Pentagon: First Week Of Iran War Cost About $11b

The U.S. spent about $11 billion last week on the Iran war, a Pentagon official said Thursday, offering the first public estimate of the conflict’s cost — and one Democratic lawmakers insist is much higher.

Jules Hurst III, the Defense Department’s acting comptroller, said the figure was a “ballpark number” during a defense summit in Washington. His office is working on a more comprehensive figure for a supplemental budget request, he said, which the Pentagon plans to submit to the White House and Congress in the coming days.

“We're looking to make sure we make the right investments and capabilities,” Hurst said. “So it’s not just replacing things, but buying new things too.”

That total, for comparison, is nearly enough to build a new naval warship, such as the Ford-class aircraft carrier.

The Pentagon has given lawmakers preliminary estimates of operational costs, such as munitions expenditures and flight costs, he said, declining to go into specifics.

Lawmakers have said they expect the Iran supplemental request to reach at least $50 billion, based on their conversations with administration officials. The White House and Pentagon have not confirmed that number.

The administration also hasn’t set a firm end date for military operations in Iran. Trump has said the operation could last for four weeks or more, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has refused to place a timeline on the missions.

Outside analysts have offered varying estimates on the expense of Operation Epic Fury, which enters its third week on Saturday. An analysis from the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Security put the cost of the first 100 hours of air and naval strikes at $3.7 billion. The conservative American Enterprise Institute has calculated the operational costs so far at between $11.2 billion and $14.5 billion.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense panel, was among the Democrats who doubted that figure was high enough.

“I don't know whether that also includes all the operational costs of the ships, planes, fuel, staff time,” he said. “If they were to come back to us and say, ‘This is how much we have spent on this operation,’ it would have to include months of preparation and deployment, as well as munition stockpile restoration, magazine refilling, as well as operating costs.”