Recently, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. had spent roughly $37 billion on the war with Iran. That’s just the direct cost, not post-war reconstruction, not the economic ripple effects that raise prices at home, and certainly not the human cost.
That number is staggering enough on its own. But in the same hearing, Hegseth also requested another $87 billion for the Pentagon, of which $67 billion would be earmarked for continued operations in the Middle East.
For those keeping score at home, that’s $104 billion devoted to this conflict, with no clear end in sight. Every time a truce or cease-fire is announced, the fighting eventually resumes when the leaders involved posture, retaliate, and escalate like immature middle-schoolers. The objectives remain vague, making victory difficult to define.
Now, I’m not writing this to debate the merits of the war itself. I have opinions on that, but what overwhelms me at the moment are the numbers. $104 billion. What else could be done with that money?
According to some estimates, ending global hunger would cost roughly $7 billion per year. It’s a breathtaking amount of money. At least to people like me! But you know what number is even more breathtaking? $1 trillion. That’s how much the United States spends on defense. Per year.
If I struggle to comprehend $7 billion, my mind completely shuts down trying to grasp a trillion.
Compared to that, feeding tens of millions of hungry people around the world begins to look almost attainable! Especially if wealthy nations shared the burden. But instead we find ourselves cutting funding for many of the world’s most vulnerable people while continuing to find seemingly limitless resources for war.
Now, feeding the hungry is just one example of what we could do with these funds. They could also strengthen struggling schools, improve infrastructure, expand social services, or invest in healthcare and communities. Reasonable people can disagree about which priorities matter most.
But my point is just this: when our greatest imagination is reserved for building more effective instruments of war, something has gone terribly wrong.
I don’t pretend to know what an “appropriate” military budget should be. Nations have legitimate security concerns (with the most militaristic nations having the most security concerns, go figure). But it breaks my heart to watch hundreds of billions of dollars flow so easily toward killing image-bearers while we have to scrap and claw and justify every dollar that we give toward helping image-bearers live.
And make no mistake, killing is exactly what these additional funds are intended to do. Hegseth himself said the money would increase the “lethality” of U.S. military forces and would help “reinforce peace through strength.”
Peace through strength. Has that ever truly worked? Military victory can end a conflict. It can even produce decades without open war. But it rarely creates peace. Most often it leaves behind humiliation, resentment, and the seeds of the next conflict. Weapons can force surrender, but they cannot create peace.
As Christians, we follow the Prince of Peace. And that Prince of Peace did in fact bring peace through strength, but that strength was displayed in surrender and death and resurrection - the tools of the Kingdom of God.
That spiritual truth doesn’t give us answers to every political question, but it should at least mean that our imagination extends beyond “we need more bombs asap!” If our first instinct is to build better ways to destroy our enemies rather than better ways to love our neighbors, then we’ve adopted a vision of the world that looks more like Caesar than Jesus.
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