The fight against ISIS costs $9 million every day
The Pentagon revealed on Thursday that the war against ISIS has cost in excess of $2.74 billion since August 2014. That breaks down to about $9 million per day, with just over half of the spending devoted to airstrikes.
Nearly a quarter of the expenditures went to weapons, which have been a controversial subject thanks to frequent reports of ISIS capturing pricey American weaponry for its own use. Indeed, as Max Fisher at Vox summarized, "America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world."
The daily spending rate has increased in recent months, and is likely to continue to rise as the U.S. sends additional ground troops to Iraq without an exit plan.
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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.
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