Pentagon Tells Congress US-Iran War Has Cost $45.1 Billion

The significance lies less in the headline figure than in what the Pentagon chose not to include: base and building repairs, and the detailed indirect-cost breakdown Congress explicitly asked for. That gap matters for any market that prices geopolitical risk, because an understated cost baseline makes future supplemental spending harder to anticipate. The open question is whether Congress presses for the omitted categories, since that disclosure — not the $45.1 billion itself — is what would sharpen the picture for defense budgets and, by extension, the fiscal backdrop that RWA and macro traders watch.