\The US has spent more on just two weeks of Operation Epic Fury than it has done in four years of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
As bne IntelliNews reported in the feature, Command of the Reload, the cost of replacing the first four days' worth of munitions would be $20bn-26bn after 14 of the systems used from a total of 34 have already fallen to critically low levels. Altogether in the first two weeks of the campaign the Pentagon has burnt through an estimated $100bn and congress has just asked for another $200bn appropriation.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US spent $350bn on supporting Ukraine since the start of the war in 2022. However, Congress’ official bookkeeping records that a total of $188bn was allocated for Ukraine’s assistance. But at around half that money was never used. Last year, Bankova and others estimated that only $83.4-$114.15bn was actually spent, and the vast majority of that – an estimated 90% - was spent in the US on buying weapons from US arms manufacturers.
At the time, when asked how much US aid Ukraine received, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy responded: "When I hear (...) that America has given Ukraine hundreds of billions - $177bn to be precise… I tell you as the president of a country at war that we have received more than $75bn. That is, $100bn… we never got.”
Since he took over a year ago, Trump has sent no money to Ukraine. The entire brunt of supporting Ukraine’s government in its $100bn-a-year existential fight with Russia already fell on Europe’s shoulders by August last year.
Cost of war
The Trump administration has badly miscalculated how easy Iran will be to defeat. Trump has relied on presumed US’ overwhelming military power, but Iran is fighting an asymmetric war and its superior cost-to-kill ratio. It has built up a vast stock of some 2,000 surprisingly sophisticated missiles and produces around 150,000 drones, which bne IntelliNews’ military analyst Patricia Marins has likened to “cheap cruise missiles, that Tehran is using to overwhelm America’s defences.
Operation Epic Fury has been, “the most intensive opening air campaign in modern history”, according to Payne Institute of Public Policy in Colorado.
Of the munitions that the US is running short of, most are sophisticated air defense missiles of which America only produces a few hundred a year. Stocks of the key Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles have been nearly exhausted in just the first few weeks of fighting and cannot be replaced this year, irrespective of how much money is allocated. A meagre 39 interceptors are slated for delivery in 2027—six years after they were ordered, according to reports.
America is thought to have used more than 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the opening days of the war, but the Pentagon planned to buy just 57 new ones in the current fiscal year. There have been no deliveries of THAAD interceptors since 2023 and the Pentagon has not placed any new orders this year.
Part of the US motivation for supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia is that for an investment equivalent to around 5% of the US defence budget, it has massively run down Russia’s military capabilities. “This is the best money we have ever spent,” Senator Lindsey Graham said gleefully on several occasions.
Now the tables are turned. The Economist ran an analysis last week entitled “The Iran war could sap American military power for years” as analysts dig into the cost of the war in Iran. In the same way that Ukraine has depleted Russia’s military power to the point where it will take years to rebuild Russia’s military capabilities, in three weeks of fighting in the Gulf, the US is rapidly finding itself in the same position.
That bodes ill for Washington if China chooses now to invade or blockage Taiwan. The Pentagon has already almost exhausted stockpiles of some of its key weapons like tomahawk and PAC-3 interceptor missiles, but now it has started to cannibalise its resources in Asia. As bne IntelliNews reported, the US is relocating parts of a THAAD missile defence system installed in South Korea to the Middle East after its key installations in the Gulf were destroyed by Iranian missiles.
“We don’t make enough munitions to support a war in eastern Europe, a war in the Middle East and potentially a contingency in East Asia,” US Vice President JD Vance said at the Munich Security Conference in 2024.
Despite the call for $200bn in new spending, the supply chain for munitions is opaque and the backlogs for key systems like Patriot PAC-3 interceptors already run to years. Moreover, the key systems, like THAAD radar stations and every single one of the missiles, use large amounts of critical minerals and rare earth metals (REMs) that are all entirely controlled by China, a detailed study by the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) reports.
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