As I have noted before, we don’t have anything approaching a full estimate — budgetary or economic — of the Trump administration’s war on Iran, now in its seventh month. Estimates by the Pentagon itself and by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office put the cost at between $38 and $42 billion. But those figures exclude major costs like the loss of expensive aircraft and the major damage done to U.S. military bases in the region by Iranian drone strikes. We now have additional information on those two issues.
A new report by the Congressional Research Service reveals that the United States has lost 81 military aircraft in the Iran war to date, nearly double the number reported in May of this year. The majority of the aircraft destroyed — 45 — were Reaper drones, which are used for surveillance, targeting information, and select bombing runs. But many other types of aircraft have also been hit, including refueling and intelligence gathering planes and attack helicopters. And although the U.S. bombers that were recently removed from a UK base have been safely removed after credible reports of a planned Iranian drone attack, it also underscored that the conflict is now global in scope.
Some of the destroyed planes cost hundreds of millions each, for total losses for all 81 no doubt reaching into the billions.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that some US bases in the Middle East have suffered so much damage that they may never be rebuilt. Instead, new bases will be built further away than the ones they are replacing. The costs of doing so? High, but how high no one knows.
Discussions of the economic costs of the war should never forget the human costs. Wars kill human beings, many of them civilians. In the case of the Iran War and the war Israel is conducting in Lebanon with US-supplied aircraft and bombs, there have been tens of thousands of deaths — at a minimum — and well over a million people driven from their homes.
Initially all of this was explained as a way to prevent an attack by Iran, perhaps even one involving nuclear weapons. But in mid-2025 the U.S. launched bombing raids that President Trump said had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. And in his first term, the president walked away from a multilateral agreement that was effectively blocking Tehran’s path to a bomb.
In short, the administration has yet to give a plausible explanation for launching this costly, devastating conflict. We can and must do better.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com