Iran war spending drains US military budgets, triggering cancelled trainings, delayed maintenance

By Davis Winkie, CNN

(CNN) — The Pentagon is feeling the financial squeeze and is struggling in some cases to carry out routine training and maintenance amid its ongoing operations against Iran, with uniformed military leaders pressing Congress to support additional funding.

The Navy’s top officer, Adm. Daryl Caudle, told House Armed Services Committee lawmakers earlier this month that his 2026 budget “didn’t bake in [Operation] Epic Fury” and that the Navy faces impacts on “routine operations” as a result.

That includes having to limit training exercises, flight training hours and training for new recruits, he said.

“My record recruiting is going to be thwarted without additional funding to [move] those individuals from boot camp and to pay enlistment and reenlistment bonuses,” Caudle told lawmakers.

The Army’s III Armored Corps, a Texas-based headquarters that oversees roughly 70,000 troops and hundreds of tanks, saw a nearly $292 million cut to its training budget in late April, according to an internal document reviewed by CNN. ABC News was first to report on the cuts.

The service’s medical schoolhouse cancelled dozens of courses and eliminated centralized funding for others, according to an April 27 memo also reviewed by CNN.

The Pentagon declined to comment for this story.

The military is normally required to pull money from specific buckets for specific activities unless Congress grants permission to move money around. Training typically comes from the “Operations and Maintenance” account.

Defense budget expert Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute think tank said that the Operations and Maintenance account is used for everything from training and deployments to fuel, travel, equipment repair, and even to pay for some Pentagon civilian employees.

Harrison said that tracking real-time Pentagon budget expenditures from the outside is impossible, but “it’s completely plausible that they are having to make some tradeoffs and do things like cancel unessential travel or cancel training.”

Early in the Iran campaign, Trump administration officials discussed seeking supplemental funding for the military, with some putting the price tag at $200 billion. Administration officials have subsequently said that figure was too high, though they haven’t provided specifics for a request, and there are no signs that Congress is moving towards approving additional funding.

The Pentagon’s most recent estimate of the conflict’s cost was approximately $29 billion, acting Pentagon comptroller Jules “Jay” Hurst III told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subpanel on May 12. But that estimate was based on the cost of munitions and destroyed aircraft and didn’t include construction costs for rebuilding bases, Hurst acknowledged. Sources told CNN in late April that the full estimate is closer to $40-50 billion.

A defense official familiar with the budget issues told CNN that the military typically encounters funding challenges toward the end of the federal fiscal year that ends in September often resulting in a need to ask Congress to move money between spending categories, but that 2026 has seen the issue bubble up months earlier than anticipated due to rising costs and the ongoing operations.

Some of the issues the military branches are facing are more a sign of intensifying funding concerns than completely new issues.

Air Force chief Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, who testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, said that the Iran conflict has exacerbated existing readiness troubles.

Appropriations lawmakers pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the topic of extra funding during hearings earlier this month, repeatedly urging the Pentagon chief to speed up that process of submitting a request.

“We need to repay those O&M [operations and maintenance] accounts that are going to be used, I suspect, in order to pay for this ongoing operation,” said California GOP Rep. Ken Calvert, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subpanel.

According to Harrison, the “hidden cost” of the ongoing conflict will manifest over time as increased wear and tear on equipment leads to increased maintenance problems. He suggested that supplemental funds may also greatly assist in replenishing the Pentagon’s depleted stockpile of both air defense and offensive missiles.

Davis Winkie’s work at CNN is supported by a partnership between Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners (JFP). CNN retains full editorial control of the reporting.

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CNN’s Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.