I remember before the election I read a few people on HN say Trump is the most anti-war president they have ever seen and that all the talk about him letting Israel flatten Palestine was fearmongering. Wonder how they feel now.
I muse on this as well but recently I'm struck that the entire conversation is something of a distraction. Everyone is focused on the current administration, what they're doing right or wrong, contrasting it with Biden, etc.
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.
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.
> > 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.
By the way, this is just the estimate from Pete Hegseth, who has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable narrator. This administration seems to have difficulty with numbers in general, accurate numbers in particular. The real cost is likely twice this, or higher.
For example, roughly 50% of our missile stockpiles have been depleted during this "excursion."
It's so funny to me when the dollars stop being abstract for a moment, and I see that the US has regions that beg for quite literally .2% of this amount to fund things like public transit, lead remediation in elementary schools, or homelessness programs.
Americans will never see a dime of benefit from this war.
For comparison, Iran's annual military budget is somewhere between $7B and $11B [1], representing 2-2.5% of estimated GDP. The US military budget currently exceeds $1T+ and the ask for 2026 is expected to be $1.5T+, representing almost 5% of GDP. And the US simply cannot end this conflict militarily short of the use of nuclear weapons. I don't mean that as hyperbole. I mean it literally.
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.
> 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.
The New York Times has a good piece on the decision process leading to Trump starting the war here: https://archive.ph/20260408044252/https://www.nytimes.com/20... Israel pitched a joint US-Israel operation with the goals of killing Khamenei, damaging Iran's military, starting a popular uprising, and regime change. Trump's advisors told him that the first two goals were achievable but the last two were farcical. Trump was willing to go to war anyway just to establish these two goals. His advisors brought up the difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump thought Iran would surrender before that would become an issue.
Iran's biggest mistake was its insufficient response to the US strikes on the Fordow nuclear site last June. They responded to getting their nuclear program set back significantly by shooting a few missiles at a US base in Qatar with hours of advance warning, most or all of which were shut down. They then accepted Trump's ceasefire proposal the next day. I think this put the idea in Trump's head that Iran was a paper tiger that could be attacked at will with little to no consequence. Even before Venezuela, the US and Israel were planning a follow-up war. Netanyahu visited Trump 3 times in 2025 prior to making his final pitch described in the New York Times article in February. If Iran had responded more forcefully and caused the US some actual pain, I don't think Trump would have chosen to go to war.
For reference, a national 4-week paid parental leave program in the U.S. is estimated to cost under $2 billion annually, while a 12-week program would cost around $7 billion.
All of the jokes about reported Soviet production numbers come to mind. This administration has zero credibility in speaking the truth, especially when the outcome is embarrassing.
- $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.
A problem with your "voice of reason" is the assumption that it will prevent nukes in Iran or the region. The US people have just offered an object lesson in why deterrent weapons are useful. How capricious they are in diplomacy. And how willing Americans are to withdraw boots on the ground in allied countries. Of course most of that won't be surprising to Iranians.
The Iranian embassy in the UK just called for terrorism on UK soil yesterday, and there were terror knife attacks today. The Islamic Republic of Iran has to do Islamic Republic of Iran things no matter what situation they are in.
35 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] threadNow they need to share the cost that we have burdened the world and ourselves with.
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.
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.
* 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...
For example, roughly 50% of our missile stockpiles have been depleted during this "excursion."
Americans will never see a dime of benefit from this war.
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
The New York Times has a good piece on the decision process leading to Trump starting the war here: https://archive.ph/20260408044252/https://www.nytimes.com/20... Israel pitched a joint US-Israel operation with the goals of killing Khamenei, damaging Iran's military, starting a popular uprising, and regime change. Trump's advisors told him that the first two goals were achievable but the last two were farcical. Trump was willing to go to war anyway just to establish these two goals. His advisors brought up the difficulty of securing the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump thought Iran would surrender before that would become an issue.
Iran's biggest mistake was its insufficient response to the US strikes on the Fordow nuclear site last June. They responded to getting their nuclear program set back significantly by shooting a few missiles at a US base in Qatar with hours of advance warning, most or all of which were shut down. They then accepted Trump's ceasefire proposal the next day. I think this put the idea in Trump's head that Iran was a paper tiger that could be attacked at will with little to no consequence. Even before Venezuela, the US and Israel were planning a follow-up war. Netanyahu visited Trump 3 times in 2025 prior to making his final pitch described in the New York Times article in February. If Iran had responded more forcefully and caused the US some actual pain, I don't think Trump would have chosen to go to war.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33279
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.
I do not know what to believe, and I hate it.
- $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.
-
At least $160 from every taxpayer in the US
>$9b per month increase in US oil export revenue
Goes directly to oil companies, taxed minimally if at all.
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
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1wwjLv4fTtLfHLkk2ejOoF?si=7...
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/linda-bilmes