Private fortunes are being built on public sacrifice—and Nevada veterans are paying the highest price.
I was a combat medical specialist in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. The Army taught me how to be a soldier. I have seen the cost of war in injuries and death. Later, as a student of U.S. history, academia helped me recognize how war enriches the wealthy at the expense of the common citizen. President Trump’s unconstitutional war in Iran is the most recent lesson in the cost of blood and treasure.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us. In his 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech, he told the nation that every warship launched and every rocket fired represents a theft from those who hunger and are cold. In his Farewell Address, he warned against the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” by the military-industrial complex. We are living that warning today.
We have seen this before. The Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the post-Sept. 11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost American taxpayers $8 trillion. Four times as many post-Sept. 11 veterans have since died by suicide than were killed in those conflicts. The Trump administration originally planned to fire 83,000 Veterans Affairs employees—a 17% workforce reduction. After public backlash, he scaled the target to 30,000 through attrition. By early 2026, Senate Democrats reported the VA had already lost more than 40,000 employees, nearly nine in 10 from health-care roles.
And now there is Iran. Direct military expenditures are already estimated at $29 billion, with Harvard Kennedy School economist Linda Bilmes projecting the total could reach $1 trillion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that the conflict has already consumed 45% of our Precision Strike Missile stockpile, more than half our THAAD interceptors—each costing $15.5 million—and nearly half our Patriot air defense missiles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is now asking Congress for an additional $50 billion in emergency funding to replace them. Sen. Mark Kelly, himself a combat veteran, said it plainly: “So, at some point … this becomes a math problem”
Meanwhile, Trump’s 2027 defense budget requests a 42% surge in military spending—the largest year-over-year increase since World War II—while he tells Americans we “can’t afford day care” and pushes Medicaid costs to the states. That matters here in Nevada: More than 1.75 million veterans nationally access Medicaid, including 340,000 who don’t qualify for VA coverage. Right here in Congressional District 2, Rep. Mark Amodei voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill, which slashes nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid while handing military contractors a blank check.
So who is collecting the profits? Russia’s oil revenues doubled in the first three weeks of the Iran War. Defense contractors Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman saw an estimated $25-$30 billion in shareholder value gains on the day the war began, according to GovFacts. Energy companies doubled their profits. And while working-class Americans watch gas prices rise 53%, and grocery bills climb, Trump’s own sons have secured defense contracts for their drone-manufacturing venture. War, for this administration, is a family business.
The failure of this war does not belong to the men and women serving in uniform. They have performed with extraordinary skill and courage. The failure belongs to a reckless president, an unqualified secretary of defense, and a Congress that has abandoned its constitutional war-powers responsibilities. Every major ally—France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc.—has refused to join this fight, citing no legal basis and no United Nations mandate. NATO is fracturing. Our credibility is gone.
Trump’s illegal War with Iran is the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” that President Eisenhower warned us about.
Farrell Vaughn is a veteran and a retired history teacher who lives in Reno. This is a modified version of a speech that he gave at the Veterans Speak Out rally in Carson City on May 23.