Running On Empty

America's Bill in Blood and Treasure

The United States spends the most on its military than any other country in the world. And it’s not even close. The Fiscal Year 2026 Defense Appropriations Act provides for a record $838.5B in new defense spending, more than ever authorized in U.S. history. To be fair, the bill includes pay and benefits increases for our service men and women, improved military housing and aid to Ukraine and Israel. Nonetheless, the next closest country in total military spending, China, will spend in 2026 only around $300B, followed by Russia at between $126B and $149B. All totaled, the United States spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined. For the cost of procurement, the bill increases weapons and munitions spending by around $330B, plus billions more for munitions and weapons R&D. Iran, America’s current enemy, last reported spending only $7.9B on defense in 2024

Kevin Hassett, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, told CBS’s Face the Nation on March 17, “The latest number I was briefed on was 12 [billion],” as the cost to taxpayers for Trump’s war of choice in the first four weeks. These numbers are sure to grow when prices for oil sensitive commodities like gasoline, groceries, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, to name just a few, are added and rise as oil prices rise and supply dwindles. Collateral costs of war to the government will rise as well when the medical bills to care for injured service men and women come due. And the costs to replace all the munitions and weapons must be accounted for if the United States is to remain in a state of military readiness for the next war, which may not be of Trump’s choosing.

On March 19 the Pentagon asked for $200B more to fund the war in Iran, while Trump keeps promising the war will be over soon At the same time he ordered 2,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne to the Middle East. Defending this request, the one time FOX News personality, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys.” In next year’s budget Trump is reported to be planning to ask for $1.5 trillion. That’s a lot of bad guys to kill.

Not that Trump gives a crap, but Nicholas Kristof had a great piece in the New York Times on better ways to spend $200B.

Here are some ideas of what the war money could be used for instead. My calculations are conservative, based on Pentagon reporting that the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion — and even that incomplete tally amounted to more than $1.3 million a minute.

• For a bit more than two weeks of this war, we could offer free college education to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually, at a cost of around $30 billion a year.

• For less than three weeks of war, or $35 billion, we could run a nationwide pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds.

• For $75 million, about an hour’s worth of war, we could provide three books free to every child in America who is living under the poverty line, according to Kyle Zimmer of First Book, a nonprofit that works on early literacy. Research suggests that books like these can help get children reading and improve their outcomes.

• A woman dies in the United States every two hours, on average, from cervical cancer. Screening all uninsured women who need it would cost perhaps $1 billion and could save hundreds of lives, according to Dr. Linda Eckert, a cervical cancer expert at the University of Washington. That’s less than 13 hours of the war bill.

• We could get glasses to all 2.3 million low-income schoolchildren in the United States who need them but don’t have them. The base cost would be about $300 million, according to Vision to Learn, a nonprofit that does this work. The bill would be what we spend on four hours of this war.

• For about $34 billion a year, less than three weeks of war, we could restore health insurance subsidies that the Trump administration let expire last year. One analysis predicted an additional 8,800 preventable American deaths as a result.

The war money would save even more lives if we allocated part of it abroad. Indeed, we spent more on the first three days of war than we spent ($4 billion) on all humanitarian aid in 2025. Consider what we could achieve internationally:

• For $400 million or less, a bit more than five hours of war, we could deworm all children in need worldwide, according to Evidence Action, a nonprofit that works on deworming. This would result in stronger, healthier children and adults.

• For $380 million, less than five hours of war, we could provide vitamin A supplementation for the 190 million children who need it. Helen Keller Intl, a nonprofit engaged in this work, says this would prevent up to 480,000 child deaths each year and virtually eliminate blindness from vitamin A deficiency.

• About one day’s worth of war spending could save more than 350,000 lives from malaria, through a rigorously studied screening and prevention program, according to Esther Duflo, an economist at M.I.T.’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

• For $4.3 billion, less than three days of the war bill, we could largely end the most terrible form of malnutrition, called severe wasting. That would save about 1.5 million children’s lives annually. We would accomplish something historic: For the first time in the history of humanity, large numbers of children would no longer be starving to death.

We have to know that numbers like this are never totally reliable — but that’s true of military costs as well. George W. Bush’s administration in 2003 put the cost of the Iraq war at $40 billion; it ended up costing perhaps $3 trillion.

Trump would rather light $200B on fire in the new White House ballroom than feed a starving kid. And that’s exactly what he’s doing in Iran.

Hegseth constantly unleashes his Bro-side for all to shudder in embarrassment at the sheer incompetence and complete lack of fitness and seriousness for a wartime defense secretary. He describes the U.S. military as “badass,” possessing “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” and "winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy" as if his transparently fake bravado fools anyone, particularly our enemies. Hegseth is a Christian Nationalist and imbues defense policy with violent rhetoric in the name of Jesus Christ. He has replaced textbook military strategy with Christian scripture. He prays at his monthly Pentagon Prayer Breakfast for “overwhelming violence of action against those that deserve no mercy.” He defiles the teachings of Jesus Christ by praying for the wielding of the “Lord’s sword of truth” against our enemies. And as a modern day Crusader he has its imagery inked across his body, including the Crusader battle cry, “Deus Vult,” God Wills It. He has preached salvation for American soldiers who die for Jesus, although many of our service men and women are not Christian. According to Hegseth:

“[Christ’s] mission was to divide truth from lies, the things of the world from the things of God, light from darkness, good from evil. And like Christ, in earthly ways our brave warriors are not called to appease the world, they must confront it. We know we fight a physical battle but ultimately grounded, as the president said, in a spiritual battlefield,” Hegseth declared. “Not only are we warriors armed with the arsenal of freedom, we ultimately are armed with the arsenal of faith and have been from the beginning.”

And like the Crusades more than a thousand years ago, in Hegseth’s worldview this war is a battle of theocracies. May the best God win. Hegseth’s despicable bravado aside, are we actually winning decisively? And does maximum lethality matter anymore?

Despite being the most expensive military in the world, we’re running on empty. In a recent and devastating report from the American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a bastion of liberal and dovish thinking, the authors wrote:

The war with Iran is no longer hypothetical. American forces are engaged. Missiles are being launched. Interceptors are being expended. Precision munitions are striking targets across a widening battle space. And with every salvo, one uncomfortable reality becomes clearer: The United States does not look like it can sustain protracted, high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary.

Meanwhile, in Beijing and Moscow, analysts are watching closely. Neither China nor Russia needs to fire a shot to learn from this war. They are observing production rates, consumption rates, congressional politics, and the elasticity of the US defense industrial base. They are calculating whether the United States can sustain a prolonged, high-intensity conflict while maintaining deterrence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. At present, we cannot. War has a way of exposing illusions. One illusion now shattered is the notion that America can rely on small inventories of exquisite, ultra-expensive weapons to carry the day.

The Washington Post reports the U.S. fired more than 850 Tomahawk missiles in the first four weeks of the war, or nearly a quarter of its stockpile, and creating a strategic risk. Five thousand Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, based in Okinawa, Japan, have arrived in Iran presumably to provide rapid deploying boots-on-the-ground for somewhere in Iran. China, North Korea and Russia are following this closely as America’s military force is being diverted from the Indo-Pacific theater and likely to be bogged down in Iran for months, if not longer. This comes at a time when China’s intentions on Taiwan are becoming more apparent, including on Taiwan’s world’s best semiconductor industry. Distracted by his war of choice in Iran Trump postponed a meeting with Xi. Today it’s been reported that Xi invited the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party to China in advance of his sometime later meeting with Trump. Xi and China are not so distracted by the opportunity Trump’s blundering in Iran has presented.

With the just arrived 5,000 Marines and the 2,000 paratroopers, all together there are more than 50,000 troops now deployed in the Middle East. Trump’s and Hegseth’s delusion that the most expensive military in the history of the world would quickly effectuate regime change and an unconditional surrender is now in shatters. And is it any surprise, except to the no-nothings in charge of America’s military, including the Commander-in-Chief who said, “I was very surprised,” about Iran targeting other Middle Eastern countries, adding it was “the biggest surprise I had of this whole thing.”

It is also an outcome made from unbridled hubris when lesser armies have won wars of attrition against America in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a generation earlier in Vietnam. Wars fought with the best munitions and planes money can buy are often ultimately no match for the asymmetric warfare fought by people whose homes are being bombed and cities destroyed. The American Revolution was an early asymmetric war. American Patriots fought the then most powerful military in the world in battles and skirmishes across America’s dense forests that became a war of attrition for King George from across 3,000 miles of ocean. In the end, the hearts and minds of the Americans outlasted the British arrogance. Today’s asymmetric warfare is conducted by inexpensive drones that can elude missile defense systems and do great damage to weapons and humans. Without drones, Ukraine would long ago have been in Russian hands. And, China smartly invests in inexpensive, lethal and easily replaceable drones.

In America Has No Good Options in Iran, Ilan Goldenberg wrote in Foreign Affairs:

American history offers repeated examples of wars entered with confidence and exited with difficulty. In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, U.S. leaders escalated in the hope of salvaging success, only to deepen their strategic predicament. Fear of failure and the sunk cost fallacy plunged the United States further into the mire.

The current conflict presents a similar temptation. But it also offers an opportunity to break the pattern. The Iran war was a choice—one made without a clear plan for what would follow. The consequences of that decision are now becoming apparent. The task ahead is not to rescue an elusive victory but to limit the damage to U.S. interests, to regional stability, and to the lives of civilians across the Middle East.

That will require accepting an uncomfortable truth. In wars such as this one, the most responsible course is not to press forward in search of a win but to recognize when the costs outweigh the gains—and to step back before a limited conflict becomes an engulfing quagmire.

Once again our leaders have without our consent, or even the consent of Congress, put America at a crossroad of deciding whether to continue recklessly squandering America’s treasury and the treasured lives of its soldiers, or to quickly find a diplomatic solution. But the lives of American soldiers is a resource they apparently believe is their’s to waste and will never be depleted. History has sadly proved this belief to be true. In the end, Americans, and the world, are again left anxiously praying and agonizing over which road this President and his lickspittle enablers will choose. But for the delusional Trump and his faux warrior Hegseth, all is going well with our badass military. That is, until it isn’t.