Sinking speedboats with a supercarrier: the lopsided cost of Operation Southern Spear

Photo: The world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), sails in the Ionian Sea, July 29, 2025. Photo credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Maxwell Orlosky via DVIDS. Public Domain. Commentary article by Peter W. Singer. Defense One – December 7, 2025.

Wars have long been weighed by their expenditure of “blood and treasure”—their human and financial costs. Indeed, Donald Trump has long used the phrase as a metric to judge the wisdom of deploying U.S. forces, dating to his 2013 critiques of the war in Afghanistan. Now Trump has launched his own military operation in which the United States is outspending its opponent by several orders of magnitude. History suggests that a decision point is coming soon: escalate or go home. […]

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