A PENTAGON official said on April 29 that the war in Iran has cost the United States $25 billion so far. Compare this with 2008, when the US spent roughly $283 billion in one year to fund its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Wars drain a political leader’s treasury. Since time immemorial, wars have placed a heavy toll on public finances, requiring paying soldiers’ wages and paying for horses, swords, arms, and other essential supplies to sustain a military campaign. Wars fought halfway across the globe, such as that in Ukraine and recurring ones in the Middle East, have already counted the costs in billions of dollars in nominal value. This does not even take into account the price tag for maintaining forward operating bases, logistics, fuels for moving military transport, and the deployment of uniformed service personnel.
In the Philippines, military and security forces have fought communist and Moro insurgencies for over half a century, resulting in massive casualties, loss of property, and billions of pesos in economic losses. At least two generations of Filipinos have witnessed the tragedies caused by such conflicts and the displacement of communities. Today, the communist armed movement has waned due to the anti-insurgency campaign of former president Rodrigo Duterte through the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, while the Moro rebellion has entered into an uneasy peace with the establishment of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
The cost of war is not only monetary; it also yields deep political, social, economic and technological consequences. Wars never truly cease, even in peacetime. Resentments linger and would eventually resurface when opportunities emerge to settle old scores. Take World War I, for example. The German nation resented the harsh conditions of the armistice, which helped usher in the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis and led to the outbreak of World War II.
Wars also ruin countries financially and economically, draining taxpayers’ money and causing job-generating businesses to collapse. The most affected are women, children and vulnerable sectors. They experience deep psychological trauma that spills over into the next generation, causing long-term disabilities and mental disorders in the population. Displacement during war is inevitable, resulting in large-scale migration of civilians to safer countries. While governments continue to finance their war efforts, basic needs such as education, health care and social subsidies are sacrificed and often underfunded. Finally, wars have produced the worst kinds of technologies to injure and even kill people — from Gatling guns and chemical weapons to nuclear bombs and hypersonic waves — creating the most brutal weapons ever imagined to annihilate entire civilizations.
The war on Iran has far more losers than victors. The world still reels from surging oil prices that disrupted global supply chains. Over 3,000 Iranians were killed by relentless US and Israeli airstrikes, while oil cargo vessels and US military assets have been attacked by Iran’s missiles and drones. Billions of dollars have already been wiped out due to this war, even as the world is just recovering from the economic ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the highest cost of war is the erosion of our humanity. Several thousand years ago, tribes and kingdoms slaughtered one another for dominance. In our modern times, little has truly changed. Wars have cost us more than what they have promised as strategic victories and secured territories. In fact, wars have only ended up in misery and destruction, without any value to our humanity.
