About a week before Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, attacking Iran alongside Israel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine warned that the lack of support from allies and depleted reserves of interceptors and Patriot missiles would make an attack on Iran risky.
Patty Nieberg of Task & Purpose reported that on February 28, the day the offensive began, Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, wrote to the troops deployed around the Middle East that they were “embarking on a mission of profound consequence,” moving “from deterrence into active combat.” Central Command has reported six American service members killed and eighteen wounded in the operation.
According to U.S. Central Command, which manages U.S. military operations in the Middle East, there are about 50,000 military personnel involved in Operation Epic Fury, 200 fighter jets, two aircraft carriers and bombers, and they are moving more support to the region. Yesterday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out sending ground troops to Iran.
In his message to Congress yesterday announcing he had taken “military action…against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote: “It is not possible at this time to know the full scope and direction of military operations that may be necessary.”
Today the war continued to widen, leaving hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals in the Middle East desperate to leave. France alone has 400,000 people there. The U.S. has between 500,000 and a million people in the Middle East. The U.S. State Department has urged them to leave but said it could not help, and with airports and airspaces closed, just how they are supposed to do that is unclear. After pressure, the government is now saying it will work on chartering aircraft and using military planes to transport people who want to leave.
Alison Durkee of Forbes reported today that Trump’s military strikes in Iran have already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 billion. The three F-15E Eagle jets lost to friendly fire on Sunday cost $90 million each. Transporting troops, ships, and aircraft to the Middle East cost about $630 million. Missiles and weapons systems are also expensive—a drone is about $35,000, and a Tomahawk missile costs millions—and the two aircraft carriers in the region together cost at least $13 million a day. And then there are the costs of operating aircraft, and so on.
Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus of Politico reported that lawmakers anticipate the administration will ask for supplemental funding for this operation, over and above the more than $150 billion the Republicans provided the Pentagon in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the nearly $839 billion in regular funding Congress appropriated in February.
Trump made little effort to present his case for military strikes against Iran to the American people. In his letter to Congress notifying them of his attack, Trump said he had acted under the 1973 War Powers Act, which permits a president to attack another country if there is an urgent threat. But the letter itself doesn’t identify any such urgent threat. It simply said Iran is one of the world’s largest sponsors of state terrorism and that it “continues to seek the means to possess and employ nuclear weapons.”
The Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president above all because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man. But they also wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they put into the Constitution that Congress had the power “[t]o declare War…and…[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
In Federalist #26, one of the newspaper essays Alexander Hamilton wrote to encourage the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton explained that people shouldn’t fear the strength of the new government outlined in the Constitution, because the necessity of debating war, alongside the two-year limit on government funding for the military, would force Congress to debate military actions. He expected members of the opposition to attack those in power over military appropriations, so that if those in power were “disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.”
But Trump has now taken that power away from the people and their representatives. He has launched a military action that by his own admission is not an emergency situation like those anticipated by the War Powers Act, and thus he should have asked Congress for authorization to send troops and money to Iran. Members of Congress, in turn, would then have had to answer to their constituents.
Tonight the U.S. Southern Command, which operates in Central and South America and the Caribbean, posted: “On March 3, Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces launched operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations in Ecuador. The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism. Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere.”
Eric Schmitt and Luis Ferré-Sadurní of the New York Times reported that U.S. Special Forces soldiers are advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos as they conduct raids against drug-related sites run by “designated terrorist organizations.”
—
Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/23/dan-caine-iran-risk-trump/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/02/hegseth-iran-ground-troops/
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/epic-fury-letter-to-troops/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd8ygee9e3o
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/03/lawmakers-trump-emergency-funding-iran-00810885
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/27725118-war-powers-report-iran/#document/p1
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed26.asp
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/us/politics/us-ecuador-trump-military-operations.html
X:
Southcom/status/2029011785567572285
This post has been syndicated from Letters from an American, where it was published under this address.