WASHINGTON — Congress has not formally authorized a war in Iran, yet lawmakers may soon be asked to approve emergency spending for a campaign the Trump administration has not defined in duration or full cost — in dollars, equipment or lives.
Defense experts interviewed by States Newsroom say the price tag for weeks of air strikes already runs into the billions and would escalate dramatically if U.S. ground forces were deployed to pursue regime change or if the conflict drags on for months. A congressional aide, speaking on background, said Defense Department briefers told lawmakers the Pentagon spent $5.6 billion on munitions in the first two days of the campaign, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, and the aide expects overall munitions spending has climbed into double digits since.
President Donald Trump has sent mixed messages about objectives and timing. He initially said the bombing, conducted alongside Israel, could last four to six weeks and later suggested it might end “quickly,” while not ruling out a longer campaign or the use of ground troops. Republicans who control Congress have largely framed the actions as necessary for national security and resisted constraining the president’s commander-in-chief authority. Democrats, who unsuccessfully tried to force the removal of U.S. forces until Congress authorizes hostilities, would be needed to pass any supplemental funding through the Senate, a potential brake on a prolonged war.
Neither the White House nor the Office of Management and Budget has publicly detailed how much the bombing has cost so far or what future requests will require. A Defense Department spokesperson said there was nothing to provide; Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, has asked the Congressional Budget Office for its own estimate.
Comparisons with Iraq and Afghanistan underscore how quickly costs can balloon. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said an “extended air campaign” might normally cost a couple billion dollars a month, but in this case the pace appears closer to a couple billion a week. Long-term regime change would be far more expensive and deadly. During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the average cost was about $1 million per deployed U.S. troop per year when infrastructure, equipment, health care and related expenses were included. At the peak of those conflicts, roughly 100,000 to 175,000 U.S. troops were deployed and annual spending reached about $200 billion.
“If you needed at least 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, you could conceivably need a quarter million or more in Iran if you’re really going to try to occupy and stabilize the whole country,” O’Hanlon said, which would translate into roughly $250 billion to $300 billion for a single year of presence — with additional costs in subsequent years. That military figure omits other consequences such as damage to diplomatic facilities, higher global energy prices and reduced fertilizer production that can lower crop yields.
The human toll is also uncertain and could rise. Seven U.S. service members have died so far, and past conflicts show fatalities can mount over time. O’Hanlon noted about 150 combat deaths in the first Gulf War and thousands more over the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — roughly 2,500 U.S. deaths in Afghanistan and about 4,500 in Iraq across their durations. Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Cost of War project warned that conflicts marketed as “short and decisive” often have long ripple effects. Beyond immediate battlefield deaths, wars produce indirect fatalities from shortages of clean water, food and medical care, disproportionately harming children under five and women.
Experts doubt that air and naval strikes alone can topple or replace a regime. Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said it will be “very difficult” to inflict major damage on the Iranian regime without ground forces. Past U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya relied on mixed tactics, including boots on the ground, and each produced years-long instability, civil wars or insurgencies. Jones cautioned that urging populations to rise up without protection risks massacres, as happened to Kurds in Iraq and Hungarians in 1956.
Sustaining a long fight would also strain U.S. stockpiles. Jones noted that systems like THAAD had already seen substantial drawdowns in 2025, and intense use now would deplete offensive and defensive munitions the U.S. needs for other contingencies, including plans related to China, North Korea and Russia.
The conflict could widen if Iran’s allies or proxies attack U.S. forces or civilians abroad. Analysts cite the risk of Houthi strikes from Yemen, attacks by Iraqi Shiite militias against U.S. personnel in Syria, Iraq or Jordan, or actions by the IRGC and its partners, which have previously plotted attacks even on U.S. soil.
Even with an $838.7 billion defense budget approved for 2026 and an additional $150 billion enacted in 2025 for specific Pentagon programs, resources are finite. Mara Karlin of Brookings and Johns Hopkins University said the military can often “walk and chew gum,” but doing so is hard and more expensive when fighting another war. She called the likelihood of massive ground deployments “almost inconceivable,” given the casualties and the prospect that invasion would make the conflict long and brutal. Using the Iraq experience as a guide, Karlin said the human and monetary costs of such a campaign would be extraordinarily high.
The administration’s lack of a public estimate for the campaign’s price tag, coupled with the potential for deeper involvement, leaves Congress and the public without a clear sense of the financial or human commitments ahead. Histories of earlier wars suggest even conflicts billed as brief can produce protracted and costly consequences for years or decades to come.
This article first appeared on News From The States and is republished with permission. Read the original here.
