Iran War’s Price Tag: $3.7 billion in the first 100 hours!
International Desk, Mar 6 (EFE).-
The United States has spent at least $3.7 billion in the first 100 hours of its war against Iran, amounting to nearly $900 million per day, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
This is the most comprehensive estimate released so far in the US of the cost of the war that began Saturday, led by President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has since spread across the Middle East.
“These estimates extrapolate from the first few days of the war, which are typically the most intense period of an air campaign,” the Washington-based CSIS said in its report on Thursday. These air bombings also included offensives that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a significant part of the Iranian leadership.
Those first 100 hours cost $891.4 million per day, and the vast majority of those expenditures were not budgeted: some $3.5 billion of the $3.7 billion spent were not included in the accounts approved by the US Congress, according to the analysis published on the CSIS website.
In contrast, the operations in the Caribbean in January that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, most of the costs were budgeted and amounted to about $31 million a day, according to the same analysts.
The nonprofit expects that, in the case of Iran, costs would begin to fall as US forces opt for less expensive munitions and Iran reduces the rate of drone and missile launches.
Nevertheless, it concluded that “the unbudgeted costs here will be substantial” and will depend on the intensity of operations and the effectiveness of Iran’s retaliation.
Of the $3.7 billion spent in the first days of war, some $1.7 billion went into aerial interceptors such as the Patriot system, while another $1.5 billion for missiles and other defensive munitions; air operations cost $125 million, sea operations $64 million and ground operations $7 million.
CSIS estimates, based on past air campaigns, that it will cost more than $3 billion to replenish the inventory of munitions being spent in the war.
The estimate comes shortly after a leading economist, Kent Smetters, told Fortune magazine that, beyond direct military spending, the war in Iran could cost the US economy as much as $210 billion. EFE
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