In the first weeks of its illegal war against Iran, the U.S. has suffered substantial material losses amounting to several billion dollars. These losses are piled on top of the staggering daily expenditure of the war, which already totals over $11 billion. This is waste at an unimaginable scale, burning human lives and money away at a rate of millions of dollars per second.
The concrete numbers demonstrate the waste of the U.S. war machine. The cost of a single THAAD interceptor or F-15E could fund countless programs that improve the quality and dignity of human life, in the United States and across the world. Instead, this vast wealth is being used by a tiny minority of billionaires to murder thousands, plunder resources, and destroy the environment.
Here’s a look at just some of the U.S. weapons systems, and their costs, being utilized in this illegal war.
Air defense systems: endlessly expensive
Iran’s primary targets among the U.S. and Israeli military forces have been anti-air defense systems and the powerful radars that spot incoming aircraft and missiles and feed the targeting information to interceptor missiles to shoot them down before they can strike their targets. Without these advanced so-called “defensive” systems, the U.S. and Israel could not wage their offensive air wars with seemingly near-impunity.
One of the primary Iranian missile and drone targets has been the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. Organized into mobile units called “batteries,” each battery has an AN/TPY-2 spotter radar, six interceptor missile launch systems, and a command station – all mounted on trucks that can be moved relatively easily.
The U.S. has already lost four of the AN/TPY-2 radars used by THAAD, forcing it to pull THAAD systems from other theaters, including South Korea, to replace them. The U.S. only has eight THAADs. Each of these radars cost $500 million, and each interceptor missile costs $13-15 million each. A full THAAD battery of radar, control station, 6 launchers, 48 missiles costs $2.73 billion.
So far, no Patriot missile systems have been confirmed destroyed in the present war, but numerous videos show their interceptor missiles firing at – and often failing to hit – incoming Iranian missiles or drones. Each of those Patriot interceptor missiles costs $3.7 million, and a full battery of radar, launchers, and command station costs $1.1 billion each.
Another stunning loss has been the AN/FPS-132 Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS) at Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest U.S. base in Southwest Asia. This massive radar system cost $1.1 billion and is of the same type built across northern North America during the Cold War as an early warning system for Soviet ballistic missiles.
Missile and drone calculus
Even when these systems work as intended and defend successfully against Iranian missile and drone attacks, the cost disparity between a THAAD or Patriot interceptor and the low-cost missiles and drones utilized by Iran presents a devastating calculus. While hard numbers for the Iranian arsenal are hard to determine, the Shahed drone is estimated to cost between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit and can be mass produced. Iran’s ballistic missiles cost into the millions of dollars, but are still comparatively inexpensive. Each drone or missile usually requires at least two interceptors to successfully destroy, meaning that for each volley Iran fires, the U.S. is spending potentially tens of millions of dollars to intercept.
The integration of cheap drones and missiles is a significant change to the strategic framework surrounding ballistic missile defense dating back to the Cold War. Interceptor systems have been an important part of international diplomacy since the Cold War, with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty limiting the U.S. and the Soviet Union to just a handful of interceptor systems capable of missile defense on a national level. However, the treaty allowed theater-level interceptors, meant for protecting troops or bases, but especially as the Cold War ended, the U.S. began to extend the ranges and capabilities of these systems, including THAAD and the Patriot, to well beyond the limitations of the treaty.
In 2002, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty, giving Russia almost no explanation, and began developing a new generation of powerful missile defense systems. Alarmed at the threat this posed, which might give Washington the ability to launch a nuclear first strike, Moscow began developing a new type of weapon that could beat these air defenses and rebalance the strategic situation: the hypersonic missile.
Hypersonic weapons travel faster than five times the speed of sound (3,836 mph at sea level) and most use highly maneuverable, unpowered glide vehicles in order to evade enemy defenses. Content with its own air superiority from stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, the U.S. did not prioritize developing hypersonic weapons of its own and has fallen behind Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran in attempting to develop a usable weapon. Iran has said it fired several hypersonic missiles in the present conflict and Russia has used them very effectively during its invasion of Ukraine.
Aircraft losses
The U.S. has also lost several aircraft since the start of the war, including six MQ-9 Reaper drones shot down by Iranian air defenses. The Reaper drone, also called the Predator-B, is a creation of the U.S. occupation wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s, and has become infamous for enabling the remote-controlled bombing of weddings and homes across Africa and Asia. Each Reaper drone costs $30 million.
In addition, several U.S. aircraft have accidentally been shot down by their own air defenses, including three F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets – each a waste of $97 million. Two KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft, airliner-sized jets that refuel other aircraft in mid-air so they can fly longer missions, have also been lost under mysterious circumstances — each costs $80 million.
These enormous price tags are not simply because of the engineering complexity of military aircraft. The military aircraft industry has long been a black hole of public investment. The development of the F-35, the U.S.’s most advanced fighter jet, cost a total of over $2 trillion dollars, and ended up 80% over budget. This is a tendency across the aerospace sector, where contractors like Lockheed-Martin or Boeing use these projects as slush funds, massively inflating costs and development timelines.
Building a Mass Movement Against War and Empire
The stunning hubris of the American military machine has always been their belief that absolute superiority on the battlefield comes to those with the most expensive technology. Yet for nearly a century, the U.S. has been strategically bested by adversaries with inferior weapons in the technological sense. While the U.S. military-industrial complex can sap trillions of taxpayer dollars to develop a missile that can shoot down another missile in space, or a plane that can’t be detected by enemy radar, it has yet to produce a device capable of depriving working and oppressed people of their determination to resist occupation and imperial domination at any cost. From Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. empire has failed to enforce its will on the people of the Global South – succeeding only at spreading terror, destruction, and mass murder across the globe.
As the Trump administration rushes to cut the budget of every social program, eliminate every safety regulation, and to put the social wealth of the nation up for sale in the gambling halls of Wall Street, it is more apparent than ever how every bomb and missile fired in some distant theater of war is paid for with money stolen from the working people of this country. The U.S. war on Iran is the most unpopular war in U.S. history – the potential is greater than ever before for us to truly build a mass movement that unites working people against war, empire, and the capitalist system that breeds it.
