The Duhpartment of Duhfense.

The cost of prosecuting the war against Iran has risen to $47 billion, according to the most recent estimates. That’s $40 billion more than Iran’s entire official defense budget. So there’s that. But there’s a deeper question about U.S. military spending that goes woefully under-examined. Namely, how much do we actually spend on a military that can’t seem to dislodge the leadership of a country that spends less on its military than we spend on the Head Start program?

Turns out, this is more difficult to answer than you might think.

In my discussion with Nick Hanauer from Pitchfork Economics on Phone A Friend this week, we talked about the need to fundamentally reimagine our economic system. He has spent the past few years working with economists around the world to develop a framework called market humanism, where we stop evaluating the health of our economy by traditional standards like GDP and start measuring it on outcomes that provide the greatest benefit to the most people. It’s a worthwhile discussion because we’ve been talking about this for a while now. It’s not enough to criticize the capitalist system or bitch and moan about neoliberalism. In this post-neoliberal era, where oligarchs rule and our tech overlords seek the end of democracy, it’s time to question everything.

But questioning is one thing. Proposing a new way forward is quite another.

So we’ve been focusing on policies the Democratic Party should adopt as tentpole ideas to score quick but extremely meaningful wins, because we’ve kind of forgotten what those look like. To deprogram the public’s mindset about public delivery of core services like energy, healthcare and education, it’s incumbent upon us to show what’s possible. But these discussions always wind up facing the same question: how will we pay for it?

Republicans and moderate Democrats look at the budget and offer up the poor, the working class and the elderly. Progressives hold up the military budget. Of course, this is met with a flurry of obstacles and outrage. Cutting the military is dangerous! Is it? It’s unpatriotic! Why? It leaves us unprepared! For what? At this point the conversation gets pretty racist, so let’s stop there and start really answering some questions.

First off, no one actually knows how much we spend on the military and defense. But it’s in the budget, right? Not really. And this is the first big surprise.

The number you usually hear is about a trillion dollars a year. That’s the Pentagon’s line. But military spending is scattered across the entire federal government, and the Project On Government Oversight recently ran the numbers five different ways. Every method landed between $1.5 and $1.8 trillion for fiscal 2025. Count the interest we pay on the money we borrowed to fund it, and the range jumps to between $1.7 and $2.3 trillion. The spending runs through 18 different agencies. Veterans Affairs alone was nearly $390 billion. Nuclear weapons sit inside the Energy Department.

And that’s before the $1.5 trillion military budget Trump wants for 2027.

There’s another problem. The Pentagon can’t tell you where the money went either. Last December, it failed its eighth consecutive audit. It is the only one of the government’s 24 major agencies that has never passed one. Auditors couldn’t even verify the existence of the spare parts pool for the F-35, a program projected to cost more than $2 trillion over its lifetime.

So think about this spending in three buckets. The past: caring for veterans and paying interest on wars we’ve already fought. The present: the war in Iran, paying people, maintaining equipment. And the future: preparing for the next war. Then ask what we got for each.

Start with the past. Iraq was long, expensive and disastrous. We destabilized the region and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In September, 23 years after shock and awe, the last American troops left. Iran and its allies celebrated our departure, and much of the country is now an Iranian stronghold. We went into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban. After $2.3 trillion and more than 176,000 people killed, we handed the keys back to the Taliban. In anything we’d call a hot war, we’ve been pretty unsuccessful since World War II. Good thing we won the Cold War. So the past cost us money, prestige and lives, both American and foreign.

As for the present...well, we’re getting our asses handed to us. Twenty-three American service members have died in the Iran war, and 865 have been wounded. Stephen Semler counts 85 US military aircraft lost and another 26 damaged in the first seven months alone, including an estimated 64 MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Air Force called the Reaper the war’s most valuable player. Then it lost a third of the fleet. More than $29 billion of the war’s price tag is bombs, missiles and interceptors. The Congressional Budget Office says we’ve probably used half to two-thirds of our missile defense interceptors, and replacing them will take at least five years.

As for the future, that’s where things get even more interesting. We have the most expensive military on earth by a mile, nearly three times China’s. And yet we’ve burned through our munitions defending Israel, bombing Iran and arming Ukraine. Now we’re behind on the next great battleground: Drones.

The math is killing us. Defending against a missile or drone costs far more than launching one. Iran sends cheap Shahed drones, and we answer with interceptors that cost millions apiece. The Navy has spent decades promising lasers would fix this. As Spencer Ackerman points out, the only one deployed tops out at 60 kilowatts. Stopping a real threat takes about a megawatt.

So the Pentagon is scrambling to build its own cheap drones. The acting director of its innovation unit told Bloomberg we’re starting from “basically zero.” The goal is 250,000 drones by the end of next year. Russia is expected to build 7.3 million this year. In the first round of the Pentagon’s drone program, 11 companies got $150 million to deliver 30,000 drones in five months. By mid-September, only three had filled their orders.

Those drones cost about $5,000 each. A single Reaper costs about $24 million. That’s more than 4,700 cheap drones for every Reaper we lost over Iran.

So let’s pull this together.

We’re dramatically undercounting what we spend on defense. Nuclear weapons sit in the Energy Department. Veteran care is spread across agencies. We never fully attribute the interest on our debt to the military, because we spend as much in so-called peacetime as we do at war. And when the Pentagon needs money that never hits its books, it doesn’t bother asking. For military pensions and retiree healthcare, the defense secretary simply “directs the Secretary of Treasury to make the payments,” and the Treasury does it. Budget expert Winslow Wheeler says that keeps nearly $100 billion a year off the Pentagon’s books. That’s how you land closer to $2 trillion a year than the already preposterous $1 trillion.

We’re addicted to spending. And we aren’t very good at war. A country that spends less on its military than we spend sending poor kids to preschool is kicking our ass with drones. So now we’re building drones. Are we going to build 2 trillion fucking dollars worth of them?

Meanwhile, outside of Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the United States hasn’t faced a serious foreign attack since the War of 1812. We’re pretty well insulated from the rest of the world. Although we should keep an eye on the Canadians these days, because they’re pretty pissed.

Which brings us back to Nick, and to GDP. Every dollar the government spends on jets, missiles and contractors counts toward GDP. In other words, a big chunk of our corporate sector thrives on government cheese. That’s where this becomes a choice. We are choosing to prop up entire industries and individual corporations that exist to collect military contracts, many of which might cease to exist without Uncle Sam’s largesse. Talk about fucking socialism.

Now imagine if we treated shelter and energy the way we treat so-called defense.

We’ve lost or damaged more than 100 aircraft fighting Iran. Iranian drones and missiles have hit at least 84 infrastructure sites across seven Gulf states. And there’s no reliable defense against a nuclear warhead on an ICBM. That’s science fiction. So what invasion are we preparing for? Who’s coming?

If they want to pick winners and losers in this very uncapitalistic free market, fine. Let’s pick.

Cheap drones over overpriced fighter jets? Cool. Pour the savings into public ownership of the energy grid and cut what ratepayers pay. Aircraft carriers built for wars from 50 years ago? Decommission them, and send their maintenance and replacement budgets to American solar manufacturers. Subsidize the shit out of them. The roughly 750 bases we keep in some 80 countries and territories, staffed with highly trained engineers and service members? Close them, bring our people home and put them to work building resilient infrastructure coast to coast. High-speed rail, baby. Shore up the levees. Use our best and brightest to build things for us. That’s America First, amirite?

Fully fund community hospitals to absorb the people who get laid off from insurance companies once we pass Medicare for All. And ban private equity from owning them. That one actually saves us money.

And the best part? Our precious GDP stays intact. We can still spend $2 trillion on defense, if you want to call it that.

The neoliberal era taught us to stop questioning how we allocate money. The people in charge kept warning that we’d run out, then proved that’s not really a thing every time they funded another war. In this bridge period between neoliberalism and whatever comes next, we get to write the script. We can choose our own winners. Fewer Lockheed Martins, more First Solars. Or we can keep bombing countries with expensive munitions while hackers pick apart our fragile energy grid, and drone operators in caves take out our jets on giant warships and bases in the middle of nowhere.

That’s also a choice. It’s a terrible choice, backed by decades of data and eight failed audits. But it’s a choice nonetheless.