The real costs of the war with Iran

**Koucha Navadar** (0:06)
This is Brian Lehrer's Daily Politics Podcast.
It's Tuesday, September 1st.
I'm Koucha Navadar filling in for Brian today. When the Iran War started in February, President Donald Trump said it wouldn't last more than a few weeks. Well, we've just hit six months, and there's still no end in sight. After a month of relative calm, the United States restarted fighting with military strikes on Iran's Loroq Island. Iran retaliated with missiles at a base hosting US troops in Jordan. After that, President Trump posted on Truth Social in response saying, quote, Iran is officially a failed nation. It is dead. Followed by many other claims about the state of Iran and a promise to respond militarily. With us now is John Cassidy. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker and writes their weekly column, The Financial Page. In his most recent column, John asked a question. I imagine a lot of us have asked at some point over the past six months, how much is this war costing us as a country, as individuals, as everything in between? In his column, John set out to answer that question, and he's here to help us break down these numbers. John, hi, welcome back to WNYC.

**John Cassidy** (1:24)
Thanks for inviting me on. I'm delighted to be here.

**Koucha Navadar** (1:27)
Glad to have you.
John, your most recent column is titled, How much is the war in Iran costing Americans? But there's actually not one clear number, right? Why is that?

**John Cassidy** (1:39)
Well, the war has several effects and it all depends on how you tally it up. The way I looked at it was I separated the costs into non-monetary ones, casualties, deaths and injuries, military costs, the cost of the weapons and moving troops around, et cetera, and economic costs, which in this case have mainly been because the war caused a big spurt in energy prices, gasoline, diesel, et cetera. And I did a little reading, spoke to a lot of experts who've looked into each of these areas and tried to tally it all together. So, you know, I can go through each of those in turn if you'd like.

**Koucha Navadar** (2:17)
Yeah, I think we're going to break down and touch on at least a bunch of them. I'm wondering before we dive in, are there other factors that you looked at besides the ones that you mentioned when you're trying to figure out the cost of a war? Maybe a factor that people don't expect immediately if that comes to mind?

**John Cassidy** (2:33)
Yeah, well, I mean, there are lots of different ones. There are psychological costs. There are strategic costs. You know, what's this going to do? The role of the US in the world, the future of sort of Middle East, et cetera. They're sort of, you know, very large, very important questions, but not ones. It's easy to put a dollar sign or a strict number against. This being a sort of economics, financial column, I tried to restrict myself to questions which I could give some sort of a dollar answer to or a figure's answer to. So certainly, I didn't, you know, the overall cost of the war, as with all wars, we really won't know for decades because obviously it depends on, you know, what larger impact it has on America's role in the world, what larger impact it has on stability in the Middle East, et cetera. And those are huge questions.

**Koucha Navadar** (3:20)
Yeah, of course. So you mentioned three categories that you kind of broke it down by. One was non-monetary, one was military, and one was economic. I think it'd be helpful to start with military since there are numbers behind that. And it seems to be the most obvious number is the cost of military operations.
In July, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee that this conflict has cost the US government $37.5 billion. He didn't give much detail about how they arrived at that number. And an NBC News report used internal Pentagon documents to calculate that the true cost might be closer to $80 billion, maybe upwards of $100 billion. I mean, those are very different numbers. How do you account for that discrepancy?

**John Cassidy** (4:00)
Well, I mean, the basic problem here is that the Pentagon's given out very little information on the conduct of the wars in terms of casualties, it's lagged behind. And in terms of the sort of financial costs, in terms of weaponry, it's given out no detail. As you said, Hexeth has given this figure of $37.5 billion. I relied on a study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, carried out by a former Marine major and budget official, who certainly knows his way around the figures as well as anyone, I think. And he came up with a figure of about, told me his most recent estimate is about $42 billion for the direct, easily identifiable costs of the war.