Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way? Without a war US would still have aircraft carriers, they would just be floating somewhere else.
On the other side, it seems like this is not tracking interceptor costs (presumably due to it being classified), which have certainly been used extensively and are extremely expensive. For that matter i doubt we have a very clear picture of how much ordinance has been used in general.
[To be clear, im not doubting war is very expensive]
A carrier operating at sea on the other side of the world is a ton more expensive than a carrier in port at home. The Ford in particular would probably be in port now if not for these back-to-back expensive adventures, they’ve been deployed for a remarkably long time now.
(As for whether this reflects only those added costs, I don’t know)
Carriers aren't meant to hang out at port at home. The US has protected global sea lanes for 80 years.
> The US has protected global sea lanes for 80 years.
But rather than protect global sea lanes, the US is bombing Iran. That’s not the same thing.
The idea that the war isn’t costing money for personnel because those people would be doing something anyway makes no sense. They could be doing something else. In fact, they could be doing something that increases the wealth and wellbeing of the world, rather than destroying things. So from that perspective, the cost is far higher than what is shown here.
Then there’s the loss of innocent lives. It would be unconscionable to put a price tag on the lives of dozens of Iranian girls killed when their school was flattened and to show it on this website, and yet, this is not “free” either.
> But rather than protect global sea lanes, the US is bombing Iran. That’s not the same thing.
Arguably the primary threat to modern sea lanes is Iran.
Right now Iran is harrasing traffic. Previously the Houthis, generally considered an Iranian proxy, were harrasing traffic. Its all kind of the same war, this is just the end game.
The first gulf war was 1990. The US has been at war with various factions of the Middle East more or less continuously for thirty five years. The current president specifically campaigned on no new foreign wars and repeatedly tried to bully the Nobel committee into awarding him a peace prize before accepting a second hand one from another world leader and a sham one from FIFA of all things.
What makes anyone think that this latest attack is the "end game" vs just the latest expensive chapter?
The only end game here is distraction from the Epstein files and a potential coup to prevent midterm elections. The whole war is just plain stupid.
If it were that straightforward, right now the US would (A) have a consistent set of demands/goals that include shipping security and (B) a large international coalition of support.
Neither are true.
P.S.: Plus, of course, the whole problem where "protecting global sea lanes" typically requires a different approach than "start a war by assassinating the leadership you were negotiating with."
JD vance whined that we shouldn't protect middle east shipping lanes because he believes it helps Europe more than the US.
Don't make me defend JD vance.
He said Europe should pay their fair share for protection since 40% of their trade passes through those lanes but only 3% of America's.
Who started the war. Why did you start the war. Dude, go home.
You really think the US should stop supporting Ukraine?
Who's talking about Ukraine here. Have you lost your mind? The comment you replied to talks about Middle East shipping routes.
There's a war in the shipping lanes?
The US is hardly supporting Ukraine any longer.
US messaging has been all over the place, but stop funding proxies has been one of the more consistent parts.
To be clear, im not saying protecting shipping is the primary reason for this war. I'm just saying if that is what you think usa should be doing, then this war makes sense.
As far as b) there are a lot of factors. Its not like freedom of navigation is the top concern of every country in the world.
People should begin quantifying the commercial freight global costs incurred from the Houthi harassment. There is a basic ROI one can do that impacts not just US interests, but global interests.
> Right now Iran is harrasing traffic
gee, I wonder why they're doing that.
A total mystery!
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"terrorism"
who bombed them first and repeatedly? and embargoed and sanctioned them before that? and tore up the nuclear deal? and before that installed the shah so we could get the oil?
"The terrorists hate our freedoms."
This seems like a perfect opportunity for a revival of David Cross's standup career.
The end game is when the US backed dictatorships collapse, this is the end of American power, not the beginning.
That seems pretty unlikely at the moment.
> Arguably the primary threat to modern sea lanes is Iran.
Such a strange take. Can you share number of attacks by Iran in the last 10 years in sea lanes, where it was started solely by Iran?
> Right now Iran is harrasing traffic
As a response to attacks, Iran AFAIK wasn't harassing anyone in the ocean traffic up until 3 days ago
Houthi harassments was also a byproduct of the Israel-US "self defense" against the Iranian backed hamas attacks. Maybe it is pointless to pontificate whether the the tic-for-tat would have been initiated had the Israel-US coalition had stopped at punishing the Oct. 7 terrorists rather than leveling half of gaza, although I'm not convinced it was an inevitable byproduct.
What about tens of thousands of peaceful civilians who have been killed by the Iranian regime during past decades? The alternative to this war is allowing the Iranian government to keep doing that, business as usual.
In my opinion bombing people responsible for these atrocities increases the well-being of the world. Most Iranians seem to agree.
I don't see how this is going to work without troops on the ground?
The US had air supremacy, troops on the ground and a friendly regime in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and it did not work. (I am not sure if Iraq was a success, but I am sure that people were super tired of it, and did not want something like that again)
What is just bombing going to do? They just rebuilt their weapons and you have to bomb them again in 1-2 years?
The administration has already suggested sending troops as an option. It does not help that they are just making things up as they go.
Trump is at his best point to save face right now. It's now or never, IMO. He killed an entire leadership lineup of Iran. If he pulls out now it is a clear victory for him. If he continues the campaign 2 or 3 more weeks it's tough for me to find another out for him that doesn't involve a lot more risk to the USA.
Given he did take this clear victory and cash in, in Venezuela, there is some hope he'll do the same in Iran.
Now turn your argument towards Saudi Arabia, or any of the human-rights violating countries that the US supports or has supported recently.
Your opinion is respectable, but not compatible with any idea of “justice”.
The point being that eliminating a murderous tyrant is bad, because there are other murderous tyrants?
Your president is a murderous tyrant, so how about eliminating him?
sometimes there are more than two options between
"do nothing"
and the clusterfuck the current administration has embarked on.
Sometimes yes, but is there in this specific case?
Because from my vantage point it looks like the choice is, status quo or bomb them. Its not like america can double sanction iran, they are already fully economically sanctioned. What is the middle ground here?
You could relax sanctions in exchange for other priorities. A persistent pain is less effective than an acute one anyway. There’s carrots too in negotiations. But no, we cannot do what a previous president did.
But what you describe was not the motivation behind the decision by Washington to bomb Iran. The motivations were Tehran's nuclear program and Tehran's support for groups like Hezbollah and generally Tehran's promotion of violence and instability outside Iran in the Middle East.
wonder what your view is of ICE actions against peaceful protesters in MN?
I’m sure the welfare of the Iranian people is a top priority for Trump.
This justification for bombing Iran is dumb as fuck. In a few days the number of civilians killed by US-Israeli bombings will surpass the number of civilians killed by the regime in decades.
Possibly.
What is that threshold? I've heard anywhere from 3k to 300k. You can definitively answer this question?
Killing more people won't bring dead people back to life! I can't believe I have to spell this out.
> But rather than protect global sea lanes, the US is bombing Iran. That’s not the same thing.
With Iran's support of the Houthi I think you'll find they are exactly the same thing.
The strait of hormuz is the opposite of protected right now. Insurance companies aren't willing to cover ships if they enter the strait to pick up a load of oil, so little commercial traffic is occurring.
The real cost should include the spike in oil prices, the world consumes about 100 million barrels a day, so every $10 increase costs the world a $1 billion a day. We're already up ~$10, and it might continue to rise depending on how things go. You probably should include LNG in there too. If this oil halt is protracted, your stocks and bonds will be dragged down as well.
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They haven't exactly been sending aircraft carriers after pirates. It's a huge excess of firepower for any traditional threat to shipping.
The US has liked to portray itself as the world's protector, but often that's just spin. The carriers are big weapons of war, meant for waging war.
We have surplus carriers specifically to allow them to average a large percentage of their time at home unlike container ships who spend the vast majority of their time in service. Many systems that are both bespoke and complex means lots and lots of maintenance issues.
Sure the Navy can Airlift in parts etc, but that’s obviously very expensive and less obviously more dangerous.
We don't have a surplus of carriers. We have a shortage, at least relative to their current tasking. They're overstretched and behind on maintenance. This is unsustainable so the civilian leadership will have to either cut back on missions or build more.
There’s always an argument for more equipment, but you need to start building them long before they enter service and need to set budgets long before any specific crisis.
Funding for Nimitz was authorized in 1967 they started construction the next year and it was in service in 2025. The US has a very large and very expensive carrier fleet today because people decided it was worth having X boats a long time ago and they calculated X under the assumption that a significant number would be spending time docked / on the other side of the planet from where the conflict is.
Obviously, part of that equation was based around warfare and the likelihood of losing some / extending deployments etc, but what we want today has no barring on what we actually built as all those decisions happened a long time ago.
TLDR; Having more than strictly needed for normal operations = having a surplus when something abnormal occurs.
Exactly: that protection isn't happening right now because those resources are doing something else. The money would be spent anyway, but doing something that is normally considered useful, and that useful thing is not happening to the same capacity as before. Therefore there is an opportunity cost to consider.
The Houthis have been doing a lot of shipping lane disruption, recently. They have sunk several ships.
Iran's Islamic regime has provided material and monetary support to the Houthis.
Crippling their capabilities aligns with the goal of protecting global shipping.
They aren't all deployed at all times and the Ford is more than overdue to be in Port. The sailors are notably suffering on this deployment and there is a ton of deferred maintenance.
True.
Honestly i think my main opinion is that we have no idea what the number is, but its probably a large one.
Carriers routinely engage in war gaming and cruises. They dont port if they are not actively engaged in war.
> Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way?
This is a fair way to account for the cost, because the assets were procured and personnel hired years ago for just this purpose.
Put another way: we would not need this fleet at all if we did not expect to use it in a manner like this. (For example, Spain did not choose to have this capability and so has not borne a cost of maintaining this option for the preceding decades.) Through that lens, the true cost of this war would involve counting back to before this round of hostilities began.
It's only fair to count _at least_ the "time on task" for all the assets.
Yes, the actual accounting is quite poor and makes bad assumptions. Don't use this info for anything important or serious.
Right, consider the personnel costs that are displayed here. They were already getting paid this past weekend either way (admittedly the military may have had to hire some last minute contractors to help with the operation).
There's someone quoted here who estimated UAE by itself cost in fighting off the Shahed drones at $23-28 per $1 spent on Shahed drone at $55000 (they know how many got through and the claimed success rate and the methods they are using to defend UAE) https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/shahed-drones-iran-us...
I think that's true, but I like that this site includes a "ESTIMATED MUNITIONS & EQUIPMENT COSTS" section that shows the value of actual, expended munitions which are all one-time costs directly resulting from the war.
Seems like a massive understatement given how much of this war has been shooting down iranian missiles. According to wikipedia, a single patriot missile cost 4 million, and you often have to use multiple to get a succesful shoot down.
This. 220 mil/day is 55 PAC3-MSEs. Iran has fired ~100 ballistic missiles alone per day. Probably spending that on interceptors alone.
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Munitions, fuel, and combat pay are additional in combat. Also maintenance. Some costs are there anyway, sure. But war is far more expensive than peace.
Also, the taking the production/purchasing cost of some F15s that were 25 - 35 years old doesn't make a whole lot of sense, or does it?
They still work, if they get shot down, you will have to pay to replace them. (also using them is expensive and causes wear, especially under the stress of real action, where the limits are pushed)
Yeah my 2004 3-series BMW also still works, but if it broke down, I wouldn't think I lost the price that it originally cost.
Maybe, its opaque how its calculated.
But you are keeping people on high alert, refueling further away, etc...
it's also doesn't take into consideration the revenue opportunities, like USA-branded apparel, FanDuel parlay wagers, and I assume that Epic Fury is a summer Marvel franchise, or Wrestling PPV?
Sure but having a bunch of resources for "defence" is very different from having a bunch of resources for "attack" in most people's mind I imagine.
Yes but right now it’s doing this war. It can’t be anywhere else, so the costs are for this deployment specifically.
I think when people are asking about the cost of a war, they are asking about excess costs. How much extra money would be saved if the war didn't happen.
Yes, it's quite humorous to try and factor in opportunity costs for aircraft carriers, "but we could be bombing someone else!"
Doing actual bombing is more costing than just patrolling relatively peaceful seas, no?
Yes, but not at the cost of the construction of an Aircraft Carrier. This is why the military uses "operational costs" (fuel, munitions, activated duty pay, equipment losses, etc) to factor the cost, not the total amount of every dollar ever spent to build+sustain a military force.
Iran probably wouldn't have blown up the $300m radar installation if we hadn't randomly attacked them.
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History really doesn’t say otherwise. Tensions were mostly cooling after the Obama nuclear deal.
Now the message we’ve told the world is: If you don’t want to eventually be at risk of the US attacking you, you better be nuclear armed.
Of course they cooled Iran kept enriching uranium and the rest of the world agreed to ignore it.
because enriching uranium worked out so well for Iran?
Because NOT enriching uranium worked so badly for Gaddafi.
because it worked out for North Korea
Largely because they didn't actually need it. Their conventional artillary pointed at south korea was already (and still is) more of a deterrnt than the nuke is.
Nobody was desperate to invade North Korea prior to their acquisition of nukes. It's a horrific war field and combat prospect. Iraq and Afghanistan were each a cakewalk next to going into North Korea (again). North Korea was safe as they were.
The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad.
The primary threat to Iran's regime is internal. Nobody is invading Iran. It's a gigantic country with 93 million people. It can't be done and it's universally understood. Trump won't even speculate about it, even he knows it can't be done. What would nukes do to protect Iran's regime? Are they going to nuke their own people? Are they going to nuke Israel and US bases if the US bombs them?
So let me get this straight: the US bombs Iran, Iran nukes Israel and some US bases, maybe even a regional foe - then Iran gets obliterated.
That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/9/22/us-threatened-to-bo...
"The primary threat to Gaddafi over time was internal, nukes would not have protected him. What was he going to do, nuke his own territory? The same was true for Assad."
Have you checked, how many outside interventions both countries had and still have?
Labelling this as "internal" is pretty missleading. If both dictators would have had nuclear weapons ready to launch, no foreign bomber would have dared going in against the regime.
> That's not what would happen in reality at all. Don't take my word for it, ask Pakistan: the US threatened to bomb them [0] - despite their possession of nukes - after 9/11 if they didn't cooperate. Why would the US do that? Because the US knows that MAD doesn't work like the online armchair crowd thinks it does.
That isn't a MAD situation.
Pakistan has nukes but they can't launch them on the US.
Giving up their nuclear weapons did not work out well for Ukraine.
Doesn't mean the direction wasn't correct.
Take any American, and treat them the way Americans treat others, and they would be forming terrorist cells (gorilla war), building nukes, basically every single thing they could to fight back. To never surrender.
Remember Red Dawn? That would be an American Response, to what America is doing.
That is it basically. If shoe was on other foot, Americans would never surrender.
So, why are we expecting others to give up quietly?
> So, why are we expecting others to give up quietly?
We're not. That's why we're bombing the regime and associated military targets. Iran was never expected to give up quietly.
Think you are missing the point.
They aren't going to just give up after a few weeks of bombing.
Will need boots on the ground versus a resistance/multiple sides of a civil war, and now we have another 20 year war.
People don't just shrug and go "all shucks, yuck yuck, guess you got us, i'll roll over"
History does not say otherwise. The US however has a history of attacking Iran, including murdering 190 people on a civilian flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
Not sure why this comment is downvoted: the facts are established, as is (among others) the Mosaddegh coup d'état co-organized by the US:
> On 19 August 1953, Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup d'état that strengthened the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. It was instigated by the United Kingdom (MI6), under the name Operation Boot[5][6][7][8] and the United States (CIA), under the name TP-AJAX Project[9] or Operation Ajax. A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mosaddegh nationalized the country's oil industry. (...) > In August 2013, the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. (...) was in charge of both the planning and the execution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Or the US backing of Saddam Hussein from 1982 onwards during the Iraq-Iran 8-year war of aggression, with “massive loans, political influence, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites”. During this war, Iraq employed chemical weapons leading to 50.000 - 100.000 Irani deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War
This (and other pieces of historical context) help very much understand the Iranian insistence on a ballistic missile program.
*290 people. Mistook an Airbus A300 for an F-14. Maybe it's an easy mistake to make on radar back in the day?
Back in the day, or even now. Kuwait’s US-supplied air defense shot down three US F15s this weekend.
History doesn't say anything, because there is no precedence Iran attacking the US assets first.
Iran has never carried out an attack against US military infrastructure that wasn't clearly retaliatory.
Look it up. Every case of Iran attacking US infrastructure has been in direct retaliation to the US blowing up some Iranian stuff.
Sure Iran has funded tons of proxy attacks by anonymous militias but these are generally not at the same kind of scale.
Is there good evidence for this?
Yes. Their repeated warnings that Iran would no longer tolerate the kind of back-and-forth blame shifting that think-tank policy papers openly described years ago as a strategy to keep Iran off sides, and that any attack by Israel would be considered an attack by the USA too and that American assets that surrounded Iran would be attacked; since under all the clownish “who? Meeee?”act gaslighting and stupid pathological lies, everyone knows they are one and the same.
It’s like dealing with psychopathic toddlers who think people aren’t smart enough to know they are lying when they deny killing the family pet even though their hands are covered in blood and you just watched them mid act of slaughtering the family pet.
It'd been there for decades. And Iran stated that if attacked by the US and Israel they'd retaliate against US targets in addition to Israel.