How much is the Iran war costing us?

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Ricky Mulvey. And I'm Darienne Woods. Lately on the show, we've been discussing some of the broader economic costs of The US Israel war with Iran, and those expenses vary day by day. Yeah. Finding out how much money war costs is a difficult task in the moment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies first estimated that the early days of Operation Epic Fury cost roughly $900,000,000 per day. More recently, The New York Times reported that Pentagon officials estimated the cost to be more than twice that number, about $1,900,000,000 per day. And even these numbers don't tell the whole story. These estimates are the tip of an iceberg. Today on the show, we're looking at the costs of Operation Epic Fury. Why post nine eleven wars cost trillions of dollars more than early estimates suggested, and the underestimated expenses that American taxpayers will be paying now and far into the future. That's all after the break. Wars are expensive, and it's difficult to find out just how much one costs in the middle of it. Mark Gansian is a retired US marine colonel. He's also done budgeting for the Department of Defense and helped come up with that daily $900,000,000 or so estimate, but that number is already significantly higher. The munitions mix appears to have been a little, richer than we had first estimated, and the damage to the bases is higher than we had estimated. He's talking about the types of bombs The US has been dropping and The US bases that have been hit in The Gulf. And here's an interesting thing. Those bombs don't actually count in the Department of Defense's current budget. After The US drops a bomb in Iran, the military says that's not a part of our regular budget, and now we need to immediately pay to replace these bombs we just dropped. They'll need to go back to Congress to ask for more money regardless of how long, the war goes. So one reason this war is already expensive is that many of the costs are not already budgeted for. But Mark says that while the costs of the first days in Iran were high, he expects the daily cost to go down now that The US has established air superiority. The military can drop cheaper bombs from airplanes versus launching long range precision guided weapons. Still, Linda Bilmes is worried that the cost of war in Iran will not be controlled, and she thinks that the long term costs could be dramatic. Linda has studied how The US pays for post nine eleven wars as a public finance professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. This is very similar territory, not only to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but to wars dating back thousands of years where those who initiate them tend to be, optimistic about how long it will take and tend to significantly underestimate the wars. The Bush …