The US fired over $11 billion worth of munitions in Iran in one week. The true cost will only become apparent years later.
Daniel Ryser for the online newspaper INFOsperber
What distinguishes modern warfare is not its cruelty—that is as old as war itself—but its accounting. Consider the figure that circulated through the corridors of Washington in early March: it wasn’t announced with military fanfare or under the glare of generals’ stars, but rather tucked away in a Reuters news report. We learned that the American government had expended $5.6 billion worth of munitions in the first 48 hours of its attack on Iran alone.
$5.6 billion. For two days. For ammunition. One might be tempted to dismiss this figure as the grotesque exaggeration of an antimilitarist scribbler, but a cursory examination of the price tags attached to our modern weapons reveals a financial obscenity. The New York Times has since reported that the first week of the war alone has already cost the Pentagon over $11.3 billion.
Billions of dollars spent in incineration
According to Bloomberg, the Patriot missiles used by the US in Iran cost $4.6 million each, the SM-6 missiles $8.2 million, and the THAAD missiles $12.8 million. The Tomahawk cruise missile, the preferred weapon of American air strikes for decades, costs $1.7 million each. The war of aggression was only a few hours old when an American Tomahawk cruise missile found its target not in a fortified military installation, but in the classrooms of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab. More than 160 people were killed, mostly young girls whose only crime was being born on the wrong side of a geopolitical equation.
Modern aerial warfare is less like traditional warfare financially than a grotesque pyrotechnics of destruction, where each projectile costs as much as a garage full of Ferraris (while the Iranian side apparently relies on missiles and drones that cost a few thousand dollars). The grotesque economics of it all would be almost comical if these deadly instruments of national policy were financed with the private fortunes of eccentric billionaires. In reality, however, they are paid for with the accumulated wealth of ordinary citizens, from their taxes and debts. Many of these citizens had also followed a president who, during his election campaign, promised to end precisely such costly adventures, only to then launch an attack without first obtaining the constitutionally mandated approval of Congress.
The Long Bill
But these initial billions spent are only the beginning of a long cascade of war expenditures. What governments categorize as military spending—ammunition, flight hours, fuel, and tactical operations—are merely the initial investments. The true cost of war only becomes apparent in the deceptive silence after the last explosion has subsided. The “Costs of War” project at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, whose calculations have been cited in speeches by both President Joe Biden and Donald Trump and which won the US Peace Prize in 2022, has been documenting this uncomfortable financial reality for years. The researchers there pursue an idea that is as simple as it is politically inconvenient: anyone who wants to understand the cost of a US war cannot simply look at the Pentagon budget.
The true extent of a war, as Brown’s figures show, often only becomes apparent after the generals have retired to write their memoirs. When one factors in veterans’ benefits, disability payments, long-term military presence, and the interest on the debts used to finance these wars, the picture changes dramatically. According to “Costs of War,” the Pentagon’s military spending alone on Afghanistan, Iraq, and other post-9/11 operations exceeds two trillion dollars on the US side. Adding further war-related federal expenditures, the total comes to over 5.8 trillion dollars. Including future commitments, the overall cost of these wars could reach approximately eight trillion dollars. At the same time, according to the project, these conflicts have already cost approximately 900,000 lives, though the exact number is significantly higher depending on the calculation method. (This text, however, focuses on a different dimension of this toll – the financial costs to the United States – while the destruction in the attacked countries and the social and environmental consequences of the wars will be examined at a later date.)
War in the Body
A particularly large portion of these costs relates to a dimension conspicuously absent from military success stories: the broken bodies and souls left behind by war, including those of the soldiers who fought in these wars. Harvard economist Linda Bilmes, one of the most prominent researchers on the costs of war, estimates that medical care and support services for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone will cost between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion by 2050.
Bilmes points out that the peak in spending on veterans’ care is not reached with the homecoming parades, but only decades later, when the psychological wounds of war – especially post-traumatic stress disorder – are revealed in their full extent.
Studies by the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica-based think tank primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Defense that advises the U.S. armed forces, indicate that post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and traumatic brain injuries are among the characteristic long-term consequences of the post-9/11 wars. According to a RAND analysis, such traumatic brain injuries alone have affected nearly half a million U.S. service members since the beginning of the 21st century, and the trend is rising.
The fiscal dimension of these consequences is enormous. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that in fiscal year 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs paid out approximately $195 billion in disability and compensation benefits to over 6.9 million veterans and their families.
$771 billion for five corporations
Of course, there are winners. Let’s briefly consider the cynical arithmetic of modern warfare: For every dollar America spends on the art of conflict prevention through diplomacy, two dollars flow into the coffers of traders who profit from warfare. Political analysts William D. Hartung and Stephen Semler calculated that private companies received $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts between 2020 and 2024, roughly 54 percent of the $4.4 trillion in freely available military spending during that period.
This money is particularly concentrated in the hands of a few corporations. $771 billion went to just five defense contractors: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX – formerly Raytheon – ($145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). By comparison, the US government spent $356 billion on the entire apparatus of American diplomacy, development aid, and humanitarian assistance – excluding military support – during the same period.
$20 billion in interest per week
These gigantic sums aren’t being paid from a well-stocked treasury. While American bombers attack targets in Iran, a quieter machine is working in the background: debt servicing. In the first five months of fiscal year 2026—from October 2025 to February 2026—the US Treasury paid $433 billion in interest on the national debt, more than $20 billion per week, just to service the existing debt.
The US war machine has operated on credit for decades. The United States has financed its military interventions primarily through debt. Around two trillion dollars have been borrowed for the direct costs of war alone. This has already resulted in enormous interest payments: By 2020, according to calculations by economist Heidi Peltier of the “Costs of War” project, approximately 925 billion dollars in interest had already accrued on these war debts. Even if no new wars were waged, the interest payments would continue to rise and, according to her calculations, could reach around 6.5 trillion dollars by 2050.
Historically, this is by no means a given. Earlier American wars were at least partially financed by taxes: During World War I, tax increases covered around 30 percent of the costs, in World War II almost half, and the Korean War was even paid for entirely through taxes. The wars after 9/11, however, were largely financed by credit. Harvard economist Linda Bilmes called them “credit card wars.”