawk can cost several million dollars apiece. That is a lot, but it is a far cry from the amount the White House is now seeking from Congress.
The Trump administration plans to ask Congress for $200bn to fund the ongoing Iran war. This would be a gross overestimate of the costs of the war to date and at any time in coming weeks. Worse, if approved, it could be interpreted as a blessing by Congress for a major escalation — since nothing about the current operation implies such a price tag over the weeks to come.
If such a huge supplemental funding request from the Pentagon makes its way across the Potomac, Congress should scale it back into the tens of billions of dollars range. It should also explicitly prohibit the use of such funds for a major ground war — capping the number of ground troops at perhaps 20,000 — and insist that the Department of Defense make other justifiable budgetary requests through the normal annual budget process that allows for proper transparency and oversight.
Should this war drag on indefinitely, the Pentagon can always ask for more funding late this spring or summer — giving Congress another opportunity to play its proper constitutional role as a steward of taxpayer money and a check on the executive branch.
To grasp how excessive the $200bn request is, consider the costs of some past conflicts in the modern era — including expenditures for operations, munitions, equipment repair or replacement, basing, and transportation. Operation Desert Storm in 1991, with more than half a million US troops, lasted for 40 days of combat, plus several months of preparation and redeployment, and cost about $150bn as expressed in constant 2026 dollars (adjusted for inflation, that is).
The US role in the Iraq war of 2003-2011 cost about $135bn a year on average or more than $10bn a month, as expressed in 2026 dollars — with well over 100,000 American troops in the region on average. But both of these conflicts were massive operations by comparison with the current air and naval campaign. Presumably Trump is not contemplating anything of comparable scale in regard to Iran, even as several thousand marines and soldiers make their way towards the Gulf.
Better analogies can be found from two other conflicts of the past three decades. The five-year campaign against Isis in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2019 cost less than $10bn per year for the air campaign in 2026 dollars. Typically, 2,000 to 3,000 munitions were dropped a month. Scaling that to today’s larger operation, and accounting for the use of offensive and defensive weapons alike, would imply a pace of expenditure perhaps 20 to 30 times as great. The 78-day Kosovo air war of 1999 involved about 1,000 Nato planes and cost the US about $10bn in 2026 dollars.
Taken together, these precedents suggest that the pace of costs of the first week of the Iran war was exceptionally high and has likely declined since. By the end of March, at the one-month mark, the US will probably have spent perhaps $30-40bn in overall military costs — just a fraction of the requested $200bn — unless this war goes through the entire summer, or winds up as a ground war.
These estimates do not include repair of damaged infrastructure, harm to the global economy, or any possible reconstruction costs for the Iranian economy should Washington somehow manage to induce regime change and then seek to help repair a broken nation. But any such funds would likely not be funded out of the Department of Defense supplemental spending package.
Although Congress, like key US allies, should have been consulted before the war began, it still makes sense for the House and Senate to provide supplemental funding for a war that we are now in, whether we like it or not. But providing $200bn would come close to giving the Trump administration a blank cheque that would allow for major escalation — and prolongation — of the conflict.
Instead, Congress should provide something in the range of $60bn to $75bn, allowing for operations to the end of April if necessary — and tell Trump to come back with another request in May if, heaven forbid, he needs more money for this war then.
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