Hacker News

A carrier operating at sea on the other side of the world is a ton more expensive than a carrier in port at home. The Ford in particular would probably be in port now if not for these back-to-back expensive adventures, they’ve been deployed for a remarkably long time now.

(As for whether this reflects only those added costs, I don’t know)

> Wouldn't some of these costs be present either way?

This is a fair way to account for the cost, because the assets were procured and personnel hired years ago for just this purpose.

Put another way: we would not need this fleet at all if we did not expect to use it in a manner like this. (For example, Spain did not choose to have this capability and so has not borne a cost of maintaining this option for the preceding decades.) Through that lens, the true cost of this war would involve counting back to before this round of hostilities began.

It's only fair to count _at least_ the "time on task" for all the assets.

Yes, the actual accounting is quite poor and makes bad assumptions. Don't use this info for anything important or serious.

Right, consider the personnel costs that are displayed here. They were already getting paid this past weekend either way (admittedly the military may have had to hire some last minute contractors to help with the operation).

There's someone quoted here who estimated UAE by itself cost in fighting off the Shahed drones at $23-28 per $1 spent on Shahed drone at $55000 (they know how many got through and the claimed success rate and the methods they are using to defend UAE) https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/shahed-drones-iran-us...

I think that's true, but I like that this site includes a "ESTIMATED MUNITIONS & EQUIPMENT COSTS" section that shows the value of actual, expended munitions which are all one-time costs directly resulting from the war.

Munitions, fuel, and combat pay are additional in combat. Also maintenance. Some costs are there anyway, sure. But war is far more expensive than peace.

Also, the taking the production/purchasing cost of some F15s that were 25 - 35 years old doesn't make a whole lot of sense, or does it?

Maybe, its opaque how its calculated.

But you are keeping people on high alert, refueling further away, etc...

it's also doesn't take into consideration the revenue opportunities, like USA-branded apparel, FanDuel parlay wagers, and I assume that Epic Fury is a summer Marvel franchise, or Wrestling PPV?

Sure but having a bunch of resources for "defence" is very different from having a bunch of resources for "attack" in most people's mind I imagine.

Yes but right now it’s doing this war. It can’t be anywhere else, so the costs are for this deployment specifically.

Iran probably wouldn't have blown up the $300m radar installation if we hadn't randomly attacked them.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. People here seem to also have no perspective, since it is not in the wheelhouse of most tech people, on the fact that this is all a part of a 40 year strategy (as Netanyahu himself has openly stated) that some refer to as the “the Clean Break Strategy” or the “7 countries in 5 years memo”[1]. It clearly took longer than 5 years, but they definitely tried and even the likes of Hillary “we came, we saw, he died” Clinton was a party of that.

People always squabble over blue team vs red team, never realizing that the whole game is just a ruse to provide a sense of democratic control to placate the public, and also give the apparatchiks if the regime a sense of autonomy, when in fact they’re just all pulling at the same continuity of agenda like beasts of burden, being whipped and rode by a very small group that hold their reins.

[1] https://x.com/wikileaks/status/1819709215352438921?lang=en

> Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain is asking questions, if US can't defend us and is moving all defensive missiles to protect Israel, why should we even be ally with them

Where are you getting this information? The UAE, for instance, is relying heavily on missile defense - and it's working out for them:

https://gulfnews.com/uae/uae-intercepts-186-ballistic-missil...

It's all US technology, too:

https://www.wired.me/story/inside-the-system-that-intercepte...

I think citizens in those countries recognize that allowing a repressive regime to exist simply for cheap oil costs is not necessarily a good solution, either.

> Europe is in trouble because they can't get gas from Russia, Qatar stopped supplying gas

60% of it comes from the US, a lot from northern Africa too, not much comes from the middle east

The disruption in gas supply will be very short. Weeks, at most. The gulf states will be very happy to see the Islamic Republic gone, they are living in its shadow for a long time now. Now, Ukraine and Israel need very different kinds of support, and things like US withholding intelligence from Ukraine have nothing to do with Israel.

NSA (Naval support) Bahrain lost a ground station (maybe two), not a radar.

Possibly. There are a lot of things around that story that seem very off

Aside from the obvious bad AI images floating around the one credible looking video shows a shaheed flying into a radome. A Radome in the middle of a bunch of buildings. You don't put radars in between buildings. And if it's a phased array I don't think it would be in a round Radome either.

They seem to have hit something of value, but don't think it was a 1bn radar

Everything around this smells like the Iran hilariously oversized F35 misinformation

https://www.reddit.com/r/AirForce/comments/1ldffvd/its_confi...

The only footage I've seen is damage to maybe a satellite receiver. Have you seen proof of the radar damage

Given 50 million schoolkids in the US and a cost per meal per child of $4, the current number represents 10 meals. At 1 meal a day that would be 2 school weeks, at 2 meals a day that would be 1 school week.

The question is fundamentally poorly formed, and as a consequence, so is the rebuttal. A state can pay for anything, since it doesn't have to be in a budget surplus.

Household budget analogies emerge any time someone wants to limit spending, or criticize spending, but one of the biggest points of Wealth of Nations (which is the foundation for modern macroeconomics) is that the budget of a state is fundamentally different to that of a household.

If a household fails to maintain its budget, it's game over. People know this, which is why it's a punchy analogy. But it's also a bad analogy.

If a state fails to maintain its budget, it can either print more money or raise taxes. Neither is a great long term fiscal policy, but it's not the end of the world either, and budgetary deficit something most states utilize fairly regularly.

What's missing with the school lunches and present with the Iran War is political will. (I get that is what your point was all along.)

OK, I don't. I wonder if we could set up some sort of legislative system that could debate this on our behalf and make a reasonable plan that accounts for our differing viewpoints.

Do you believe that those goals will be achieved? Given the historical track record of these kinds of interventions, I do not.

Do you really believe killing 175 children[0] will bring peace and prosperity to the Iranian people?

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/world/middleeast/girls-sc...

It's genuinely difficult to see this sort of claim as being an honest statement, given that everyone knows the outcome with Afghanistan and Iraq.

Would you still approve if the cost is 20x, the Iranian people are worse off, and the shipping routes and Middle East are dramatically less safe due to drones?

Because that is a realistic possibility.

Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq, again. Syria. Libya. Iran. Iran, again. Yeah - this is totally gonna work this time.

For Pakistanis as well ?

That is an unrealistic goal.

Likely the actual goal, as dictated by Israel and the Jewish Lobby in the US, is to destabilise Iran long term in a sort of Syria situation, so they cannot threaten Israeli hegemony in the region.

Remember even a non Islamic Iran is still a threat to Israeli power if it remains unified and intact.

Yeah that’s the likely outcome given our track record /s

[flagged]

Defense contractors, the oil companies who get to rebuild, private security, etc. You can do a web search for who profited from the Iraq war. It's mostly all the same. This war also has a religious component to it, as a US combat unit commander has said "the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth": https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-ir...

Iran has been weeks away from a nuke for decades. What evidence is there that they were any closer this time, or that this war was necessary to delay or block their progress?

I'm sorry but this is a braindead take. Trump is exactly a short-sighted .. well not a bean counter since I doubt his ability to count. But short sighted for sure.

Thinking an Iranian nuke is threatening a US city is probably a Fox news talking point, so dogshit by definition.

Exactly. The alternative was to let Iran (while under a suicidal theocratic regime) get nukes? Imagine if Dubai was struck by nukes instead of drones.

Universal healthcare is cheaper than our system of healthcare by a factor of 2 (comparing other OECD countries). If we raised taxes and implemented universal healthcare we’d save about $1T a year.

Cost isn’t the relevant factor, it’s politics. Or more accurately, naked bribery that we, for some insane reason, call “lobbying”.

[flagged]

That’s good. But it seems that the American anti-war discourse is slanted towards the cost of it. Maybe because the whole political spectrum can relate to “our tax dollars”, while (1) the cost for the military personell might not be a concern for all because it is all-volunteer, and (2) some Americans don’t care what happens to people in other countries.

Certainly: American progressives can use this to counter the “fiscally conservatives” (for domestic spending) who are also hawkish.

We can't. That would require a carefully conducted cost-benefit analysis of potential outcomes including the costs and benefits of not starting it, with estimates for short-term (3 years), ten years, and twenty year outcomes. Such a study doesn't exist publicly and there is no way you can convince me it exists at all other than showing it to me with evidence that it was written before the US attacked Iran. It's also not usual to make such analyses because the costs of a human life lost are calculated very differently in each domain and are hard to assess. For instance, 13.7M per life is assumed in airline safety but that's not a figure the military would use.

There's next to no chance that whatever comes out of the end of this will be a "liberal democratic Iran government". Obama started a route in that direction with the lowered sanctions and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action from 2015. Iran having a democratic government doesn't really help the GOP war hawks so of course they trashed it. The same happened with North Korea in the 90s with the Agreed Framework that had some promise before GWB torpedoed it to please his oinking base.

I also think that nuclear powers mean regional stability. Ukraine gave up its nukes in the 90s and we saw what happened there.

> We better get a liberal democratic Iran government out of this.

> We better remove and halt nuclear powers for the rest of my life.

Neither of those things is a guaranteed outcome of this. Depending on who you ask, it's not even a likely outcome.

The IRGC remains the most powerful group in Iran. Probably a military junta is a more likely outcome, plus or minus a civil war to establish it.

Unfortunately, I think "Theocratic Iran with the bomb" is on the "good" side of the distribution of potential outcomes here.

> We better get a liberal democratic Iran government out of this.

I doubt it. US intervention seems to have a habit of creating weakened nations for its rivals to benefit from. In Iraq's case: Iran and in Iran's case maybe the Taliban in Afghanistan.

I'd be happy with the permanent removal of US bases from the Middle East.

The Middle East does not understand Democracy. It will just be another strong man in power. The diaspora is pushing for a new shah

America needs to have never-ending perpetual wars to sustain its own economy. If we woke up tomorrow and there was just world peace, and America got rid of its military budget millions of people would probably instantly lose their jobs.

That's the ultimate reason. They could just as easily declare war against Venus and spend hundreds of billions of dollars sending rocks into space and it would have the same net effect. Actually it would be a bit more positive because to my knowledge nobody's really living on Venus right now.

Because, like Venezuala, they were selling their oil to China, which would allow China to attack Taiwan and take the US's supply of advanced semi-conductors for its weapons and military dominance

Israel attacked Iran and dragged us into the war as per Rubio: https://x.com/Acyn/status/2028573242173366282

"Why?" is the hardest of the questions.

For any particular person, you can tell a story that satisfies "Why?". But for a large number of people, you have to answer "Why?" for one sub-group at a time.

In other words, there's not a single answer that will answer this in a satisfying way.

To answer a different question: It appears that the Israeli government and military wanted to bomb Iran again, and the United States executive branch and military decided to help out. This is an incomplete and unsatisfying answer. Sorry.

To bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Greater Israel project

https://youtube.com/shorts/jFRTZGgmGo4?si=0gYc8JPCzVD_TD__

because when you give someone the keys to the US military to some people, they lack the imagination to think beyond piracy and raiding.

The war in its current inception is Hamas levels of planning.

1. Do a big attack

2. ????

3. Profit!

Depends of if the Iranian state is weak enough to collapse on its own, because I imagine a land assault in Venezuela or Iran would be a horrific mistake due to the terrain.

Christian Evangelicals, war hawks, and a voter base that fell for the "peace ticket" talk.

Distraction

Midterm elections later this year

To occupy media cycles? To start the rapture?

I love that this was downvoted and greyed out. Don't think, don't ask questions. Since when was that part of the hacker ethos?

You're asking dangerous questions, comrade.

because of Epstein tapes and blackmail by Israel

[dead]

[dead]

According to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio yesterday, we are at war because we knew Israel was going to assassinate Iranian leaders and we would be expected to defend them (and our foreign bases) when they go to war, so we might as well go to war right away. 4D chess.

US has tons of interests in the region. This is just as much for america's benefit as it is for Israel's.

Almost all of our representatives have been bought by the Israel lobby. We will spend many billions more, and questioning it will continue to cause people to be labeled as antisemitic.

Israel is seeking a new Memorandum of Understanding now which will guarantee them aid for twice as long as normal (20 years instead of the usual 10).

https://www.stimson.org/2025/a-20-year-mou-with-israel-is-no...

The Israel lobby is the most powerful and feared lobby in Washington. As a politician, getting on their bad side means almost certainly losing your next election. Just look at how much money they are putting into trying to replace Thomas Massie.

Their power and influence has a huge chilling effect on all criticism of Israel, even representatives who represent people who overwhelmingly are against Israel like AOC and Omar, largely remain silent on the genocide and our foreign policy toward them because of this chilling effect.

I highly recommend the book "The Israel Lobby" by Mearsheimer and Walt. It was published in 2007 and detailed this entire thing almost 2 decades ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Fore...

At this point the media apparatus that shaped all these people's brains in the comments here must've cost more than the wars they simp for.

[dead]

Certainly a lot less per day, but regardless, the two wars have very different aggressors. If the US has an argument that Iran was a real threat, it certainly hasn't tried to make it yet. Conversely, Ukraine had no choice about whether to be in a war.

It's easy to be cynical around "righteousness" but morality means something. I hope Americans with any kind of influence or vote are introspecting hard right now on what they feel confortable with.

Ukraine is fighting for democracy, something that US been preaching for centuries, bozo.

It was not set on fire, it was ”invested” in dead Russian soldiers.

He stole María Corina Machado‘s and has the much coveted one from FIFA too.

At this point he could say 'we have always been at war with Eastasia' and his base would uncritically repeat it.

It's not strange, it's perfectly intelligible doublespeak.

Doublespeak

low, if the claims are true iran has 1000ish lbs of 60% uranium.

we shall see