US War In Iran Has Cost $25 Billion So Far, Says Pentagon Official

2 min readUpdated: Apr 30, 2026 11:02 AM IST

A Pentagon official Wednesday said the The United States’ war on Iran has cost $25 billion so far. This is the first official estimate of the military’s ‌price tag for Middle East conflict, news agecny Reuters reported.

Earlier in an estimate of the war costs, the United Nations’ humanitarian agency has flagged that the funding could have saved 87 million lives if allocated as humanitarian aid.

“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritised plan to save 87 million lives is $23bn. We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot,” The Guardian quoted Fletcher as saying.

Speaking at Chatham House in London, Tom Fletcher, the head of the UN’s humanitarian agency, had predicted that, with food and fuel inflation inching closer to 20%, the world would feel the impact for years, pushing more people in sub-Saharan Africa and east Africa into poverty.

Just six months left to go before the US’s midterm elections in which President Donald Trump’s Republicans may face an uphill task to maintain a majority in the House, Democrats are gaining traction in the public opinion polls as they attempt to link the heavily cricised Iran war with affordability.

Democrats grilled US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as he appeared before the House armed services committee alongside Genral Dan Caine, chair of the joint chiefs of staff with Representative John Garamendi of California calling it a “quagmire” and “political and economic disaster at every level.”

Hegseth denied that America and Israel’s war on Iran is a “quagmire” and called Democratic lawmakers “feckless” for criticising the conflict.

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Hegseth, who testified before the Congress for the first time since the US and Israel launched a war against Iran on February 28, asked the lawmakers to approve a $1.5 trillion defence budget and criticised some lawmakers as “the biggest challenge” in the war effort.

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