In early 2003, when “shock and awe,” not “fiasco,” was the brand, war enthusiasts like Paul Wolfowitz and others in the U.S. government claimed the treasury was good for a few billion in the mission to defeat terrorists, topple Saddam Hussein, and set up a democracy in Iraq. Some $500 billion later, the only shock and awe left in the conflict is its cost. According to the Congressional Research Service, the combined cost of the Iraq war (Operation Iraqi Freedom, in Pentagon jargon) and its companions, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and the global war on terror, will easily top $600 billion this year. Staggering as that figure is, Harvard economist Linda Bilmes and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz presented a report early last year claiming that the real costs, including indirect spending on care for wounded soldiers and lost income and economic activity from military service, could top $2 trillion. More-conservative estimates excluding indirect costs have hovered around $1 trillion.

The numbers are big no matter how you break them down. The annual congressional appropriations—averaging $160 billion—for the wars are bigger than the global market for soap or heroin and just nudge out the world’s gambling market. Monthly spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan averaged $6.8 billion last year, according to the Department of Defense’s comptroller—a figure closer to $8 billion today. At that rate of burn, General Electric’s value would be wiped out in 3½ years, Bill Gates’ personal fortune would evaporate in seven months, and Ford would cease to exist in a matter of weeks.

If you think of the war as a giant impulse buy using an unlimited credit card, then paying it off would require coming up with enough cash to match the G.D.P. of three Irelands, or about 11 Kuwaits, or a Netherlands—but only if you throw in a Sri Lanka. Or if you think of the wars as an actual country that produces nothing but has to buy about $127 billion worth of goods and services per year to sustain itself, it would have a lot of eager customers and the second-largest trade deficit in the world. (The U.S. would still be a comfortable first.)

There have been a number of published accounts suggesting that if, instead of spending $600 billion or so on the wars, the U.S. could have used the money for funding poverty programs, sponsoring cancer research, or solving the health care crisis. Such comparisons are tempting. But like the Iraq war, they are a conceptual rat hole: Once you get into the battle, the complexity of the endeavor causes cost estimates to go awry.

Whatever the debate on the morality or utility of the war, it is trumped by the current outflow of $8.8 billion per month. This level of spending tends to make customers out of critics, and much of the industrialized world has managed to cash in in some way. This is a distinct change from American conflicts before the 1990s, when the U.S. produced nearly all of its warmaking products. Today the D.O.D. imports an enormous amount of its inventory. Tires come from Japan. Flat screens and electronic components such as satellite phones and memory chips are made in Taiwan. The military’s Danfo AB mobile toilet systems are from Sweden. And you can bet that the fuel for the war isn’t coming from Texas.

If you ask the Defense Department for a list of contractors, it will send you an Excel document that runs to hundreds of pages and represents thousands of companies. There are the traditional defense contractors. Boeing provides Apache helicopters. Lockheed Martin produces the popular Hellfire missile. General Atomics is behind the remote-controlled and deadly Predator drone aircraft. But Operation Iraqi Freedom has also drafted M&M’s candy into the military industrial complex, along with a little company in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire: Monadnock Lifetime Products, which supplies $1 disposable plastic handcuffs to soldiers. These producers have all benefited greatly from the war. For the biggest of these contracts, five-year stock charts show a steep rise to historic levels from January 2003 onward.

The global war on terror has propagated what you might call the security industrial complex to create products for detecting and combating terrorism and insurgencies. Advanced imaging sensors in combat aircraft that cost millions of dollars a day to fly can identify insurgents from above and transmit targets to ground troops—though they can’t reliably distinguish between civilians and fighters. Another example is the search for an effective countermeasure against improvised explosive devices. Many of the soldiers wounded or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan were victims of I.E.D.’s that cost less than $100 to assemble. In response, the U.S. dedicated $3.5 billion in 2006 to develop a line of products to combat them. The initiative has engaged companies like Ionatron and Foster-Miller, which make bomb-busting robots, and Alliant Techsystems, which produces high-powered microwave systems to detonate I.E.D.’s before they can kill.

In a $600 billion enterprise, one has to be sympathetic to the Pentagon’s difficulties in trying to keep track of individual transactions. In many cases the D.O.D. is unable to specify what it has purchased from contractors. Asked about a $321 million payment made to Altria-Kraft, a Defense Department spokesperson took two weeks to explain that it was for “assorted groceries.” (Altria-Kraft also was unable to be more specific.) The D.O.D. had no data on the number of bullets used since 2003. And an Army spokesman eventually referred requests for information on purchases made from contractors such as Mars, Tyson Foods, and Dell to a public information officer at the contractor Halliburton, saying it is the best source for that information, “They have their feet on the ground over there.”

Heavy-construction and logistics companies like Halliburton benefit from the challenge of maintaining anything as large as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These conflicts require a giant overhead investment in facilities and transport. A large fraction of the war funds go toward maintaining the gigantic supply chain that stretches from North America to Kuwait and Jordan and then overland and by air into Baghdad and points west, south, and north. Camp Anaconda (recently renamed Logistic Support Area Anaconda), northwest of Baghdad, is the central storage and distribution point for the Iraq war and one of the largest forward bases in the world. It sprawls over 15 square miles and has its own bus service and fleet of trucks supplying troops with everything from ice to medical equipment.

Keeping track of how much the U.S. is spending on the war has been complicated by the fact that, until this year, the Defense Department and the Bush administration have kept their spending requests separate from the general budget, instead moving them through Congress as supplemental appropriations. Each request becomes a vote on supporting the troops instead of what it actually is—maintenance of the increasing cash bleed. This strategy, coming at a time of persistent low inflation and a rising stock market, has created a distorted reality for most Americans in which, aside from the daily casualties, the war appears to be cost-free.

In fact, it is something of a mystery how little effect our current conflicts appear to have had on global markets or on domestic inflation or growth. That $600 billion could be spent over four years without any obvious effect is hard to fathom. By contrast, the outlay for World War II necessitated sacrifices such as rationing of food and fuel by virtually every American. One difference is that this war is being paid for with debt, whereas W.W. II was more of a pay-as-you-go proposition. This raises the question of whether there is a break point in the future. Does the war spending have some predictable impact on the supply of money available for borrowing? Might lenders like China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia reduce their purchases of U.S. Treasuries at some point, forcing the U.S. to raise interest rates drastically in order to make them more attractive? Or might these lenders seek an alternative to dollars, which would cause a steep drop in the greenback’s value? Both of these events might ripple through the economy in the form of inflation and a growth-choking liquidity crisis. All anyone can say for certain is that U.S. spending for the war puts us at least a trillion dollars closer to whatever that break point might be.

So until something changes, the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq represent a bizarre big-box-retail showcase for vast sectors of the global economy. Like some dreamy indulgent bachelor’s closet full of shiny electric guitars, the objects of war photographed for this portfolio are expensive, tangible, and exotic evidence of what $2 billion a week will buy. The U.S. will have inventories of these items long after the conflict is over. Our bases and communication infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan will endure as costly functional investments or ghostly ruins, whether our troops are there or not. While much of the world may oppose U.S. policy in Iraq, a big part of the globe also has a stake in minimizing that policy’s impact on the U.S. economy. At these levels of spending, the notion of a military victory or defeat is somewhat beside the point. Somewhere beyond $2 trillion, it is the global economy that may need the protection of a green zone as much as the city of Baghdad.

Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell famously warned President Bush that if you break it, you buy it. Powell was only partly correct. At last count, we’ve bought the equivalent of 10 Iraqs and will apparently buy at least a few more before we’re done.