For U.S. taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.
A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing about a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.
The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. “It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,” said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. She added that the replacement costs of the enormous number of munitions that the U.S. military has expended will be much higher than the original purchasing costs.
Iran also severely damaged other U.S. assets in the region, including a valuable military radar jet on a tarmac in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh.
Bessette/Pitney’s AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: DELIBERATION, DEMOCRACY AND CITIZENSHIP reviews the idea of "deliberative democracy." Building on the book, this blog offers insights, analysis, and facts about recent events.