How we count. What we include. What we deliberately exclude. And who edits this.
We count direct, trackable U.S. military expenditure tied to the conflict with Iran and aid to Israel since April 2024. That means appropriations Congress passed, weapons Congress authorized, munitions the Pentagon reports firing, equipment Iran destroyed, and operations the Defense Department ran.
If a dollar figure appears in a congressional bill, a CBO score, a CRS report, a DSCA notification, a Pentagon press briefing, or a published estimate from a named defense analyst at CSIS / JINSA / AEI / FPRI, it qualifies. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
We leave these out because the direct-cost number is already hard to argue with, and inflating it with speculative additions hands critics an easy dismissal. The goal is to be unable to be dismissed as made up.
We use FY2026 DoD procurement unit costs where published. These are what Congress authorizes Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing to charge for a new unit. When a replacement cost estimate exists (e.g. CSIS cites $3.6M per Tomahawk during the current production crunch), we note it but anchor to procurement. Procurement is defensible; replacement is situational.
AEI’s April 2026 analysis puts the 40-day active-combat phase at $22.3–31B. CSIS (Cancian) cites ~$500M/day average. We use $25B— the low end of AEI’s range — for defensibility. Going higher would be within sourcing but harder to defend against gotcha questions.
The live counter runs at $1.4B/day, which is the midpoint between CSIS’s early-phase $890M/day estimate and the Pentagon’s sustained $1.88B/day rate over Day 1–6. This reflects Epic Fury surge tempo. The pre-surge period (April 2024 – February 2026) ran at ~$26M/day — mostly Israel aid packages rather than daily ops. A phased burn-rate model is planned.
We use published replacement costs (Raytheon contracts, Lockheed contracts, official USAF fact sheets). Iran’s claims are cross-checked against NYT/Bloomberg satellite imagery analysis before we book a loss as confirmed.
Every 2 weeks during active operations. Monthly otherwise. Full data-refresh workflow: verify every existing line item against current primary sources, research the gap period, flag outliers, post revised numbers, update live constants, ship. See iranwarcost.com for an upstream cross-check — though that repo is currently stale.
If a number looks wrong, tell us what source says otherwise. We log every change in CHANGELOG.md with the date, the old value, the new value, and the source that moved it.
See the full sources index for every URL cited across every card.
Shahzad Ahsan. Brooklyn, New York. Former Creative Strategy at Spotify, former Head of Software Marketing at Logitech. I build sites that turn complicated things into readable things. No institution funds this; no ads; no tracking beyond aggregate page views.