Pentagon watchdog puts Operation Epic Fury at $33.4 billion through June

The Defense Department inspector general released its first mandated report on the Iran war on Monday, covering 28 February to 30 June. Operation Epic Fury cost an estimated $33.4 billion in that window, $22.3 billion of it on munitions. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told Congress in late July that the running total had reached $37.5 billion. Separate reporting in July put informal estimates far higher.

The report’s hardest line is on stocks. “The munitions expenditure on OEF has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.” The department, it said, is trying to shorten procurement and lead times and to stockpile critical materials. That sentence is the first official admission that the campaign has eaten into weapons the United States would want for another fight.

Aircraft, drones, and bases

The accounting of losses includes four F-15s destroyed, one F-35 damaged, seven KC-135 tankers damaged — five of them hit on the ground in Saudi Arabia — and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones destroyed at about $30 million each. Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan.” The Navy’s main logistics hub in Bahrain was among the targets. Repair costs for those bases are not in the report. It is not yet clear which sites will be rebuilt or who will pay.

Diplomatic damage is separately priced. Physical damage from Iranian strikes on U.S. facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE is put at about $184 million. The package draws on the inspectors general for Defense, State and the former development agency. Much of the detail had leaked in pieces over six months. Monday was the first time the numbers sat in one congressional document.

NBC News first reported the publication. CBS, the Washington Post, CBC and others matched the munitions and base passages. The report does not settle the wider cost of the war, which continued after 30 June. It does settle the official description of the first four months: a campaign expensive enough in precision weapons to leave “strategic” holes, and a map of American facilities across eight countries that took hits.

What the shortfall means

Strategic inventory is the language used for weapons that cannot be replaced on a factory schedule measured in weeks. Bottlenecks mean the plants that make those weapons were already tight. The inspector general is not a combatant command. It is the office Congress told to count. The count now says the United States spent more than twenty billion dollars on munitions in four months and cannot treat the cupboard as full.