According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024, in constant 2024 dollars, equal to the combined military spending of the next 18 countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multitrillion-dollar US war machine?

A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Gaza is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles, and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed on March 10 that the US had “total air dominance” over Iran, but that is still not true. Instead, US forces are mainly attacking Iran with stand-off weapons from outside Iran’s borders, radically depleting US stockpiles of extraordinarily expensive weapons.

Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone, and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.

The American people have sacrificed enormously to pay for this obsolete, overpriced, and ineffective war machine.

By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq's air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK, and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.

In 2003, the US Armed Forces dropped 13,000 tons of bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first 30 days of the war. But only 800 tons, or 6%, of those munitions were cruise missiles and other stand-off weapons like the ones the US is now relying on against Iran.

The US has already depleted one-third of its stand-off and air defense weapons stocks, including JASSM and Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-2, -3, and -6 anti-aircraft missiles, as well as half its stocks of Patriot and THAAD interceptors and the new Precision Strike Missiles that are replacing the shorter-range ATACMs. These missiles range in price from $700,000 each for JASSMs up to $12 million each for THAAD interceptors, and many will take years to replace.

So the US is using multimillion dollar missiles that are irreplaceable in the short term to try, and often fail, to intercept Shahed drones that cost Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 each. This is a stark contrast from Iraq in 2003, when the US weapon of choice was its 500-poun GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb, which costs only $22,000, and the 7,000 bombs used to attack Iraq were easily restocked.

To make up for the Navy’s dwindling missile stocks in the war zone, the US is flying B-1 bombers from a British airbase at Fairford in England to fire Tomahawk missiles at Iran. So many planes are now flying from so far away to attack Iran that the US has also had to send dozens more aerial refueling planes to reinforce the 60 it already had stationed in Israel.

The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs. Meanwhile, the corrupt US military-industrial complex has built a gold-plated revolving door between the US arms industry; the Pentagon top brass; and a captive, co-opted civilian government. It has produced ever more expensive weapons, but it has lost nearly every war it has fought.

The only wars the US has won since 1945 were three short wars to recover small neocolonial outposts in Grenada, Panama, and Kuwait, as the US took advantage of the weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Otherwise, from Korea in the early 1950s to Iran today, the US armed forces have lost every single war, while inflicting mass destruction on countries and people the US government claimed to be liberating. As the saying goes, “With friends like us, who needs enemies?”

Like many US industries, the post-Cold War US arms industry has become consolidated around a cabal of five firms—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon (now RTX), General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—whose continued growth depends on ever-greater profits from increasingly expensive warships, warplanes, and weapons, while endless wars and “threats” serve to justify siphoning more and more of America’s national wealth into their coffers.

The US government and corporate media have told Americans for decades that these extraordinary military expenditures and endless wars are something to be proud of, and many Americans have swallowed this perverted myth of US military prowess. The Pentagon works hard to bolster its public image, spending $2 billion per year on recruitment and retention, and $1.14 billion on advertising contracts in 2023 alone.

But that narrative is beginning to crack. As with many aspects of the US political and economic system, more and more Americans are questioning what they have been taught about the US military, and veterans themselves are often the most outspoken critics.

Writing in Business Insider about the problems facing US military recruiters, Kelsey Baker reported that many veterans of the “Global War on Terror” now discourage their own children from joining the military. Three of the recruiters Baker spoke to said guns had been drawn on them by the parents of teenagers they were targeting for recruitment, and one recruiter recalled an irate parent calling him a “baby killer” and a government slave.

In Iran, the United States is caught between escalating a catastrophic, unwinnable war it should never have started and the urgent need to rethink the illegal, corrupt, policy of aggressive war it has pursued since 2001.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers—not by the countries that the United States went on to invade and occupy. Yet our leaders responded to those horrific crimes with a multitrillion-dollar investment in new weapons and imperial military expansion—a decision driven by precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in his farewell........

© Common Dreams