Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has been in a very public spat and back-and-forth with Congressional Democrats over the Trump administration's $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request, as well as over Iran war strategy and mounting costs.
Hegseth has turned to some classic wartime fearmongering: "What is it worth to ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon?" - he posed to members of Congress when pressed in a hearing.
Hegseth called the "reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats" the United States' greatest adversary. At a moment Operation Epic Fury is about to reach 60-days on Friday, he's still insisting that this is not a 'forever war' with an open-ended timetable.
One figure to come out of the latest Congressional hearings this week is a $25 billion total Iran war price tag thus far:
A Pentagon official told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that the war in Iran cost the United States $25 billion in the first two months.
Facing questions from ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Acting Defense Department comptroller Jules Hurst testified that most of the cost was “in munitions” plus “[operations and maintenance] and equipment replacement.”
Smith thanked the Pentagon official for offering the most specific cost estimate since its first week, when Hurst said the price tag was roughly $11 billion. “I’m glad you answered that question because we’ve been asking for a hell of a long time and no one has given us the number.”
However, the $25BN number immediately raised questions among skeptics, both within Congress and among media pundits, over whether this is a lowball number.
According to Responsible Statecraft:
Rep. Ro Khanna pushed back on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s assertion that the supplemental would only include $25 million for the mission in Iran specifically. “You’re saying $25 billion. If you come back and want to revise those numbers, because all the experts are disagreeing with you when it comes to today’s dollars in damage,” Khanna said.
Also Reuters has noted, "But it is unclear how the Pentagon arrived at the $25 billion amount given that a source had told Reuters last month that President Donald Trump's administration estimated that the first six days of the war had cost the United States at least $11.3 billion."
The case for skepticism is further fueled by the fact that the US military has lost so many expensive radar systems and aircraft throughout the war.
"Iran’s missiles and drones, and one devastating instance of so-called friendly fire, have destroyed US military equipment worth between $2.3bn and $2.8bn, the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has calculated," one report has underscored.
But like with the Iraq and Afghan wars before, the true cost in both blood and treasure might not be known or fully assessed even for years to come. And that's assuming Trump's Iran quagmire gambit wraps up by then.