Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?
A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza, is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10th that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.
Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.
By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq’s air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.
In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions, were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.
The US has already depleted a third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3 and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.
So the US is using multi-million dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to interceptShahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500 lb. GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which cost only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.
To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the sixty it already hadstationed in Israel.
The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry, the Pentagon top brass and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.
The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the U.S. armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”
Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms(Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman), whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.
The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.
But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.
Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.
In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.
The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers—not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multi-trillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion—a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech in 1961.
US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were defeated by lightly-armed resistance forces defending their own countries. Yet America’s leaders ignored their own failures and defeats, continuing to blindly climb the escalation ladder—first confronting Russia through the war in Ukraine and now taking on Iran in its own territory.
We should note that it was under Democratic administrations that the US backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and then rejected a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, while Trump, a Republican, assassinated Iran’s top military leader in 2020 and launched wars on Iran, in cahoots with Israel, in 2025 and 2026. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, like the illegal occupation that spawned it, still enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, but not from the American people its members claim to represent.
Many Americans understood the dangers of the United States’ militarized response to the crimes of September 11th, 2001, even before the Pentagon embarked on its spending spree and unleashed mass destruction on country after country.
Chalmers Johnson wrote his prescient and widely-acclaimed book, Blowback, in 1999, explaining how US militarism and imperialism inevitably sow the seeds for cataclysmic events like the 9/11 attacks. He followed it with three more books in his American Empire Project before his death in 2010.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done…We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened.”
By the time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003, international outrage was so widespread that it produced the largest global street protests in history, with up to 36 million people protesting in 60 countries. But US leaders ignored the world’s rejection of their lies, both at the UN and in the streets, and insisted on pretending that Iraq had chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, and was somehow responsible for the crimes of September 11th.
The brainwashing of US occupation troops in Iraq was so complete that, even three years into the war, in February 2006, 85% of US occupation forces in Iraq told a Zogby poll that their main mission there was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
The lies, brainwashing, torture, civilian massacres and other war crimes that have corrupted the last 25 years of American military history—together with the outrageous cost—have turned the American people squarely against more new wars. But incredibly, they have failed to persuade Members of Congress to exercise their constitutional responsibility to stop feeding the out-of-control US military-industrial complex with record amounts of money, weapons and false pretexts for war.
Trump has requested a record $1.5 trillion in military spending for FY2027. The House-passed NDAA authorizes $1.15 trillion in discretionary military spending, with additional funding outside the NDAA bringing the administration’s overall military-spending plan to $1.5 trillion. The Senate has so far blocked its version of the NDAA.
The draft NDAA also includes unprecedented provisions to further integrate US and Israeli weapons production and intelligence sharing.
Trump’s frustration over the US-Israeli failure to defeat Iran stems from the same delusion of US military supremacy that infected his predecessors, especially since the end of the Cold War.
But in his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov warned that huge US investments in aircraft-carriers and other big-ticket warships and warplanes were rapidly being rendered obsolete by a new generation of Russian and Chinese missiles capable of traveling much faster and farther than the most advanced missiles in the US arsenal.
Now Iranian missiles and drones have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Middle East. They have driventhe US military out of its bases in the Persian Gulf and are forcing US aircraft carriers to stay 1,000 miles from the coast of Iran. US Central Command has had to relocate its regional headquarters from Qatar to Jordan, but Iran has attacked it there too.
Now the United States is repositioning more of its forces in the Middle East to Israel. This raises the stakes, and increases the risks, of any future escalation in the war on Iran, and it further expands the entangling US military alliance with the genocidal state of Israel, which most Americans now oppose.
On August 8, Iran reiterated six points from the Memorandum of Understanding that Trump already signed on June 17, and insisted that the United States must comply with them before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping.
Western commentators have described these as tough new conditions, but they are neither new nor tougher than before. They simply make explicit what was already implicit—for example, by specifically mentioning Palestine and Yemen, whereas the original memorandum merely called for ending the war “on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The United States and Israel started this war, and the United States has the power to end it by negotiating in good faith, based on the memorandum it already agreed to.
The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine. Many have paid with their lives, their limbs or their health. All of us pay the opportunity cost of our leaders’ warmongering and reckless squandering of our national wealth, leaving us without the basic support systems that our neighbors in other developed countries take for granted, from universal free healthcare and quality public education to living wages and paid vacation time.
The US government’s corrupt priorities leave our most serious problems unaddressed, while undermining global efforts to address them, from the destruction of the climate and the natural world to the ever-present danger of nuclear war.
As this year’s primary election results suggest, most Americans want a society that cares for its people, with a government that addresses our most urgent needs. That must surely include dismantling this failed, corrupt, out-of-control and absurdly expensive war machine.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors ofWar In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.
Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
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