U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), one of the 11 combatant commands (CCMDs) of the Defense Department, released video of U.S. Marines departing the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA 7) by helicopter and moving over the Arabian Sea to board and seize the Iranian-linked cargo ship, M/V Touska.
CENTCOM reported: “The Marines rappelled onto the Iranian-flagged vessel, April 19, after guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) disabled Touska’s propulsion when the commercial ship failed to comply with repeated warnings from U.S. forces over a six-hour period.”
U.S. Marines depart amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli (LHA 7) by helicopter and transit over the Arabian Sea to board and seize M/V Touska. The Marines rappelled onto the Iranian-flagged vessel, April 19, after guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) disabled Touska’s… pic.twitter.com/mFxI5RzYCS
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) April 20, 2026
President Trump said the U.S. Navy “gave them fair warning to stop,” but that “the Iranian crew refused to listen, so our Navy ship stopped them right in their tracks by blowing a hole in the engineroom [sic].” The POTUS added, “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!”
Iran, which called the seizure of the ship “armed piracy” and a violation of the ceasefire agreement set to expire on Wednesday, has reportedly vowed retaliation and announced that it has “no plans” to participate in additional peace talks this week in Pakistan, which U.S. Vice President JD Vance is scheduled to attend.
We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it.
He’s just burning your tax money. pic.twitter.com/TVwfALJ80S
— Chris Murphy
(@ChrisMurphyCT) April 19, 2026
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) responded to Trump’s celebratory social media post: “We are spending billions to keep our entire navy in the Strait to fecklessly fail to open a waterway that wasn’t closed until Trump’s pointless war of choice closed it. He’s just burning your tax money.”
Professor Linda Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy expert, has predicted that the Iran war’s ultimate cost to the taxpayer could be far more than the already expensive Pentagon expenditures that have been acknowledged. “I am certain we will reach $1 trillion for the Iran war,” Bilmes said in a recent interview.
Bilmes points to three main factors responsible for her enormous war cost total, which is ultimately footed, as Murphy warns, by the American taxpayer.
First, the Pentagon’s estimate of $2 billion a day in the early stages significantly underestimates, Bilmes says, the real total, as the DOD numbers consider the cost of lost equipment and weaponry, but not the far higher cost of replacing them.
Second, there is the potential lifetime disability benefits owed to more than 50,000 American troops in the region who have been “exposed to toxins and environmental hazards.”
And third is the staggering cost of running a war on borrowed money. “When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, debt held by the public was under $4 trillion,” she reports. By contrast, “Our total national debt today is now $31 trillion, and a lot of that debt is due to the money we borrowed for Iraq and Afghanistan. But all the money that we borrowed over the last 20 years at low interest rates is now being repaid at the higher interest rates that we are all experiencing. So that means we are borrowing to finance this war at higher rates, on top of a much larger debt base. The result is that the interest costs alone will add billions of dollars to the total cost of this war.”
Bilmes notes another eye-opening datapoint that compares the current Iran war not with the Iraq debacle, but with America’s more recent Ukraine support, saying “to put it in perspective, we fired more Patriot missiles in the first four days of the Iran war than we have given to Ukraine over the past four years.”