President Donald Trump has restarted the Iran conflict in the days of the missile strikes, and US intelligence officials now estimate that the total cost of the Pentagon’s war could exceed $100 billion, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.
The officials were tracking the cost of Operation Epic Fury to be $50 to $100 billion by the end of May, in line with secret congressional estimates that put the cost so far at about $80 billion.
The Trump administration has not released estimates of the cost of the Iran war. In June the White House made a request for $88 billion to cover some of the war’s costs, but even that is small, the people said.
Part of the reason why final costs are not available is that the Pentagon is still deciding whether to replace every aircraft destroyed or irreparably damaged during the conflict, the people said.
If the Pentagon decides not to replace a particular aircraft, defense officials have told lawmakers, it will not ask for the money and therefore not include that in the total cost of the war, the people said.
The details of the report were presented, said an official of the Ministry of Defense The inner loop: “There is nothing else to announce at this time.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a May 20 report compiled using only publicly available reports that the US has lost at least 17 manned aircraft and 25 drones since the conflict began.
The CRS report also showed that the US has been losing an increasing number of drones, which are not expensive to replace. Among the 25 lost drones was the MQ-4C Triton, the Navy’s most advanced surveillance aircraft that costs more than $600 million per airframe.
The cost of maintaining US bases in the region, some of which have taken heavy damage since Iran fired retaliatory missiles and one-way attack drones in response to US strikes, will also be high.
Defense officials have told lawmakers behind closed doors that they have not calculated the cost of repairs — and may never do so — if the U.S. ultimately decides to close those bases because they are too vulnerable to an attack by Iran, the officials said.
Iran has repeatedly hit several key bases in the Middle East in retaliatory strikes, including the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Naval Support Activity, Bahrain, which the Pentagon has not publicly acknowledged.
The only actual cost publicly provided was by then-acting Pentagon chief Jay Hurst, who testified at an oversight hearing in May that the cost of the war had risen to nearly $29 billion.
On Tuesday, at his hearing to be appointed permanent administrator, Hurst declined to provide an updated figure but said $29 billion was in weapons and fuel costs associated with having two US aircraft patrolling the Middle East.
Operation “Gold Eagle” is here
The Trump administration on Tuesday launched a clean house that will try to identify and patch any software vulnerabilities before malicious actors can hack them with more powerful AI models.
Said the administrative officer The inner loop The clearinghouse, called “Golden Eagle,” will be run by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which will itself use AI models that are not publicly available, to identify vulnerabilities.
It marks the first major implementation of Trump’s June 2 executive order aimed at creating a framework to oversee the rapidly growing threat of advanced AI models.
