Haider Ali Hussein Mullick writes:

America’s spending on the war in Iran will far outlast active combat. The U.S. government has already made contracts and other commitments to repair damaged bases, field counter-drone platforms, feed and shelter thousands of troops and replenish munitions.

Even if President Trump signs a deal ending the war tomorrow, we will harden bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, by reinforcing aircraft shelters, building blast walls around fuel and communications nodes, replacing destroyed satellite communications equipment and installing layered defense systems to defeat Iranian drones — the kind that killed six Americans in Kuwait. We will monitor for years Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and the Strait of Hormuz with carrier strike groups, destroyers and intelligence assets. Also, the U.S. military will have to replenish its munitions stockpiles: The war has burned through U.S. supplies of offensive missiles such as Tomahawks, used to strike Iranian ground targets, and defensive Patriot and THAAD interceptor systems, deployed to halt an onslaught of thousands of Iranian drones.

I worked for a decade in the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office, conducting oversight of the sorts of conflicts that the United States so often finds itself in — ones that are easy to start and hard to end, just like this one. The Pentagon calls wars such as these “overseas contingency operations,” a misnomer that hides their true nature: long, stubborn conflicts marked by changing objectives, cost overruns, fraud and waste. The risk is high that the public will not understand how much the Iran conflict will cost and that a lot of money will be wasted, either lining the pockets of fraudsters or paying for things that are marginal to the mission.

Congress should force the Trump administration to provide full, regular transparency on what it has signed up the nation to pay. And it needs to be clear with the American people how well the government is using the billions it is set to spend.

The best path forward is to tap a special inspector general to estimate costs, audit contracts, investigate fraud, inspect logistics chains and track whether stated objectives are met. The conflict in Iraq and Syria has one, as do the conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine. While I was with the Pentagon inspector general’s office, we created a website that provides the public information on funding and other oversight work relating to America’s support of Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The Iran war has neither a special inspector general nor a public website explaining how much is being spent and on what.

Federal lawmakers know they cannot count on executive branch officials for a straight answer about this war’s cost. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the House Budget Committee on April 15, “I don’t have a ballpark for you.” It is incredible for him to claim that he has no general sense of the Iran war’s cost so far. Many people, including in the government, have been counting.

The Pentagon told Congress that the first six days of the war cost more than $11.3 billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies calculated that munitions consumed 84 cents of every dollar spent on the Iran conflict in the opening 100 hours, as the U.S. military burned through Tomahawk, Patriot and THAAD inventories. With over 50,000 U.S. troops deployed in the region and about 13,000 strikes against Iran, the American Enterprise Institute estimated the cost at between $25 billion and $35 billion.

And that’s before the long-tail contracts that follow every war. Those costs can be enormous, and we need to anticipate them. [Continue reading…]