FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
60% Positive
Analyzed from 4382 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#cost#war#billion#iran#more#trump#need#world#https#military
Discussion (92 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Americans will never see a dime of benefit from this war.
And spread death and disaster across the world, making chainsaw man musk the 21st century's bloodiest killer. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
But yes our politicians seem entirely unwilling to do anything about colossal expenditures on this "expedition", while all-too-willingly destroying American institutions. It's an insurrection of the elites; Federalist Society finally getting the destruction of the nation their treasonous tattered souls have lusted for. What a horror show they have us strapped in to.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33279
I guess what matters is that the increase in revenue largely stays within the country, but that doesn’t help consumers directly.
Is the job of a leader (or the administration) to foresee threats before anyone else can see it coming? Is their job to make sure that it does not manifest?
It is interesting that when they does it, the majority is against it, precisely because no one else could see it and can agree with the action of the administration?
So it seems that if someone is a very good leader, they will be ridiculed by the very people they are trying to protect. I think this happens if the unit in question is a family, or a country.
I am not picking sides in the on going crisis. But just making an observation.
China has every incentive to goad Israel or Iran into starting another round in this conflict so that America will deplete even more missiles. Iran destroying one of these[1] and an AWACS should startle everyone and with the right supplies from China Iran has the capacity to take out even more of them.
So if in two months this conflict heats up again and we're looking at half of these radar systems destroyed and minimal amount of missiles available, would you consider it well worth it?
Because that's a very plausible scenario and I'm very concerned about what the world will look like by the end of the summer if that comes to pass.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/TPY-2_transportable_radar#
Remember when multiple US administrations have internally pushed for nuking Korea and Vietnam, and yet we are apparently still allowed to have nukes?
Remember when Iran used to have a fully operational biological weapons program that they have dismantled as confirmed internationally.
Iran has enough Uranium to make bombs. The physics package that actually detonates things is not as hard as enriching Uranium in bulk.
Why hasn't Iran used a weapon of mass destruction yet in this almost existential war? I thought they were nuts? I thought they wanted to nuke all the infidels?
MAD has had its virtues extolled, yet assume it won't work with another country because somehow they are even more irrational (if true). Even though that is exactly for whom the MAD strategy is designed and operates under.
It is only the build up of Iran getting a nuclear weapon that is used to go to war.
The game theory here seems rather simple, honestly.
And if Iran is seen as hostile, we need to look at the countries for whom the USA allies with and what wars they launched in the region. And they are plausible nuclear capable where their neighbors are not.
I think Israel is currently a larger aggressor, literally flattening more towns through demolition.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/29/science/iran-...
Oh wait, that the Trump and his war criminal friends. They make the problem, blame it on someone else, and then claim they fixed it while making life worse for everyone else. Meanwhile Trump and his corrupt oligarch cronies are profiting massively.
You seem to be assuming an always-rational market, run by the mythical homo economicus.
But as they say "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent." You can't infer that a set of decisions is rational just because market participants made them.
(which of course would need to account for the cost to the end user of constant rug-pulling, enshitification, github struggling to maintain one 9 of availability, privacy invasion, rampant mental health issues and political division from profit-based social media, etc)
I mean, they're projecting $750 billion in 2026, and apparently they spent $450 billion on them last year: https://about.bnef.com/insights/commodities/ai-data-center-b....
$25 billion is like six datacenters worth of money: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/how-big-tec.... It's a drop in the bucket.
$25B in a few months is also more than the average annual amount of military aid sent to Ukraine from the US, and the Trump administration considers this to not be a "drop in a bucket" either, and in fact a huge imposition that should not happen at all.
You can have an opinion on whether or not AI/data centers are worthwhile, but ultimately it wasn't made by your money.
"Mission Accomplished"
Operating a carrier group in a theatre is not that much more expensive than just maintaining an operational carrier group.
* https://www.twz.com/air/here-is-what-trumps-gargantuan-1-5t-...
That's $500B more than last year's budget, and:
> > Trump’s budget proposal represents the largest yearly military spending plan in U.S. history, exceeding the previous record of $1.2 trillion during World War II, when adjusted for inflation. And records confirm the DNC’s characterization of the increase being the largest since WWII when inflation is factored in.
* https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/apr/20/democratic...
That request was over a month ago and perhaps based on estimates using an operation tempo that was high. After the initial outburst, things may have slowed down.
That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.
So they were expecting those high tempos to continue for months?
> That said, a lot of missiles were used, which, under current production rates, will take years to replenish: some 'extra' money may be needed to pay for production ramp up to get replacements sooner.
8X is a heck of an expedite fee.
Have any of the not objectives for the not war been accomplished yet?
For any sufficiently large and complex system, you need to keep that assembly line alive to keep the system alive. Part of this is for just replacement parts and general maintenance. Take something like the F35. The engine will only last a certain number of flight hours. Then you need a new engine. That engine will need replacement blades and other parts. The frame and the stealth coating will need maintenance. And then there are all the weapons you fit to the plane and use.
A good example of how this matters is with rockets. Up until SLS, Saturn V was the most powerful rocket ever built and SLS only beats it by "cheating" with 2 solid rocket boosters. People would often ask "if we could build Saturn V 50-60 eyars ago, why can't we just do that again?" It's a fair question and the answer is we no longer have the expertise. All of the people who worked on that are long gone. Some of it was documented. Some wasn't. F5 engines were essentially bespoke. Materials science has changed. It's essentially impossible or just prohibitively impossible to reproduce now.
So back to the $200 billion. The US military has been hit by this kind of problem before where they've bought a weapons system and been unable to maintain it later. Now it essentially has to be documented and the US buys up and stores all the documentation as well as machining tools, etc if they ever have to revive it.
So for a lot of the munitions used in the war, the US has contracted them to a certain replacement rate. In the last year they've been used way in excess of that production rate. Ramping up production is expensive. New factories have to be built. New people need to be trained. And the only way a supplier would do that is if the military essentially pays for it AND guarantees purchasing. So you might end up paying 3x to double production because it doesn't necessarily scale. It's also more expensive to scale something up quickly.
Put another way, this is another $200 billion for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to replenish overpriced weapon systems.
This makes absolutely no sense. The $25 Billion cost would be the cost of all the munitions used, the cost of the actual usage, the cost of all the maintenance, the fuel consumption, the logistics, the wages and hazard pay of all the people involved. So the things you actually need to replace are only a tiny fraction of that number. On top of that, it's still the total. If you were spending $2.5 billion per year for 10 years to build up that stockpile, then $25 billion is already a 10X multiplier to scale back rapidly, on top of the $2.5 billion per year that has already been allocated for the usual production. Further, those are peace time prices. Munitions factories are overbuilt and then run lean during peacetime, increasing per unit cost to justify maintaining everything. Scaling up to larger orders doesn't increase unit prices, it lowers them. There may be some diseconomies of scale as you deal with some growing pains or if you need to go beyond maximum capacity, but it's certainly nothing that's going to balloon the cost 8X+. Finally, building the facilities to produce more quickly would take substantial time anyways, so it's not even advantageous to do so unless you're actually going to need that higher production capacity in the long term.
Right now the munitions cost is estimated at $10 Billion with a replacement time of 1-4 years. Note that only a fraction of the US's inventory was actually used, for example the US used about 1000 tomahawks over the course of the conflict and still has about 2000 in inventory. Obviously every munition you fire is one less round available immediately - if we get into a war with China next week we'll be in a bad spot - but that's not a problem solvable by overspending.
[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
Now they need to share the cost that we have burdened the world and ourselves with.
A market without regulation is not a free market after the first few transactions.
You don't get to point to all the ways you can manipulate a market and cry foul, that's reality. If you want to play with fake markets that can't be manipulated or controlled and don't "need" regulation because competition is perfect, stick to econ 101 and go no further. Real world markets are not efficient.
What you want is well regulated markets, that purposely make it harder to be a big company. "Efficiency of scale" is vastly overrated, and not meaningful to all our IP based economy.
Of course this cost would be distributed over time, and the economic benefits of putting substantial spending money in the pockets of younger adults would have the potential to significantly offset or exceed these costs.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-506_nmip.pdf
Trump-led tax cut policies reduced revenues by ~$1.5 trillion in his first term, and ~$5 trillion in his second term. $800B of PPP loans were forgiven. The oft-cited ICE and CBP budget increases were about $140 billion.
I can't find many other policies championed by Trump that accounted for increases >$200B in increased spending. As a result, there's not really any good 1:1 "Trump is willing to spend $400B on $X but not student loans". Most of his national debt impact has been via tax cuts rather than spending. Where spending did increase in large amounts, it was mostly for the Pentagon, and some % of those increases likely would have occurred under any other administration - so it's hard for me to carve out what Pentagon budget increases were due to his policies vs. the base-case for how much they would have increased otherwise.
I think the best course is to allow students to default on their loans. With backed loans Unis know they’ll get their money one way or the other and keep ballooning their admin costs.
We can do both. We can help people already saddled with debt, and also do things to prevent future generations from being saddled with debt in the first place. People who managed to climb out of the hole (a demographic I am also part of) are the least in need of consideration.
they've spent more than $25 BILLION on just weapons which have to be replaced so it's already twice that number
and for more examples we know now the true cost of militarization since 9/11 was $21 TRILLION
it's at least half the national debt if not more
https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
Remember, beyond the cost of war, every day the cost of gas is +$1 that's another BILLION dollars being siphoned out of the US economy, EVERY DAY
the strait is not opening this year, maybe not even before 2029 at this rate
that's TRILLIONS
time for a windfall profits tax on the US oil industry
- $9b per month increase in US oil export revenue as a result offsets probably 40% of the cost.
- Several trillion (with a 'T") of realized and yet to be realized FDI commitments from gulf states more than offsets cost by about 3x.
- A nuclear Iran carries economic costs I won't detail here to prevent a wall of text. In sum, forces other countries to go nuclear and take other actions to manage risk, and this happens in ways that could severely impact US dollar standing, US debt standing and US military spending. Its an interconnected world.
I know its unpopular to be pro-USA and pro-government on HN, but someone has to be the voice of reason - even if its at the bottom of the page.
-
It's easy, we don't let them have nukes, period. Bombing their underground facilities was absolutely the right thing to do and can be repeated if/when they rebuild. I would go further, finish the job, and insist on complete disarmament of the country.
I personally don’t buy the line of thought that Iran has no such ambitions; YMMV.
Whether this war is effective at stopping that is another question.
Americans like you (I rudely assume) care more about US domestic policies than I do.
Foreigners like me care more about global stability compared to US domestic policies.
European takes are usually the funniest. It's literal racism (as in, one race is better than the other) but it's packaged in such a ridiculous way that you somehow suggest that it's doing others a favor.
For example, roughly 50% of our missile stockpiles have been depleted during this "excursion."
I do not know what to believe, and I hate it.
Now I feel I was wrong and Trump is just averagely warmongering, as US presidents go.
It was also consistent with a broader policy of isolationism shown during his first term. Reducing support for NATO, backing out of trade deals - all consistent with America First and not being the world's policeman, which has been the US's justification for every war in the last 80 years.
I'm not American, so probably have a different perspective on this from Americans. But also that's a reason for me to judge a US president disproportionately more on his foreign policy than on say, healthcare or which bathroom people should use.
Up is always down with these people.
My question is - how did we even reach this point? I understand people didn't like Hillary Clinton and the way they dealt with Biden's age was abysmal when he was in office.
But I have literally never seen anyone express that they wish Clinton had won over Trump back in 2016. I find that really strange.
There are long-term consequences to this war (and the 12 day war last year), namely the depletion of missile defence munitions (eg Patriot, THAAD) that will take years to replenish and this will have ripple effects on allies as well as certain theaters (eg moving THAAD interceptors and radars from South Korea to the Gulf).
Over half of the military budget goes towards weapon systems, arguably incredibly overpriced weapon systems. Put another way, it's a scam to move money from government coffers to private weapons manufacturers.
The inability to open the Strait of Hormuz militarily was not a surprise to US military leadership or intelligence agencies. It was only a surprise to the president (IMHO) who believed he could do a repeat of a Venezuelan decapitation strike. But Iran unlike Venezuela has suffered under reprehensible and unjustifiable sanctions and military adventurism by the US and its proxies such that the entire Iranian national project is built to resist US aggression, understandably. So that was never going to work.
This will have to end diplomatically. It will be worse for the US than it was before this war. Iran has something better than a nuke: it has a nuke they can use (e closing the Strait) and the US forced them to use it and prove that it works.
Now it's just a questio9n of how long this impassse goes on for before it ends and so far at least the US would rather let the world burn than split with Israel. Again without hyperbole I say, splitting with Israel effectively means the end of American empire. And the whole world is suffering for it.
[1]: https://tradingeconomics.com/iran/military-expenditure
Meanwhile Trump also wants to increase the daily allocation of military spending by $1.3B per day, to go to useless and unproductive contractors such as his son, rather than truly effective defense spending.