Missiles, markets and moral bankruptcy – what is the true price of this madness in lives, money, and even our very souls?
The world is watching as the Middle East is set ablaze – not by necessity, but by a catastrophic failure of foresight, planning and purpose.
The warmongers are thumping tables, the fools who follow them wave placards demanding more death and destruction, and the planet is scratching its collective head wondering why we keep doing this to ourselves.
A sense of depression is setting in as I absorb the news channels 24/7 and watch the ever-changing narrative spiral out of control like a wildfire driven by political arrogance and historical amnesia.
Are we not yet fatigued by conflict? One would think that after the invasion of Ukraine, the devastation of Gaza, and the endless carousel of proxy conflicts stretching from Africa to Eastern Europe, humanity might finally have developed some collective immune response to the madness of war.
Yet here we are again, watching another conflict ignite in the most geopolitically volatile region on Earth – the equivalent of striking a match inside a munitions dump while the global economy nervously checks its insurance policy.
Which, incidentally, has already been invalidated.
The insanity of what’s happening in the Middle East right now cannot even be measured.
Or actually, it can. And the numbers are simply staggering.
A Billion Dollars a Day – and That’s Just for Starters!
According to the latest data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the U.S. is spending nearly $1 billion every single day on Operation Epic Fury.
That figure does not include the massive military build-up that preceded the strikes – the deployment of naval fleets, aircraft squadrons, logistics infrastructure and missile defence systems across the Gulf.
And then there are the ongoing operational costs. Running a single U.S. carrier strike group costs around $6.5 million per day, according to defence analysts. And there are multiple carrier groups currently operating in the region.
Add the cost of aircraft sorties, cruise missiles, air defence interceptors, intelligence operations, drones and logistics, and it quickly becomes clear that this war is burning money at a rate that could swallow a treasury whole.
One billion dollars. Every. Single. Day.
That’s roughly twice the entire annual GDP of Micronesia.
The Price of Missiles
Part of this, of course, is simply the price of defence against Iran’s retaliation to the illegal, illicit and unwarranted attack on it by the world’s most powerful country alongside the world’s most bellicose one. (Since January 2025, the U.S. has engaged in military strikes, operations or combat missions on seven countries, and Israel on six – and yes, I deliberately picked the time period since the second coming of Trump. It’s unprecedented.)
But back to the numbers, and the price of protection. In the defence operation alone, a single Patriot (PAC-3) interceptor costs around $4 million, and a THAAD missile costs up to $15 million. Iran is effectively “bankrupting” the U.S. defence budget by forcing it to use these against drones that cost less than a Toyota Corolla.
Let that sink in. It is the equivalent of swatting flies with a 22-carat gold-plated baseball bat.
The U.S. has also already lost over $2.5 billion in equipment, including an early warning radar in Qatar ($1.1 billion), three F-15 fighter jets and several MQ-9 Reaper drones. In the first 100 hours alone, the U.S. fired $3.1 billion worth of missiles.
Meanwhile, the global economy staggers and is losing trillions. The Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz triggered a $3.2 trillion loss in global equity value in just the first four days.
Oil prices are rocketing past $100 per barrel, for an energy source the world is still heavily reliant on.
Docked ships and grounded airlines are also hammering businesses and livelihoods across the globe.
The U.S. thinks it’s winning. Yet we now have a situation where the “winner” is destroying the region’s economy, while the “loser” has effectively lost the ability to even surrender because its leadership has been fragmented and disrupted – witness yesterday’s apology by the President of Iran for attacking Gulf neighbours, followed immediately by another barrage of attacks.
“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly.”
How We Could Have Used the Money
Let’s put some of this into context. We aren’t just burning billions of dollars – we are burning the very resources that could solve the crises we claim to fight.
Let’s just take that $1 billion being spent per day on blowing stuff up – stuff that will eventually have to be replaced, rebuilt and resurrected.
$1 billion is almost exactly the same amount the World Health Organisation (WHO) appealed for to cover an entire year of global health emergencies.
$1 billion could provide over 2 billion meals, according to the World Food Programme (WFP). That is enough to feed every single person on Earth currently facing “extreme hunger” for roughly a week.
$1 billion could provide healthcare to 250 million people living through conflicts and disasters (including Gaza, Sudan and Haiti), according to the WHO.
$1 billion would be enough to sustain 8,000 health facilities, deploy 1,300 mobile clinics, and facilitate around 50 million health consultations worldwide.
$1 billion could put approximately 40 million children into school for a year, paying for teachers, books and safe classrooms, according to the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) – which also estimates that $5 billion (remember we’ve already had over a week of this war) could transform the education systems of 90 countries for five years.
$1 billion could immunise around 40 million children, preventing millions of future deaths from measles, polio and pneumonia, according to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
In short, not only is this war disrupting – and potentially destroying – a fragile global economy, it is also literally blowing money that could resolve many of the world’s most urgent problems at a stroke. Money that could alleviate the causes of strife and the roots of conflict, and instead foster peace, prosperity and progress rather than death, destruction and doom.
The world is not poor.
But it increasingly seems our hearts and minds are.
The Human Cost
Of course, the financial cost is only one part of the story. The real cost is measured in lives. What value do you place on a life? Can there ever be a correct amount?
Within days of the conflict escalating, hundreds – and then thousands – of people had already needlessly lost their lives.
The U.S. has just flown home six caskets. The Gulf States, despite the admirable armour of protection they have cast around themselves, have lost around ten lives (probably not including the Pakistani taxi driver killed in Dubai as I write this, due to falling debris from an intercept).
Israel itself has suffered twelve civilian fatalities, while around 200 have been killed due to its bombing of Lebanon in response to the Iranian proxy Hezbollah rattling its sabres.
And it is reported that over 1,300 civilians in Iran alone have met their end. 1,300 people “freed” by outside intervention. That includes as many as 180 schoolgirls less than twelve years old, whose lives were snuffed out on the first day.
Darling little princesses. Innocents erased without cause or consequence.
My heart weeps just thinking about them.
Some of you might be thinking – yeah, but life is cheap there. After all, just over a month ago they killed over 36,000 of their own people in a brutal crackdown on an internal uprising – buoyed in part by the promise of an American intervention that never came until it was too late.
Indeed, that blood lies on the hands of the tyrants who were in charge there – tyrants who are now dead.
But the blood of those 180 little girls? Whose hands is that on?
Those still trying to wash off the stains of the 20,000 children sent to an early grave in Gaza, perhaps?
The occupants of the White House that ignited so-called Epic Fury as an epic distraction from the Epic Epstein Files and a failing, flailing economy?
Or American taxpayers whose hard-earned money has gone not to help their own communities out of crime and poverty, but to create conflicts halfway across the world – conflicts that will inevitably generate more refugees and migrants trying to enter the countries that so effectively destroyed theirs?
America ultimately spent about $2 trillion each on its escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those conflicts reshaped entire regions – and not for the better.
They created power vacuums.
They destabilised governments.
They fuelled extremism.
They gave us the Taliban. ISIS.
And after two decades of fighting, both wars ended with deeply ambiguous outcomes. Afghanistan has regressed to the dark ages. You should have seen it in the 1970s, though.
Yet here we are again. Another conflict. Another justification. Another promise that this time things will be different. Do we learn nothing from our past mistakes?
“Mainly what we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”
This War Is a Farce
An egotistical toddler with the keys to the cupboard full of shiny war toys was easily cajoled by those who have tasted conflict and killing – and who like the buzz and the bitter taste of bloodstains on their fingertips.
Sold a dummy, the U.S. stepped in to “stabilise” the region by removing a supposed threat – one that did not have nuclear weapons (because their ability to make them had already been obliterated recently, remember?).
Instead, they have turned a predictable adversary into an unpredictable swarm, paralysed the world’s most important trade route, and triggered a migration and humanitarian time bomb.
And now we find ourselves in a war of attrition, where the U.S. thinks it’s winning the battle, but everyone can see it’s losing the region – and possibly the world.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Why This Feels Personal
With all my years in the Middle East – growing up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and early ’90s (yes, I was there during the first Gulf War) and later working in the UAE from 2006 to 2019 – this all feels very personal.
This region is my home away from home, and I find myself in a funk of impotent fury (to borrow a phrase), fuelled by incandescent disbelief at the stupidity of the world’s most powerful statesmen currently in power above us today.
If there’s one saving grace, it’s the maturity I’ve seen from the leaders of the Gulf. The stoic restraint and calm, deliberate defensive actions of places like my previous home of Dubai – creating no fuss, no chaos, and allowing residents, native and expat alike, to simply carry on living their lives – has been most impressive.
“Keep Calm and Carry On” used to be a very British thing. But here we are arguing about ships that don’t set sail in the night, witnessing the political punchbagging of a Prime Minister who actually, in my opinion, did the right thing for once by not following a U.S. president into Middle Eastern mischief, tongue attached firmly to the Presidential rectum.
We’re freaking out about getting our people home and making snide digs about the glitter of Dubai being tarnished by the debris of an unsanctioned war the West has effectively foisted upon them.
Yet the region itself is proving resolute and admirably restrained.
Frankly, there should now be new mugs printed up with the phrase:
“Keep Calm and Drink Karak.”
Dubai’s favourite chai.
Shit Just Got Real – We NEED To Talk
And maybe that Karak should be around a table, where war gaming is actually played out in a virtual theatre of words and arguments, rather than through bombardment, destruction and death. A Karak chai is a lot cheaper than a missile, and no one has to go home to their family carrying a guilty conscience.
We need to do this now, before it’s too late. Saudi Arabia has just invoked its Pakistan Pact. And if this conflict widens to include Pakistan, the stakes change entirely – because that is the only Muslim-majority country with nuclear weapons.
At that point, the world stops playing with fire and starts playing with extinction.
So yes, shit just got real. The Mullahs are looking for martyrs, and the future just became a whole lot less likely.
Less likely to what?
Less likely to be.
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