Operation Epic Fury didn’t come cheap.
Since the first strikes on February 28, the U.S.-Iran conflict has cost American taxpayers $35 billion in direct military expenditures alone, according to one estimate.
Mix in the broader economic damage—the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, oil supply disruptions, higher gas prices—and Moody’s Analytics puts the total hit to consumers and the economy closer to $132 billion. And the meter’s still running.
Those are the numbers people are searching for as the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed last week, marking an informal end to the war. As an investor, though, I think the most important question isn’t what the war cost, but what comes next.
The Arsenal We Burned Through
First, I want you to consider the staggering rate at which the U.S. consumed precision weapons in the early phase of combat.
Munitions and interceptors alone accounted for more than 80% of the total cost, or $750 million per day. The U.S. fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles at $3.5 million apiece. Between Patriot, THAAD and Standard Missile interceptors, another 1,500 to 2,000 air-defense rounds were expended.
Meanwhile, 42 aircraft were lost or damaged, and as many as 20 U.S. military installations across eight countries took hits.
The Pentagon’s comptroller pegged total equipment repair and replacement costs at $29 billion… and that’s before an $80 billion supplement request now making its way through Congress.
Rebuilding Will Take Time
Replacing everything will take years. Defense officials told the Wall Street Journal that full Tomahawk stockpile restoration alone could require up to six years.
The White House recently invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950specifically because the munitions industrial base can’t self-correct at the speed the military requires. Factories need to be retooled. Supply chains need to be restructured. Bloomberg reports that Trump will host weapons manufacturers at the White House this week to push for faster production, with the president telling reporters that “is all excited about building weapons… including the Patriot, including the Tomahawk, and lots of other things.”
Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the more clear-eyed defense economists working today, said in a recent interview that it’s impossible to scale supply chains quickly enough without appropriate incentives. Put plainly, defense contractors simply won’t build capacity without long-term contractual commitments from the government.
“Show me the money,” Cancian told Federal News Network, voicing manufacturers’ concerns. “They don’t want to build facilities that aren’t going to be used.”
That commitment appears to be coming, and at historic scale.
What the Backlog Is Telling Us
According to PwC’s midyear aerospace and defense report, the five largest U.S. defense firms ended 2025 with a combined order backlog of $1.36 trillion, marking a nearly 24% increase from the previous year. Individual order books at some contractors grew by more than 30%.
European revenue alone has grown double digits across major U.S. contractors, driven by allies who now treat elevated defense spending as a permanent planning assumption rather than a response to a crisis.
It’s important to point out that this backlog doesn’t disappear with the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. If anything, the pause clarifies the restocking mandate without the risk of escalation.
Facing Reality
I’ll be the first to say that war is a tragedy. But investors have always had to reckon with the world as it is, not as we’d wish it to be.
And the world as it looks today features depleted stockpiles and governments writing the largest defense checks in modern history.
Arsenals must be rebuilt. The only question is who builds it, and whether you’re positioned accordingly.
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