The Pentagon used $5.6 billion in advanced munitions in just the first two days of its Iran war, according to new figures shared with Congress.
The estimate, provided by three U.S. officials on Monday and reported by The Washington Post, reflects only the opening salvos of Operation Epic Fury, before the military began shifting away from expensive precision munitions—including Tomahawk cruise missiles and advanced air defense interceptors—toward more plentiful laser-guided bombs.
The news has sparked alarm on Capitol Hill over how quickly U.S. forces are burning through America’s most high-end weaponry, according to the Post.
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell insisted to the outlet that the Defense Department had “everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline.”
But the Post reports that Donald Trump’s administration is now expected to send Congress a supplemental defense spending request worth potentially tens of billions of dollars as early as this week to help bankroll the campaign.
That plea, it says, is certain to face fierce opposition from Democrats whose efforts to restrain further military action in Iran have so far come up empty.
The Daily Beast reported last week that the war has been costing American taxpayers an estimated $1 billion a day, a pace that could push the total bill toward $215 billion if the conflict drags on through September as some U.S. officials have warned.
None of that appears to have punctured Trump’s confidence. At a House Republican retreat at his Trump National Doral resort in Doral, Florida on Monday, he told lawmakers the conflict would be “a short-term excursion” that was going to be “finished pretty quickly,” according to Punchbowl News.
He also used the occasion to claim Democrats had stopped attacking his economic record.
“You noticed you don’t hear that word anymore, Mike,” he told House Speaker Mike Johnson from the stage, referring to the word “affordability”—a claim Punchbowl noted was flatly contradicted by the reality of Democratic messaging on both sides of the Capitol.
Behind the munitions costs, though, lies a deeper set of anxieties. The Pentagon has begun moving parts of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system from South Korea to the Middle East, along with Patriot interceptors previously stationed across the Indo-Pacific.
Mark Cancian, a weapons inventory expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Post that the reallocation carries its own dangers: “The more THAADs and Patriots you shoot, the more risk you assume in the Indo-Pacific and in Ukraine,” he said. The two systems are considered the most advanced air defenses in the world.
The concerns are not new. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine had warned Trump, 79, before the war began that a prolonged conflict could dangerously deplete America’s stocks of precision weaponry, already eroded by years of military aid to Ukraine and operations across at least seven other countries.
The administration has sought to play down that warning. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 45, and Caine told reporters last week that the campaign was transitioning away from its reliance on precision munitions. Cancian said the shift would dramatically cut the per-strike cost—from several million dollars per round to as little as $100,000 in some cases.
Iran has continued to strike back with unexpected sophistication. Russia has been supplying Iranian forces with intelligence to sharpen the targeting of their attacks on U.S. and Israeli positions, according to the Post.
Three American F-15 fighter jets were also destroyed in a friendly-fire incident involving Kuwait—at an estimated $100 million apiece, according to Cancian.
Seven U.S. servicemembers have now died in the conflict—six in an Iranian drone strike on a military facility in Kuwait, and a seventh following an attack in Saudi Arabia.
The Daily Beast contacted the Pentagon and the White House for comment. The Pentagon declined to discuss the matter.
