Pete Hegseth confirmed earlier this month that the Pentagon has asked the White House to approve a supplemental request of more than $200 billion to fund the war in Iran. (That figure, he added, “could move.”) President Donald Trump has not yet signed off on the amount, but as military operations in Iran enter their fifth week, the Pentagon shows no signs of pulling back.
The request comes after Congress passed a sweeping budget bill last summer that gutted the social safety net, and after the so-called Department of Government Efficiency slashed funding for programs that millions of Americans depend on. Meanwhile, as oil prices are surging, the administration is signaling that it is prepared to spend more on this war than most countries spend on defense in a year. For all the talk of “America First,” Trump is choosing guns overseas—in a war of choice—rather than butter at home to help ease the pressures of affordability.
Budget requests have a way of exposing military ambitions that dwarf what a president says in public. Vietnam is the clearest precedent: As Lyndon Johnson escalated through the mid-1960s, the ballooning costs of the war, which he tried to keep hidden, told the story his rhetoric wouldn’t. Hard numbers, not words, are the most reliable guide to where a war might actually be headed.
Before 1965, most Americans paid little attention to U.S. involvement in the conflict between North and South Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy had already deployed special forces and military advisors into Southeast Asia to support South Vietnam, but the operation remained limited.
Amid his reelection campaign against Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, Johnson asked Congress to pass a resolution granting him broad authority to use military force. It did so overwhelmingly on Aug. 7, 1964, not knowing that his request was based on misleading and false intelligence regarding alleged attacks on U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
During the fall campaign, however, Johnson reassured voters that he was the candidate who would preserve peace, portraying Goldwater as a dangerous figure who might drag the nation into war.
Until the spring of 1965, the U.S. presence in Vietnam remained limited. Then everything changed. Despite his landslide reelection victory and advice from people like Vice President Hubert Humphrey and French President Charles de Gaulle to pursue a negotiated settlement, as Fred Logevall documented in his book Choosing War, Johnson chose escalation instead. He did so even though later released White House recordings revealed that the president himself, as well as senators such as Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, had harbored massive doubts throughout 1964 and early 1965 about the feasibility or necessity of entering this conflict. Even Secretary McNamara, as Philip and William Taubman recount in McNamara at War, understood the immense problems with the war, at the same time as he was publicly blasting any of Johnson’s critics.
Regardless of the private doubts, in February 1965, Johnson authorized a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, followed by ground troops in March. The administration justified these moves with the familiar logic of the early Cold War: If South Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of the region would soon follow.
At first, Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara signaled that the conflict would be contained. The U.S. military, which had defeated global fascism in World War II, was far superior to anything the North Vietnamese could field and besides, Johnson’s true priority was building a Great Society of domestic programs like Medicare.
Yet Johnson was deliberately keeping the probable costs of war from public view—and McNamara was his main accomplice. Rather than seeking a full wartime appropriation, Johnson funded the war through a series of supplementary budget requests, each understating the true costs. On May 4, 1965, he sent Congress a supplemental request for $700 million, the first appropriation for Vietnam outside the regular defense budget. Under pressure to prove they would stand firm against communism, members of both parties passed it less than 53 hours after the request, with almost no dissent. “Congress has acted with dispatch and clear purpose to approve the request that I made on Tuesday for $700 million to meet our mounting military requirements in Vietnam,” Johnson told the nation.
But the figure was a fraction of what Johnson and his advisors were discussing behind closed doors. They knew McNamara was planning a massive troop buildup under Gen. William Westmorland that would push costs well past $1 billion. Johnson also rejected proposals for a tax increase, calculating that it would energize conservative opposition to social programs. In addition to the supplemental request, , President Johnson requested a $1.7 billion appropriation for Vietnam within the defense budget and Congress approved it. By year’s end, more than 180,000 troops were in the field, much of his domestic agenda had been passed, and the federal treasury was severely strained.
Johnson’s January 1966 budget rested on even more misleading assumptions about the war’s duration and cost. He vowed that the U.S. could afford to keep funding the war in Vietnam and the Great Society. “[W]e will not permit those who fire upon us in Vietnam,” Johnson declared in his State of the Union, “to win a victory over the desires and the intentions of all the American people. This nation is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.”
As administration officials continued to obscure the true costs, Johnson made an additional a supplemental request of over $12 billion, the bulk of it directed to Southeast Asia. There was, again, minimal congressional opposition. Beyond the supplemental, Congress appropriated almost $60 billion for defense in fiscal year 1967—the largest defense budget since World War II. In March 1966, a majority of the country still supported sending ground troops into Vietnam.
As the budget numbers grew, congressional unanimity slowly started to crack. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, launched televised hearings on Vietnam; it was the first time a senior senator had publicly asked hard questions about the war, a fact made ever-more telling given that Fulbright had been a close Johnson ally and a staunch liberal internationalist who moved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through the upper chamber. In April, public approval of the war started to decline. By the end of 1966, approximately 400,000 troops were in the field.
By early 1967, Johnson’s top economists were warning that he could no longer afford both the escalating war and his domestic agenda. Inflation was rising sharply, and his strategy of hiding costs to fund both guns and butter was unraveling. Listening to his experts despite knowing that tax hikes were unpopular, President Johnson bit the bullet and agreed to ask Congress for a 6 percent surcharge on personal and corporate income taxes as well as a $12.3 billion supplemental appropriation for “military operations in Southeast Asia.” He couldn’t let inflation get away from him, especially with his reelection around the horizon, and he needed money to pay for the war and his Great Society.
Congress passed the budget request but, in a move led by House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Wilbur Mills, refused to move on the surcharge. Mills, an ardent fiscal conservative, was determined to force cuts in discretionary spending, and told the president he would agree to a tax increase only if Johnson accepted meaningful reductions in domestic programs. In other words, he had to decide between guns or butter. As the fiscal situation deteriorated, Johnson renewed his request in the summer, now increased to a full 10 percent surcharge. Weeks passed, then months, and Johnson did not get his tax increase in 1967. Chairman Mills, who maintained an iron grip over his committee and the House, refused to be pressured.
The battle over the surcharge dragged on for more than a year. Inflation kept worsening, costs kept rising, and a balance-of-payments crisis in 1968 threatened the stability of the dollar and triggered a run on gold reserves. In the end, Johson relented, accepting $6 billion in spending cuts and $8 billion in rescissions (previously appropriated funds that had not yet been spent), along with a 10 percent surcharge. The deal was widely seen as a devastating blow to his domestic program. As Johnson later reportedly confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, “that bitch of a war killed the lady I really loved—the Great Society.” The financial reckoning laid bare just how deeply the United States was mired in Vietnam, and the staggering price—in money and in lives—that the war had exacted. It would grind on through Richard Nixon’s presidency until Jan. 27, 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords brought U.S. combat involvement to an end.
When presidents lie about the cost of the war, or keep those costs hidden, it is safe to assume that their plans are far more expansive than what they are telling the public. There is no reason to think Iran will become another Vietnam. The scale of U.S. involvement is far more limited: There are no ground troops deployed yet, and there is no draft. And Trump has shown more reluctance than his predecessors to enter into a protracted conflict—in part because of the sobering legacy of Vietnam and Iraq.
But the conflict with Iran has the potential to become far more serious, and far more costly, than the administration has let on. It has already unleashed more chaos and destruction than the president initially suggested. The Middle East is one of the most volatile regions on earth, home to vital energy resources and a tangle of competing powers, and what Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have set in motion could escalate dramatically in the weeks and months ahead. As the pandemic showed, the interconnected global market is extraordinarily fragile. Breakdowns in one area can have massive ripple effects.
The Pentagon’s supplemental request suggests that the conversations happening behind closed doors in Washington look very different from the scattershot half-statements being offered to the public. Indeed, Vietnam was not an anomaly, as there is a long history of presidents hiding and lying about the costs of war, trying to keep out of public view what might be just around the corner.
The money that is now being sought by the Pentagon is a reminder that this war will not be free, and that at a moment when millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, it will demand real sacrifices from citizens who might prefer that those resources go toward health care and housing.
It is also (yet another) reminder that, if the Republican majority were willing to exercise its authority, Congress could be in the driver’s seat. Ultimately, the future of both the war and any post-war intervention comes down to money, and the Constitution unambiguously vests control of the purse in the elected who serve on Capitol Hill.
