type: timeline_event
An NPR comprehensive assessment published on March 13, 2026 tallied the human and financial costs of the first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury. The numbers were staggering: more than 5,300 people had been killed, including at least 511 documented civilian deaths and 4,789 military fatalities across Iranian, U.S., and allied forces. Thirteen American service members had been killed in action, with approximately 200 wounded. An estimated 3.2 million Iranians had been internally displaced by the bombing campaign.
The financial costs had already surpassed the savings claimed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The Pentagon had spent more than $11 billion in the war's first week alone — exceeding DOGE's reported $9.4 billion in total government spending cuts. The per-day expenditure rate was accelerating as the campaign expanded to deeper target sets inside Iran, with munitions consumption alone running at hundreds of millions of dollars daily.
The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, a Kurdish human rights monitoring group with extensive networks inside Iran, provided some of the most granular civilian casualty documentation, tracking deaths by province and identifying specific incidents where residential areas and civilian infrastructure had been struck. Their figures were generally higher than Pentagon estimates, which classified many of the same deaths as collateral damage from strikes on legitimate military targets.
Time magazine's analysis placed the war's cost trajectory on pace to rival the first months of the 2003 Iraq invasion, noting that the combination of direct military spending, global oil price disruption, and the emerging humanitarian crisis meant the true economic cost extended far beyond the Pentagon's operational budget.