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.