Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is asking Congress for a record amount of money, $1.5 trillion, as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran continues. What do those taxpayer dollars pay for?

Guests

Connor O’Brien, senior defense reporter at POLITICO.

Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, which is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I    

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee this month. He offered his latest estimate on the cost of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran.

PETE HEGSETH: The estimate we have as of today is 37.5 billion.

CHAKRABARTI: $37.5 billion. The Trump administration is also asking for $90 billion in supplemental funds for the war.

HEGSETH: The military requires a generational investment to deliver on peace through strength. We know the best way to create peace is to prepare for war, to deter it, and that’s exactly what the Department of War is doing, building a force so capable that it would be absurd for anyone to challenge it.

CHAKRABARTI: Hegseth portrayed the U.S. Armed Forces as at the top of its game, but sorely in need of support to sustain, quote, “military readiness” and quote, “accelerate critical capabilities.”

HEGSETH: If we don’t make critical investments right now in tech, in compute, in AI, in autonomy, in space, our adversaries who are already making these types of investments could outpace us. Without these funds, we face critical shortfalls that threaten our ability to also simply pay our service members, rapidly replenish equipment and munitions, and sustain vital operations without disruption.

CHAKRABARTI: The secretary also asserted that the money Congress could provide will be put to good use.

HEGSETH: Rest assured that every dollar appropriated to the Department of War will be focused on building the lethality of our joint force and reinforcing peace through strength. As I have said before, not fully funding this department, the Department of War, and we know what that means, that means $1.5 trillion, given the world that we live in and the disaster of what the Biden administration budgets gave us.

Not funding this department at $1.5 trillion, I believe, is the greatest threat that our nation faces.

CHAKRABARTI: We will talk about that $1.5 trillion proposed Pentagon budget, that’s the proposal from the Trump administration, a little later in the show. That’s separate from the $90 billion supplemental that’s currently on the table.

There is vocal doubt amongst Democrats, and now a number of Republicans, about continuing funding for a war that seems to have no concrete aim or end. Quote, “Collectively, those of us in Congress are worried about the costs associated with the Department of War and the transparency.” End quote. That was Senator Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican, and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis told The Hill about Secretary Hegseth that, quote, “He’s got a massive insecurity complex. He has a lack of experience in large organizations. He micromanages too much. He’s lost my confidence.” End quote. And West Virginia Republican Shelley Moore Capito told News Nation.

CAPITO: I do think that the American public’s growing weary. Senator Justice and I represent the same folks. We can feel that in our local conversations. And I do thin, a promised shorter endgame has now been timeline’s been exceeded. We’ve lost four of our service members. That is always devastating to Americans and American families, not just those most closely affected.

And I think that’s where you begin to see the weariness creep in.

CHAKRABARTI: And at the appropriations hearing, New Hampshire Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen put it bluntly.

Why are you asking the American people to absorb the cost of a war they don’t support? Joining me now is Connor O’Brien.

He’s senior defense reporter at Politico, and he follows the defense budgeting process closely. Connor, welcome to the show.

CONNOR O’BRIEN: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: All right. So first let’s stay focused for a moment on that $90 billion supplemental. What exactly is Secretary Hegseth or the Pentagon saying that they need that money for?

O’BRIEN: Yeah, the Pentagon is doing, the Trump administration is trying to do two things simultaneously. They want, as you covered pretty thoroughly, this $1.5 trillion budget. That would be for the coming fiscal year. But the Pentagon’s argument is right now they have a hole in their budget this current year right now due to the kind of torrid pace of operations in the Middle East.

But presumably, there’s also some cost that was imposed by the operations in the Caribbean and in Venezuela as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Can I just jump in here for a second? Because so this current hole, as you say, being caused by the war in Iran and those military operations in the Caribbean, but just remind me, this is a current hole in a budget that had been passed, a defense budget that had been passed that was, what?

Close to a trillion dollars?

O’BRIEN: Yeah, between the regular spending process that Congress appropriates money for and the Trump administration and Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill, which added about $150 billion to the Pentagon, the Pentagon has about $1 trillion dedicated to it for this year, and they haven’t spent all of that, a point that that some Democrats made in that hearing.

But yes, the argument that the Pentagon is making is that they do need this money very quickly, or the military services will face budget shortfalls where they’ll have to make trade-offs to basically cover the costs of these operations.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so some of those trade-offs being, we heard Secretary Hegseth in some of the tape in the open saying without the supplemental, they may face a problem in even paying servicemen and women.

That was news to me. Do you know more about that?

O’BRIEN: We’ve seen some public testimony. The most the most specific thing I have heard in these kind of public hearings has been from the Navy, where the Chief of Naval Operations, said that right around this timeframe, I forget exactly when the hearing was, but this spring said that in the July timeframe, they would run out of funding for certain accounts because of these operations.

They’ve obviously been dedicating a lot of resources to the Middle East. A couple aircraft carriers, a very big presence in the region. And basically, what they said was that they might have to curtail some personnel related things. So some training operations, some recruitment and retention efforts in order to finance the operations related bill.

So the basic conundrum they’d be in is they have to make some trade-offs and the question I think is how much pain that may cause. And again, Democrats pointed out that the One Big Beautiful Bill maybe roughly half of the $150 billion that was given to the Pentagon hasn’t been spent so far.

And so critics of the war who don’t support financing a war that they oppose have pointed to the Pentagon and said, “You’ve got tens of billions on the side here. Why can’t you repurpose that for this?” So that’s been an argument as well.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me follow up on that because as you said, Democrats had asked Secretary Hegseth about that.

I think there was a moment particularly where Senator Chris Coons was like, “Oh, you do know how you’re gonna spend this money that hasn’t been spent yet?” That was news to him. Can you tell me a little bit more about that, Connor? So there has been a lot of consternation even among defense hawks who supported that extra pot of money for the Pentagon.

So the One Big Beautiful Bill passed roughly a year ago, a little bit over a year ago, and it had tax cuts, it had border enforcement money, but it also very key had this $150 billion in extra funding for the Pentagon, which is what got them to this trillion-dollar threshold that we’ve been talking about.

And it was earmarked for a lot of things, building, fielding emerging technology, drone and counter-drone a variety of different things that kind of the Pentagon sees as priorities.

But, even among on that committee, on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Republicans have been pretty vocal that the process that was used to allocate that money, which is called reconciliation, which if folks out there have heard that before, it’s what was used to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill, complex budget process that circumvents the Senate’s filibuster requirements.

So you don’t, one party can basically pass it if they have majorities in both chambers of Congress and the White House, and that’s why that process was used.

Even appropriators though have argued that was not really the ideal process and the chair of that committee, Susan Collins, one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, the top defense appropriator on the Republican side, Mitch McConnell, who is not at that hearing while he’s hospitalized, but has been, both of them have been kind of critics of using that process because they argue it keeps them, when they’re supposed to have a tight grip on the purse strings, in the dark on how that money is being spent and really gives the power of spending that money to the Pentagon rather than Congress.

And we’re kind of seeing that tension as the White House pushes Republicans to use that budget process again for even more money. So we’re going to see that play out, and we are seeing that play out in the Senate right now, where there’s a lot of unease, even among Republicans who want more defense spending.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, got it. So going back to some of the other specifics that Secretary Hegseth told the Appropriations Committee that they need, again, we’re still just talking about the supplemental. We haven’t even gotten to that proposed $1.5 trillion which we will in a couple of minutes. But there’s been, obviously a lot of discussion around restocking munitions that have been used in Iran thus far, operations and maintenance, as you talked about, drones, you’d mentioned, and some classified programs which they can’t tell us more about.

We’ve got about 20 seconds before our first break, Connor. Take the temperature of the Senate right now. Do you think that that the money is likely to come through?

O’BRIEN: It’s got a real tough road ahead. John Thune, the majority leader, has been very cool to a proposal, a kind of a first draft that passed the House this month.

And the thing he’s noted is his defense people want more money so they’re going back and forth with the White House right now. White House officials are supposed to meet with Republicans to talk this over, and I think that’s gonna be one of the big things they discuss.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let me bring into the conversation now Lindsay Koshgarian. She’s program director of the National Priorities Project, which is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Lindsay, welcome back to the show.

LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN: Hi, Meghna. Glad to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, I want to just play a little bit more. We’ve got a lot of clips from this Appropriations Committee hearing where senators are trying, actually, from both sides of the aisle, are trying to get some clarity on why the Pentagon is asking for this additional vast sum of money.

So here’s Democratic Senator Patty Murray from Washington State, who asked Secretary Hegseth if he could explain the connection between some of the items requested in the proposal. I suppose it’s the budgetary proposal, and the proposal itself.

PATTY MURRAY: Why exactly are billions of dollars more for the National Guard and this administration’s illegal strikes in the Caribbean urgently needed for the Iran war?

HEGSETH: Senator, I wouldn’t of course agree with your characterization, but why this kind of spending is needed is because of the gross negligence and neglect of the Biden administration inside our department. Ran it like a bureaucracy, abandoned our strength posture around the world, so we’re having to reestablish deterrents.

Just to, you mentioned the end strength numbers, and I will acknowledge that we are ahead of schedule on end strength in recruiting. 8,000 in the Navy, 6,000 in the Army, 4,000 in the Air Force. Because under President Trump, there’s been record and historic, over 30-year recruiting records inside our department since he won the election because the American people didn’t wanna sign up for what Joe Biden was providing our military.

CHAKRABARTI: You hear Senator Murray there trying to come back in over Secretary Hegseth to try and get some clarity on that answer.

Lindsay just your thought, do you see some kind of, I don’t know, meshing of priorities? Not merely meshing, but confusing of priorities? In this case Senator Murray asked about National Guard funding and why that’s being tied to funding for the Iraq War. I’m sorry, excuse me. Forgive me, the Iran War.

KOSHGARIAN: Right.

It’s an excellent question. I think the approach right now that the Department of Defense and Hegseth seem to have is they’re asking for money for everything and the kitchen sink. And so it’s a terrific question. Of course, it sidesteps the whole question of the legitimacy of the Iran war in the first place, but we know that the administration spent last year about $1 billion on National Guard occupations of cities.

We know that according to work that we did or we’re a part of that they’ve spent, it looks like $5 billion, and probably more than that now on the Caribbean. And so these are real expenditures, and the legitimacy of these things is under question. And it’s telling, I think, that Secretary Hegseth didn’t really address those questions.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let’s hear a little bit more from Senator Murray’s time questioning Secretary Hegseth. And so she basically keeps pushing him to explain how statements he’d made to the Appropriations Committee in the past could be squared with the current requests.

MURRAY: How is it possible if their capabilities were, quote, “functionally destroyed” three months earlier, as you claimed, for them to be doing this now?

HEGSETH: Senator, Iran is at the weakest point militarily it has ever been in in the past decade. Certainly, maybe in 47 years, as they’ve gathered effectively a terror army. And that terror army was built to try to create conventional capabilities to defend against a pursuit of nuclear weapons, which meant thousands of ballistics missiles, many of which we have destroyed, others of which they have put inside facilities and hidden in underground facilities.

That’s what terror regimes would do. So I acknowledge they still have capabilities, no doubt. But the amount of damage that we’ve done to them over the course of these series of operations has put them in the worst place they’ve ever been. 

CHAKRABARTI: Connor O’Brien, I’d like to turn to you on this one. Senator Murray there asking a lot of questions I think many of the American people have. Tell me more about what you’ve been hearing on the Hill about, I suppose particularly from Democrats, on wondering what exactly is the state of affairs in Iran right now, and therefore what should be funded?

O’BRIEN: It’s been a thing that’s been talked about in the I guess we’re now at five months of the war. And there’s a general sense among lawmakers that they really haven’t been kept in the loop on this conflict. And it extends to the funding for this war, and that’s actually a bipartisan complaint.

When this request went up to the Hill at the end of last month there was a bipartisan briefing in the House among the House Appropriations Committee, I’m sorry. And on a bipartisan basis, those members whose job it is to allocate federal dollars came out and said they didn’t have enough information.

Even the ones who, even the members who wanted to pass this money and pass it very quickly were of the opinion that they were short on information from the Pentagon about how exactly they want to spend it. And that’s been a writ large complaint not just with regard to Iran, but with just Pentagon congressional relations in general, that there isn’t the lack of, that there is a lack of basic information to Congress.

And we’ve seen complaints from top members of Senate Armed Services Committee, House Armed Service Committee, both parties. And on the war generally speaking, the complaints, particularly most notably from Democrats are that there has not been a defined end game, and there hasn’t, and the objectives haven’t been well-defined by the Trump administration. And we’ve seen those complaints as well among Republicans of not as vociferous and many of them not as willing to cross the administration, I think, publicly.

But we’ve seen some misgivings about how this has dragged out. And it could, and I think that reflects that it’s going to weigh on the party headed into the midterms in just a few months.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, so Lindsay, help us here with a little bit of context.

This repeated complaint from members of Congress about to put it bluntly, a lack of transparency, as Connor was describing, from the Pentagon on how money is being spent during wartime. How does that compare to communications from the Pentagon in previous wars of the past?

Is this something different, or is this kind of so par for the course for how the Defense Department sort of operates when it’s asking for money for an active, military engagement?

KOSHGARIAN: It’s a bit of both, I would say. There’s definitely been less transparency from this Pentagon than from some previous Pentagons in terms of just reporting on actual dollar amounts or actual figures.

There’s certainly less of that now. But I would say that the larger sort of picture of what you heard Hegseth saying earlier about, we’re about to win this war, or we really, we’ve already won, but we just need to do a little bit more, and that’s very familiar from the 20-plus years that we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was a constant story of success is right around the corner if we just keep pushing a little bit longer.

And we all know how that turned out. So I think the larger lesson here is one that I would have hoped that Secretary Hegseth and other folks leading the Pentagon would have learned. But certainly, I hope that the folks in Congress will have the wisdom to learn, to have learned that lesson after so long, and to really not let Secretary Hegseth and the Pentagon off the hook for this.

They really need to hold them accountable to what is going on here. Not just the question of what are their goals and what’s the end game. Those are legitimate questions, and I think that haven’t been answered, but was this a legitimate war to begin with?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Lindsay this is so interesting to me because it’s not just how the Pentagon behaves when it comes to budgeting during wartime, right?

The last time we had you on the show, this whole issue of the defense budget became an obsession of mine, because we talked about how the Pentagon has not yet passed a single audit. So in non-wartime years, it cannot even say with clarity what it’s spending money on. So in a sense, this is just par for the course, right?

KOSHGARIAN: It’s true. Just for the backstory on that, Congress, way back in the early ’90s, passed a law that said that agencies have to be able to pass an audit. Seems common sense, right? And since then, every major federal agency has done so, has passed an audit, except the Pentagon, which has failed now going on eight years in a row to pass an audit.

And that’s not saying the money is spent well, if you pass your audit. It’s just saying you know where the money went. And so when they fail the audit, it means they don’t even know, they don’t know where the money went. They don’t know where their assets are. And so it’s a huge problem.

And that’s something that Congress has tried to hold them accountable, but not that much. And when you see the budget going up from, we just hit a trillion dollars this year for the first time, and now they’re asking for 1.5 trillion, a huge increase, and it’s just, it seems like the accountability problems will just grow.

I don’t think I can point to another department in the United States federal government that is receiving or asking for a 50% increase in its budget. It’s quite remarkable.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay Lindsay and Connor, let’s go back to some of the questions that Secretary Hegseth faced at that appropriations committee hearing.

I had mentioned Democratic Senator Chris Coons a couple of minutes ago. He’s of Delaware. And again he kept coming back to this issue of how can Secretary Hegseth ask for more money in the form of the supplemental when his department supposedly, when the Pentagon supposedly had yet to spend money it was given in the previous budget cycle?

COONS: You’ve been asked repeatedly, there’s $75 billion appropriated but unobligated. Can we really not avoid critical short-term shortfalls? What does that mean about the budget management within the department in terms of unexpected and unbudgeted wars?

First, Operation Southern Spear and then Operation Epic Fury.

HEGSETH: I would just note I was updated, 95% of that One Big Beautiful Bill funding will be allocated by the end of September in accordance with congressional intent. So these are things we said we would spend and we told you we would spend them on and we plan to spend them on those things by the end of September.

So this is a new request based on new realities of a world we face, stepping up to meet that moment.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then here is Senator Jeanne Shaheen, again, Democrat from New Hampshire, continuing on that line of questioning about where has the money gone.

SHAHEEN: And at what point do you stop asking Americans to foot the bill for a war they don’t support on top of an inflated budget request and billions in reconciliation funds that you still haven’t spent?

HEGSETH: Senator, I obviously don’t agree with your characterization of that. But ultimately, I appreciate that, but you didn’t ask —

SHAHEEN: But I want you to answer my question. I know you don’t agree with my characterization. I don’t agree with yours either.

HEGSETH: One of the reason I do, I take issue with that characterization is something that Senator Durbin said when he talked about Ukraine and he talked about winning.

And I appreciate as much as anybody winning a war, but I sit in front of a committee that wants to talk about winning a war that’s been going on for four years and talks about strategic defeat of a conflict that’s been going on for four months to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. I would hope for some perspective in this town of the historic nature of what President Trump is undertaking. Do you want radical Islamists to have a nuclear bomb who can scare down the world?

I don’t want, I don’t want to hear your speech because I have limited time.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let’s get to the $1.5 trillion budget request.

Again, that’s separate from the $90 billion that we were talking about a moment ago. Connor, can you just give us a brief roundup as to why the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense are saying that the United States military needs a 50% increase in its next budget?

O’BRIEN: The numbers are quite staggering when you think about it. $1 trillion was in, at least in I think nominal terms, a record. And so we’re talking about another essentially 50% increase on top of that. So it’s a very staggering figure.

And this has, there have been defense hawk Republicans who’ve pressed the administration on, for a, I believe one of the clips of Secretary Hegseth had him saying the term generational investment. You’ve heard that from a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill about the need for a generational investment, a buildup now to be able to, you know, buy the weapons, the technology that’s needed to, you know, for the future.

And so that’s kind of where this push comes from. I would say that first off, they again split this request into two pieces. $1.15 trillion is a number we’re gonna hear a lot about because that is the amount that the administration wants through the annual appropriations process, the regular process through funding government. But again, they want to use the reconciliation process, which bypasses Democratic opposition for another $350 billion to complete that $1.5 trillion total.

CHAKRABARTI: Gotcha. And I would say, can I just turn to Lindsay? I’m sorry Connor for interrupting, but let me just turn to Lindsay for a moment. About this generational investment, we actually had a On Point listener call us and say hey, that actually makes sense because the war in Iran, the war with Iran is actually showing perhaps the military’s not quite, the U.S. military isn’t quite prepared to engage in another modern war in the future if it has to with, say, China over Taiwan.

That now what we have seen is that we do need to invest more in AI, the in compute, as the secretary calls it, in drones, et cetera, and that will require this giant flood of money to catch up to where the military should be for future conflict. What do you think about that, Lindsay?

KOSHGARIAN: I think that we’ve been told a story now for a long time in this country about sort of the nature of war and how wars can be won, and this idea that they can be won quickly and decisively has been disproven time and time again.

The United States military budget for many years has been about the size of the next 10 countries combined. Pushing it up to $1.5 trillion would push it up to, in inflation adjusted terms, higher than it was at the peak of World War II. And that war was also not won quickly and decisively.

That’s not actually how wars are won. And so I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding that we’ve been sold from kind of the highest levels in our country for a very long time about what the reality here can be.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I just want to play some more from the Appropriations Committee.

This is a slightly longer exchange, but it’s pretty revealing. So here’s New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat. She also pushed the secretary to account for how the money’s being spent, especially when the Trump administration is not supporting and even cutting other domestic programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: You are asking for unlimited money for bombs when people can’t feed their families, and I don’t know how this administration intends to defend those decisions to the American people.

HEGSETH: Not unlimited bombs, Senator. I’m asking for the right bombs at the right time to ensure we can deter our adversaries into the future, and that’s why this is a generational investment.

(CROSS TALK)

GILLIBRAND: … Secretary Hegseth, the reason why people are so upset … the reason why they are so upset with you and this administration is because the words you have used in the past don’t add up About Iran specifically, you said that we had obliterated, quote unquote, “Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.”

The president made the same claim. Yet eight months later in February of 2026, the president launched an act of war claiming Iran was within two weeks of having a weapon. So when you say two very different things, the American people don’t know who to believe or what to believe. They just know they can’t afford their healthcare, they can’t afford their food, they can’t afford housing, and our farmers are continuing to suffer.

So which is true? Was it obliterated or wasn’t it? What’s the status?

HEGSETH: The nuclear sites under Midnight Hammer were obliterated, but Iranians foolishly continued to attempt to pursue nuclear capabilities, which is why we destroyed their defense industrial base —

GILLIBRAND: Okay.

(CROSSTALK)

HEGSETH: And on so many of the other capabilities to ensure they can’t get to a nuclear weapon. See, we’re staying laser focused on the objective, and you’re trying to make campaign commercials.

CHAKRABARTI: So Lindsay Koshgarian, let me turn back to you here. Can you put this $1.5 trillion request kind of in perspective with how much the federal government spends on other things?

I think sometimes the numbers get so big that it’s hard to really, see the bigger picture here.

KOSHGARIAN: Yes, absolutely. But I do think Senator Gillibrand started to get at it, which is that Secretary Hegseth’s job is to run the Pentagon. He doesn’t need to worry about other programs. But folks in Congress do.

They need to worry about the entire budget. And the American people need to worry about the entire budget. So what Secretary Hegseth wants for the Pentagon does have to be held against all the other priorities. And the big bill that we keep talking about that was passed last year, yes, it poured money into the Pentagon, some of which has not been spent and is still available for the things that they say they need.

But it also cut Medicaid. It also, which is going to result in millions of people losing their health insurance. It cut food stamps, which has already resulted in about four million people losing their benefits under that program. And this is all happening at a time when costs are still historically high.

There is an affordability crisis. Prices for things like gas and food are rising because of the Iran war, and so people are really struggling. And the idea that we should pour $500 billion into the Pentagon and just for context, restoring the cuts to Medicaid would take about $90 billion a year, and restoring the cuts that were made to food stamps would take about less than $20 billion a year.

So these are actually quite small expenses compared to the amount of money that it- they’re asking for the Pentagon. And there are so many other things we could do. Medical debt in this country is a huge problem, leads to bankruptcies. That’s about $250 billion. We could use half of this $500 billion they’re asking for and wipe out medical debt once, entirely.

So the other possibilities here are really something that we need to consider when we’re talking about pouring this huge historic amount of money in. And, especially when the aims of this war are so dubious to begin with.

CHAKRABARTI: And there’s also this other issue about even the senators seem and not just senators, but of course congressmen and women in the House seem really focused on immediate costs, right?

And immediate funding requests from the Pentagon. Whereas, as you mentioned earlier, Lindsay, the truth about how war is waged, there are long-term accruing costs that come, especially when we have to do things like replenish munitions, which isn’t you don’t just make some bullets overnight.

We’re talking about highly sophisticated technological systems that can’t just be made in a month. It takes years. And to that point, actually back in April, we did a show that tried to account for the real overall long-term cost of the Iran war, and Linda Bilmes joined us back then. She’s the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and she really talked about how the aggregate cost over time is completely different than the numbers we’re hearing now.

LINDA BILMES: They are considering the absolute tip of the iceberg. They’re not even considering the cost prior to the war in Iran now, the cost of the Houthis’ activity. They’re not including Operation Midnight Hammer, which was our operations in Iran six months ago, and they’re certainly not including all of the reconstruction of facilities.

For example, we have 20 major facilities across the Middle East, 17 of which have been severely damaged. They’re not even taking into account the reconstruction of those facilities, which is going to take four to five years.

CHAKRABARTI: Lindsay, I wonder if you want to comment on that because given this, these potential long-term costs and also that making things five years from now will be more expensive than today, Professor Bilmes said she thinks the Iran war could cost more than a trillion dollars in the long run.

KOSHGARIAN: Yes, and that’s in keeping with what some other experts have estimated. And we can look at that based on looking at what the Iraq war cost sort of upfront, and that would then what the long-term costs were. And so yes, it’s things like backfilling munitions that were used and restoring bases that have been damaged if we choose to do that.

I think there are legitimate questions also about which of those bases should be maintained, especially since it’s so clear that they are acting as targets right now. But there are all these questions. And then long-term costs for veterans. We’ve been hearing more about how many injuries there are for U.S. troops and how many soldiers have died.

It looks like I think it’s up to 18 at least now. And there are disputes over what should count. But those are costs into the future, right? The health care for veterans, the expenses for families. So those are costs that just continue on for the lifetime of the troops that are involved.

And so yes, I think it’s absolutely true that the cost of this will continue to mount. And this is something that we really have to grapple with in this country. We continue to act like we can just dip in and out of these conflicts. But it’s something that does perpetuate for decades and I think we really need to look at that.

CHAKRABARTI: Connor, I want to come back to you here in a second, but please just, there’s one more exchange I want to play. It was quite a fiery one.

This is Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, and he essentially called Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the Iran war thus far a failure, and he asked Secretary Hegseth, he pressed him to explain how his strategy would change to better handle the war.

GARY PETERS: So what’s different? Mr. Hegseth. Secretary Hegseth.

HEGSETH: I think your characterization of this incredible effort as a failure is reckless and I think it’s irresponsible, and I think it smears the sacrifice of the troops that are out there making on behalf of the American people to ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon.

PETERS: Shame on you and others who call this a quagmire and a failure, and then you wanna turn around and say you support the war fighter. Either you do or you don’t.

Is the nuclear material still there, sir?

HEGSETH: I can get you a ticket out to CENTCOM to talk to what those Americans are doing, how committed they are to this effort, and how they want to ensure that Iran never threatens their families with a nuclear weapon.

That’s the kind of intensity that our war fighters have about making sure that Iran isn’t capable of doing that.

PETERS: Secretary Hegseth, if you listened to my comments, you told, you would’ve heard me say how amazing our war fighters are.

HEGSETH: I heard failure. I heard exactly what you said.

PETERS: I will tell you how I used the word failure. I heard exactly what you said. ‘Cause I used the word failure to their leaders. You, sir, are the failure, not the men and women who are on that front line, not the men and women who hold up their honor with distinction. But if there’s a lack of a winning strategy, they’re in harm’s way, their leaders have failed them, and that’s what’s happening. We have political leadership. You don’t have a strategy. You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war. The men and women are gonna be able to do it, but they need to have leadership. 

CHAKRABARTI:  Okay, Connor O’Brien. So obviously a very tense, to put it lightly, exchange there, but the question of Hegseth’s leadership of the Pentagon, I actually hinted about increasing discomfort over that at the beginning of the show, not just from Democrats, but from Republicans as well. Can you give us more insight there?

O’BRIEN: I think there you have through maybe half dozen times he’s testified this year on the budget and then on the war, we’ve seen a lot of exchanges like that, particularly with Democrats. Democrats were not sold on Hegseth from the beginning for a variety of reasons, arguing he was he was inexperienced and not up to the job.

We have seen some kind of cracks in the Republican wall of support for him. I think most notably Thom Tillis, who’s retiring senator from North Carolina, came out and said, he should probably be, he should be fired. He doesn’t have confidence in him to do the job anymore.

So I think we’re seeing an increasing uneasiness, and that comes with this conflict dragging out. What we haven’t seen is a critical mass of opposition from Republicans. And by all appearances, he has the support of President Trump.

And I think that’s what matters here. But I think the thing that I’ll be watching is if Congress flips, if one chamber of Congress flips, does that change? We’ll probably see a number of cabinet officials who do leave. Is he perhaps one of them, or does he intend to ride it out?

I think to be determined, but it appears for now that he has Trump’s confidence.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so if Congress flips meaning in the midterms. Connor O’Brien, senior defense reporter for Politico, thank you so much for joining us today.

O’BRIEN: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So Lindsay Koshgarian, we have about two minutes left, and I wanna get down to not just the numerical reality, but the political reality here as well.

Because one of the things about the defense budget is that by virtue of how many contractors there are out there, that pot of money goes to essentially all 50 states in some way, shape, or form in the United States. So no matter how much concern or criticism or fiery questioning there is right now from Democrats, what we saw is we always see is that these requests all essentially pass.

They pass, which is why the government, the defense budget gets ever bigger and bigger every year. I don’t really see anything right now that would convince me that this year could be different. Do you?

KOSHGARIAN: I actually do think this year is different. And I don’t, I wouldn’t necessarily predict that there won’t eventually be a budget that passes, but a couple things are different.

We have the outrageousness of the $1.5 trillion amount. We have the very unpopular Iran war. And I think that, yes, the contractors have a lot of power. They get about half of the Pentagon budget, and they stand to benefit tremendously from this budget going up. But ultimately, we’re in a midterm election year, and members of Congress want to keep their seats or and be elected.

And so we see this with, Senator Collins from Maine. They’re accountable to their constituents, and they are expressing discomfort. We have seen the National Defense Authorization Act which helps authorize the largest part of this money pass in the House by one of the narrowest margins ever.

It actually hasn’t passed the Senate yet. … It was blocked by Democrats. So I do think that we’re seeing something different this year. And I honestly don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.