Trump’s Senseless Waste in Iran

Back in 1909, the British writer and politician Norman Angell famously argued in the book The Great Illusion that wars no longer made any economic sense. While the states of the medieval period or antiquity might profit hugely by looting conquered areas, by the 20th century the global economy had become so complicated and interdependent—and modern militaries so expensive and destructive—that any war would be a net economic drain.

Angell reasoned that this meant wars were unlikely to happen in future, and even if they did, not likely to last long. That, alas, was gravely mistaken. But his argument that war does not pay was completely correct. Two world wars left Europe a smoking ruin. And today, the global economy is immensely more complicated, and militaries immensely more destructive, than they were 117 years ago.

Just look at Iran, where mind-boggling quantities of resources are being squandered.

CNN compiled a partial list of the ships and planes being used in the bombing campaign. They include B-2 bombers (about $88,000 per hour to operate), F-15 fighters ($25,000 per hour), F-16 fighters ($14,000 per hour), F-22 fighters ($56,000 per hour), F-35 fighters ($17,000 per hour), F-18 fighters ($25,000 per hour), E/A-18G electronic warfare planes ($20,000 per hour), P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance planes ($9,000 per hour), plus several other manned planes, and a large number of drones, all using up an untold amount of fuel and ordinance.

Related: The Iran war is already hugely unpopular

All this air power is operating from two full-scale carrier strike groups, each of which costs something like $8 million per day to operate. The military is also chewing through its supply of Patriot ($4 million per shot) and THAAD ($13 million per shot) missile interceptors so fast that it is reportedly considering stripping South Korea of some of its missile defense batteries.

All told, The Wall Street Journal reports that simply getting all those forces into position cost $630 million, and Anadolu reports that the first 24 hours of the attack cost $779 million.

Then, of course, this operation is going to lead to much more future military spending. All the wear and tear on planes and ships means additional maintenance or earlier replacement—as when poor coordination, possibly because of a Pentagon leadership that drinks heavily and thinks wars are fought with push-ups, leads to Kuwait shooting down three F-15s ($90 million per plane) by mistake. And all the fighting is going to lead to tremendous medical spending from all the soldiers who end up injured, or on benefits for the families of the slain, like the six who were killed by an Iranian drone.

Even those immense military expenditures are just a small fraction of the total cost. Most obviously, Iran’s economy, with a PPP-adjusted GDP of roughly $1.7 trillion, is going to take a massive hit. It might collapse entirely if Trump’s reported plan to get Kurdish forces to invade goes through. Anyone who trades with Iran will suffer corresponding economic damage.

Then there’s the price of oil, which has jumped by about 10 percent, to $75 per barrel at time of writing. Everyone in the world using oil, or products made or shipped with oil, will pay a higher price, requiring spending to be diverted from elsewhere. Prices will rise, not due to some climate policy scheme to transition away from fossil fuels, but from a war of aggression choking off the Hormuz Strait. As I write, stocks are tumbling, with the Dow down by 800 points.

And for what? Neither Trump nor his toadies have any consistent explanation for why we’re in this war. He seemed at a loss when he heard that most of the potential puppets he might have installed in the place of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in his own attack. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead,” he told ABC News. Whoops!

There is more to war than wasted money, of course. The human cost—like the 175 Iranian schoolgirls and teachers slain in an airstrike—is beyond any dollar valuation. But it’s worth underlining the stupendous quantity of money and resources that might have been used to help somebody, anybody, instead of being lit on fire.

Trump quite clearly views the military, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, “like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.” It turns out that sending carriers to turn donuts in the Persian Gulf while destabilizing another Middle Eastern nation for no reason is not cheap.

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