About $127 billion over the four years the war has gone on. Was a good investment in promoting peace and freedom in the world as far as I’m concerned. Of course, that’s before we de-sanctioned Russian oil & tossed their war machine a lifeline. Yep. 5D chess. 😐

Oh, and in case you were curious, estimates range between $20 and $30 billion for what’s been spent in the first MONTH of the Iran war. Of course, that doesn’t consider intangibles like American lives lost or forever changed by wounds suffered in the conflict, the impossibility of replacing out of production aircraft like F-15Es, KC-135s, and E-3s, the fact that we have far outpaced precision ordinance production with the massive amount we have expended, or the fact that we have taught Iran that our bases are vulnerable to $25,000 drones and that they can shut down the straight whenever they like. Then we can talk about the inevitable costs of keeping a force in the region indefinitely to ensure the peace once the dust settles.

Feel free to keep doing you (I have little doubt you will), but I very much prefer the approach where we support a nascent democracy and gut an adversary’s ability to threaten its neighbors with zero direct involvement or lives at risk vs. the one where we Leroy Jenkins our way into an ill conceived and poorly planned operation that leaves American servicemen dead and wounded, depletes our military’s resources exponentially, blows up the world economy, and leaves our enemies in a better strategic position than when we started.

But, hey, that’s just me.