LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyPresident Donald Trump restarted the Iran conflict with days of missile strikes, and US intelligence officials now estimate the total military cost of the war for the Pentagon could exceed $100 billion, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.
The officials were tracking the total cost of Operation Epic Fury to be in the $50 to $100 billion range at the end of May, dovetailing with confidential congressional estimates putting the costs to date at around $80 billion.
The Trump administration has not disclosed its cost estimates for the Iran war. In June the White House made a request for $88 billion to cover some of the costs of the war, but even that is an undercounting, the people say.
Part of the reason why a final cost is not available is that the Pentagon is still deciding whether to replace all the aircraft destroyed or damaged beyond repair during the conflict, the people say.
If the Pentagon decides not to replace certain aircraft, defense officials have told lawmakers, they will not request money for it—and therefore not factor that into the total cost of the war, the people say.
Presented with a detailed breakdown of this reporting, a War Department official told Inner Loop: “We have nothing further to announce at the moment.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a report on May 20 compiled using only publicly available reporting that the US had lost at least 17 manned aircraft and 25 drones since the start of the conflict.
The CRS report also showed the US had been losing an increasing number of drones, which are not cheap to replace. Among the 25 drones lost was an MQ-4C Triton, a high-altitude Navy surveillance aircraft that costs more than $600 million per airframe.
The cost of repairing US bases in the region, some of which sustained heavy damage from Iran firing retaliatory missiles and one-way attack drones in response to US strikes, will also be high.
Defense officials have told lawmakers behind closed doors they have not accounted for the costs of repair—and may never do so—if the US ultimately decides to shutter those bases because they are too vulnerable to Iranian attacks, the officials say.
Iran has been able to repeatedly hit several key bases in the Middle East in retaliatory strikes, including the headquarters of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet at Naval Support Activity, Bahrain, which the Pentagon has not publicly acknowledged.
The only actual cost provided publicly by a top defense official has been from then acting Pentagon comptroller Jay Hurst, who testified in an oversight hearing in May that the cost of the war had risen to roughly $29 billion.
On Tuesday, at his nomination hearing to permanently become comptroller, Hurst declined to provide an updated figure but said the $29 billion was mainly munitions and the costs like fuel associated with having two US aircraft carriers steaming around the Middle East.
The Trump administration on Tuesday launched a clearinghouse that will try to identify and patch any software vulnerabilities before malicious actors can hack them with the most powerful AI models.
An administration official told Inner Loop the clearinghouse, named “Gold Eagle,” will be run by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which will itself use AI models that are not publicly available, to identify vulnerabilities.
It marks the first major implementation of Trump’s June 2 executive order that aims to create a framework to oversee the rapidly growing threat of advanced AI models.
But the bigger test for the administration is yet to come: The executive order also requires officials to build a classified benchmarking process to assess AI model capabilities before their release—and whether the models are subject to restrictions.
That second step is significant because, to date, the administration has regulated the AI industry by requiring companies like Anthropic to throttle the capabilities of its most powerful models such as Mythos for public use.
Within the next six to 12 months, industry experts believe China will catch up in the AI race and start publicly releasing models that are equally powerful but are not answerable to the US government. It remains unclear how the administration intends to stop bad actors from using those models to try to hack into sensitive systems.
This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
