Justine Drennan counts the costs of the campaign against ISIS so far:
[E]ach U.S. “strike” against the self-proclaimed Islamic State can involve several aircraft and munitions and cost up to $500,000, according to Todd Harrison, an expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based defense think tank. Harrison said the cheapest possible strike could cost roughly $50,000 — assuming a single plane dropping one of the cheaper types of bombs. … But using his $500,000 upper estimate, Saturday’s strike missions alone cost as much as $4.5 million. And those figures don’t even include the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights necessary to scope out targets ahead of strikes, which have helped make even the low-level campaign against the Islamic State hugely expensive. The Pentagon revealed on Monday that it has spent as much as $1.1 billion on military operations against the Islamic State since June.
But this war, among others, is great news for the companies that make those planes and bombs:
Led by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.
Investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago-based BMO Private Bank. President Barack Obama approved open-ended airstrikes this month while ruling out ground combat.
“As we ramp up our military muscle in the Mideast, there’s a sense that demand for military equipment and weaponry will likely rise,” said Ablin, who oversees $66 billion including Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC) and Boeing Co. (BA) shares. “To the extent we can shift away from relying on troops and rely more heavily on equipment — that could present an opportunity.”
Meanwhile, Julia Harte and R. Jeffrey Smith flag a report by Conflict Armament Research, which “indicates that the Islamic State’s relatively newly-formed force has had little difficulty tapping into the huge pool of armaments fueling the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.” The group, the report shows, has gotten its hands on arms and munitions manufactured in 21 different countries, including, of course, the American equipment taken from the retreating Iraqi army. Now that the Pentagon is preparing to send more arms to the Iraqis and Syrian rebels, the jihadists are licking their chops:
On Sept. 18, Congress passed a law authorizing the Defense Department not only to re-equip Iraqi forces that lost territory and abandoned their weaponry to IS, but also to provide arms to “appropriately vetted elements of the Syrian opposition.” …
The Islamic State, meanwhile, has said it welcomes fresh opportunities to get its hands on additional Western-supplied munitions. “Look how much money America spends to fight Islam, and it ends up just being in our pockets,” says Abu Safiyya, the narrator of an Islamic State propaganda video uploaded to YouTube on June 29. Gesturing at a Ford F-350 truck parked in an Iraqi police base captured by the extremist militants over the summer, Safiyya said, “They will lose in Syria also, God willing, when they come. We will be waiting for them, God willing, to take more money from them.”
The Dish 