(The Center Square)–Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, the cost to taxpayers for the U.S. War on Terror is approaching $10 trillion.
Initial costs for two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were more than $8 trillion. An additional $2 trillion will be incurred by U.S. military spending after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack against Israel and conflicts in Yemen and Iran.
Iraq and Afghanistan war costs: $8+ trillion
“From late 2001 through fiscal year 2022, the U.S. appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $8 trillion for the post-9/11 wars – an estimated $5.8 trillion in appropriations, plus an additional minimum of $2.2 trillion for obligations to care for the veterans of these wars through the next several decades,” according to an analysis of federal data published by Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
The report breaks down spending by federal agency for the conflicts between 2001 and 2022. It includes more than $2 billion initially spent by the Department of Defense, with another $884 billion in increases. It also includes more than $189 billion spent by the State Department, more than $1.1 billion spent by the Department of Homeland Security and more than $465 billion spent on veteran care.
During the 21 years analyzed, interest on federal borrowing to fund the wars exceeded $1 billion.
Afghanistan: $2 trillion
The 20-year Afghanistan conflict cost more than $2 trillion.
On Oct. 7, 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan with the stated purpose of overthrowing the Taliban and dismantling al-Queda, which took credit for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. After the U.S. fought al-Queda and the Taliban for 20 years, the Biden administration withdrew U.S. troops in August 2001. The administration left $7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment behind and turned control of the country back to the Taliban.
Iraq and Syria: more than $5 trillion
The U.S. invaded Iraq in the Second Gulf War in March 2003, initially over Iraq allegedly obtaining weapons of mass destruction. The conflict lasted until December 2011.
After imposing sanctions on Syria in 2011 and supporting the overthrow of Syria’s president Bashar Assad in 2013, the Obama administration launched airstrikes in 2014. U.S. troops have been stationed there ever since until they were pulled out in April.
According to the Brown report, the U.S. spent nearly $3 trillion on both conflicts. A Harvard Kennedy School analysis puts the total higher, noting the Iraq war cost $5 trillion.
The former Al-Qaeda leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, wanted by U.S. authorities with a $10 million bounty, is now Syria’s leader and was removed from a U.S. terrorist most wanted list by the Trump administration. The president invited him to the White House, praising the man who previously supported suicide bombers in Syria and Iraq who killed U.S. troops.
Cost on veterans: $2.5 trillion
The estimated cost of caring for post 9/11 veterans dealing with physical and mental issues is expected to reach $2.5 trillion by 2050, according to another Brown analysis.
Cost on interest on debt to fund war: more than $2 trillion
The Brown report refers to the War on Terror as “credit card wars. By 2030, the U.S. will have spent as much on interest payments as it did on ‘overseas contingency operations’ for the wars themselves – over $2 trillion,” it says. It also highlights perpetual spending on military contractors, big tech and weapons companies, noting that “30-40% of spending on contractors is lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Post Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks: more than $34 billion
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, War on Terror costs to U.S. taxpayers has skyrocketed. Within two years, the U.S. government has spent nearly $34 billion in the form of military aid to Israel and in military operations in Yemen, according to the Brown analysis.
Iran costs: $16 billion initial costs in first few days, $2 billion a day
In February, in the first few days of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, the Pentagon said munitions cost $11.3 billion. A Harvard analysis puts the total cost closer to $16 billion with the ongoing conflict costing Americans $2 billion a day.
A Center for Strategic & International Studies analysis questions Pentagon budget data. It notes that the Office of Management and Budget often disagrees with federal agencies about what to include when reporting total budget costs. It also estimates the cost to replace equipment, infrastructure damage, loss of ammunition and replace plane inventories is nearly $2 billion.
More spending requests: nearly $90 billion
In June, OMB director Russell Vought requested another $87.6 billion from Congress to support the ongoing Iran conflict, including $17 billion for operational costs.
In June, both houses of Congress passed war powers resolutions directing the president to withdraw troops from the Iranian conflict. Secretary of State Marco Rubio maintains the War Powers Act is unconstitutional.
Multiple polls conducted in March and in June and July, indicate nearly 60% of Americans polled oppose U.S. military intervention in Iran.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
