By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
The costs of modern war are in the news this week. In congressional hearings, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth estimated that the current action against Iran is costing about $37.5 billion.
That’s a staggering sum.
The war has lasted about five months so far, and it’s not over yet. For those of us who hoped it would be quick, that sounds like a long time.
But all numbers – both in money and in time – are meaningless in a vacuum. To determine whether it’s really a lot – relatively speaking – depends on the context.
And context is everything, in politics, economics, and foreign policy.
So our roughly continuous action against Iran has lasted about five months so far. What does that mean?
The Spanish-American War was over in four months. Our war against Grenada was over in a week.
On the other hand, our war against the Axis powers (WWII) lasted about four years (but only because we joined it two years in). And our War of Independence lasted eight years, and needed to be refought thirty years later.
World history is full of both overnight takeovers and generational conflicts. Compared to the Seven Years War, the Thirty Years War, and the Hundred Years War, these five months are a blip.
So many issues impact the durations of wars, it’s extremely difficult to make a fair comparison between them. Are the two sides evenly matched? Are you giving it everything you’ve got, no holds barred, or are you holding back in an effort to avoid certain types of damage or casualties? Are you willing to spend what it takes to win?
The current Iran conflict is the perfect storm of challenges to the goal of a quick war. The United States have overwhelming technical superiority, but we desperately want to avoid civilian casualties or the destruction of non-military targets, because we consider the vast majority of Iranians to be our potential allies (they certainly were in the 1970s), and we want to set up a successor government with the tools for success.
Iran has 47 years of tyranny and military dictatorship to overcome. For 47 years, the mullahs have focused much of their GDP toward sponsoring global terrorism, foreign Twelver proselytizing, toppling foreign governments, and developing apocalyptic weaponry.
The Iranians aren’t tempted to pull their punches when fighting with us, but we have to pull our punches when fighting with them, because we want the successor government to be both economically and politically able to return to the western-facing, modernist, secular status it was before the Twelvers took over.
Could we reduce Iran to rubble? Sure, we have the ability. But we have to be surgical, because we need to reduce the collateral damage.
Besides, we have already won this war, by all normal measures. We won it in the first month. Any normal government would have surrendered long ago. But Iran is ruled by a minority, apocalyptic death cult that delights in mass casualties (the Twelvers believe that if enough people die, it will speed up the return of their imaginary Mahdi), and they know that a surrender would end this ongoing death toll.
They aren’t really fighting to win – that’s impossible – they’re fighting to keep running up the casualty numbers. Because casualties are what they like.
Similarly, the cost of the war, like all costs of government, must be viewed in context. We choose to fight more with technology than with boots on the ground nowadays, because we value human life, especially the lives of our servicemen, so whatever we can accomplish with expensive missiles, bombs and drones, we do, rather than putting people on the ground to be shot at.
So there’s a trade-off here – much greater expense, but far fewer lives lost among our servicemen. Virtually any American analyst will agree that this is a worthwhile choice.
Every loss of life is a tragedy, but compared to the tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of losses in most of our past wars, the few casualties we have in this much more expensive method of warcraft are a blessing.
But if it’s so expensive, and so hard, the question arises: why do it? Why choose to fight the war at all?
Good question.
To answer it, we cannot just look at the past few months (though the past few months do support our choice, as the IRGC’s gleeful launching of attacks on everyone in sight, both their enemies and their presumed friends, certainly proves our argument that they are indeed insanely dangerous).
We must look at what the mullahs’ regime has done over the past 47 years.
They have transformed Iran from a western-facing, modern, secular, pluralistic nation with a strong economy into a Sharia-law-dominated Twelver-run hell, viciously oppressing the Zoroastrians, Bahaiis, Sunnis, Jews, Christians, atheists, and other minority religions that make up the majority of their population.
They have constantly sponsored terrorism all over the world, setting up Twelver jihadist cells wherever they can.
They have funded, trained, and directed numerous major insurgencies, political/terrorist organizations, such as the Houthis and Hezbollah, and have toppled governments in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon.
They have been a major source of the continuous attacks on Israel.
They have held global shipping hostage, by directing their Houthis to close off the Suez Canal to containership traffic (this alone has cost the world economy about a trillion dollars over the past three years, independent of Iran’s recent nuisance action in the Persian Gulf).
All this has caused a crippling ongoing expense, not just to the U.S. government, but to the entire free world’s private sector too, as the business world has had to react by complying with complex supply chain rerouting, restricted party controls, product controls, and other necessary sanctions.
So in the final analysis, what has the Twelver regime in Iran cost us? Countless trillions of dollars, in terms of direct and indirect economic damage and necessary responses and work-arounds over these 47 years.
The Twelver regime in Iran is a blight on the world, and while tens of billions of dollars are certainly a lot of money, and we sure wish it didn’t fall to us to shoulder so much of this burden (with many thanks acknowledged to our wonderful ally Israel, the only other participant who has shouldered a proportionate share of the cost), but that’s just the reality of the situation.
Either we act, or we continue to put up with the crushing abuse to both global security and the global economy that Iran has inflicted upon this earth for 47 years.
Is $37.5 billion a lot of money?
Yes, it is.
But it’s a bargain, compared to the ongoing cost of living in a world with a malevolent, unyielding Iranian Twelver regime.
Yes indeed. As the saying goes, it’s a bargain at twice the price.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
