Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on April 30, 2026. (Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Analysts have also cast serious doubt on the Pentagon’s official estimate of the Iran war’s price tag, with one arguing the conflict cost more than $25 billion “in the first two weeks.”
Iran’s foreign minister on Friday accused the Pentagon of deliberately misleading the American public with its formal estimate that the war on Iran has so far cost the US $25 billion—a number that the chief Iranian diplomat said was a fourfold undercount of the conflict’s true price tag.
“The Pentagon is lying,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on social media. “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s gamble has directly cost America $100 billion so far, four times what is claimed. Indirect costs for US taxpayers are FAR higher. Monthly bill for each American household is $500 and rising fast.”
Outside analysts’ estimates of the illegal war’s total cost to American taxpayers have varied widely, but most put the number higher than the $25 billion offered by the Pentagon.
The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, estimated earlier this month that the Pentagon was likely to have spent more than $33 billion during the first 39 days of the conflict. An April 10 assessment released by the conservative American Enterprise Institute after the ceasefire began put the war’s cost between $25 billion and $35 billion.
Independent policy analyst Stephen Semler has estimated that the US spent nearly $29 billion on the Iran war during just the first two weeks of the conflict—an average of $2.1 billion per day.
“Hegseth lied to Congress when he said the Iran war has cost $25 billion,” Semler wrote Thursday on social media. “It cost more than that in the first two weeks.”
On top of direct war spending, lawmakers and experts have pointed to indirect costs of war in the form of higher gas and food prices paid by American consumers.
US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said on the House floor on Thursday that the Iran war has cost Americans over $630 billion—or $5,000 per household on average—“because of the increase in the price of food, the price of gas, the price of electricity.”
“We need to end this war now, and help the American people reduce costs,” said Khanna.
Linda Bilmes, a public policy expert at the Harvard Kennedy School, said in early April that the Iran war’s cost to the US is likely to exceed $1 trillion in the long-term, when accounting for veterans’ care and other outlays.
“It is hard to measure the exact cost,” said Bilmes. “But based on what we know now, it is costing about two billion dollars a day in short-term, upfront costs, which is the tip of the iceberg.”
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Strait of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
“Look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece,” writes Hartmann and you will realize our worst nightmares are coming true. (Credit: Armyinform.com.ua, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.
Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.
This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.
That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.
USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces… Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”
The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.
Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.
She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.
Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.
I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.
Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”
That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.
What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.
To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”
Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.
The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.
Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.
And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”
This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.
Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.
ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.
ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.
Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.
Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.
That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.
And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.
The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”
This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.
Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.
Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.
We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”
The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.
With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?
If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.
The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.
And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.
If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.
Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.
Nigel Farage objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying on 7 March 2026 that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won. He’s challenged with the claim that he lies as much as the IDF.
Pete Hegseth in Arlington, Virginia, on Monday. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Accusations refer to attack on Iran without congressional authorization and strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats
House Democrats filed six articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth on Wednesday, accusing the defense secretary of “high crimes and misdemeanors”, in reference to the attack on Iran without congressional authorization and deadly strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats, among other official acts.
The move comes as the Trump administration faces mounting scrutiny over recent foreign action, particularly the war with Iran.
In Wednesday’s resolution, Yassamin Ansari, a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, and colleagues including John Larson of Connecticut accused Hegseth of disregarding rules to minimize civilian casualties during armed conflict.
The US may have been responsible for a March strike on a school in Iran that left at least 175 individuals dead, including children, according to a New York Times report.
The House Democrats also pointed at a growing number of boat strikes in the Caribbean. The military has repeatedly sought to frame individuals on the vessels as “narco-terrorists”.
Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Donald Trump sings and dances, says that it’s fun to kill everyone …
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, March 2, 2026
THE attack on Iran by Israel and the US is a breach of international law so clear that the US “defence” secretary sees no reason to dress up his masters’ war as anything other than the exercise of imperial power.
Pete Hegseth has refused to rule out a ground invasion of the 94-million-strong Iranian nation, yet lashed out: “To the media outlets and the political left screaming ‘endless war,’ stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless.”
Hegseth, and the US joint chiefs of staff chairman General Dan Caine claimed that the attacks were designed to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapons system. Where this is a task more easily accomplished through negotiations the US/Israeli strategy is rather to target the Iranian leadership and its security forces.
It is clear that while the US is capable of mobilising powerful military assets to strike at Iran’s own military capacity and infrastructure — and the profits to be made in replenishing its hardware, missiles, drones and ammunition will profit US arms corporations — the immediate strategic interests being served are Israel’s.
The assassination of Iran’s leading cleric and state leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not least the collateral death of dozens of primary schoolchildren, appears to have the effect of mobilising opinion in defence of Iran’s national sovereignty and there is nothing in the US/Israeli strategy that will convince the Arab street or opinion in the global South that the US can be trusted.
The parallel strategy to encourage regime opponents and dissident national groups to take to the streets in an ill-prepared “colour” revolution on the model that put neonazis into office in Ukraine (but largely failed in Georgia) seems unlikely to restore the Pahlavi royalist regime. More likely, it will expose any innocents who believe US promises and take to the streets, to renewed repression.
Disreputable though he is, and dangerous to boot, Hegseth’s frank espousal of imperial war aims unadorned by hypocritical words or faux-liberal sentiments is refreshing when compared to the weasel words of lapsed human rights lawyer Keir Starmer.
He seems aggravated that the Iranians responded to the Israeli/US assault by interdicting Israel and US military bases in the regime. He describes the Iranian response as reckless but not a word about the words and actions of Trump and Netanahayu.
He said: “Our decision that the UK would not be involved with the strikes on Iran was deliberate. Not least because we believe that the best way forward for the region and for the world is a negotiated settlement,” but says: “We have British jets in the air as part of co-ordinated defensive operations which have already successfully intercepted Iranian strikes” and the next day more fully commits British service personnel to join the US/Israeli military operation and allow British bases to be used.
The weasel words are: “…the collective self-defence of longstanding friends and allies, and protecting British lives.”
The friends and allies in the region are a collection of kleptomaniac “royal” families raised to rule by the British empire in the defence of oil profits. They are no friends of the British people but only of our ruling elite.
And now Trump says Starmer was too slow to change to back the US and Israeli assault, adding: “It took far too much time. Far too much time. That’s probably never happened between our countries before. It sounds like he was worried about the legality.”
Either Starmer is worried about the legality but went ahead or he doesn’t care.
It is clear that Trump holds Starmer in contempt. On this question alone he is at one with the British people.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss rotting brain. Front Orca says “Wish someone would lock him up”.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, March 2, 2026
