War on ISIS estimated to add $40 billion per year to military spending

War on ISIS estimated to add $40 billion per year to military spending
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

While it's just a drop in the bucket compared to the $4 to $6 trillion price tag of the 2001 war in Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, fighting ISIS isn't cheap. A new estimate places the annual cost of the war on ISIS at about $40 billion a year, a figure that will certainly rise if the effort is expanded beyond airstrikes.

That $40 billion will be added to the Pentagon's 2015 budget of $496 billion, plus its $58.6 billion "Overseas Contingency Operation" fund to pay for America's various Middle Eastern entanglements. Meanwhile, more than $90 billion has been spent in the still-active war in Afghanistan this year, even as a majority of Americans now believe that war was a mistake.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.