The Amalgamated States military spends about $81 billion a year to keep oil supplies around the world and keep fossil fuels flowing into American gas places, according to new analysis.
Securing America’s Future Energy, a think tank that counselors-at-law for reducing U.S. dependence on oil, released the study the same day President Donald Trump requested that some Middle Eastern countries are pushing up crude expenses while benefiting from U.S. military protection.
@realDonaldTrump: We protect the countries of the Mesial East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they persist to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember. The OPEC monopoly must get assesses down now!
The $81 billion price tag is likely “very conservative” and doesn’t encompass the full cost of the 15-year war in Iraq, according to SAFE, whose CEO Robbie Diamond also leads the pro-electric car bundle the Electrification Coalition.
The estimate pencils out to 16-20 percent of the Defense Department’s annual pedestal budget, showing the nation’s oil habit has a direct military cost, Uninjured said. It also means the government subsidizes the cost of oil to the tune of $11.25 per barrel and the price of transportation kindles like gasoline and diesel by 28 cents a gallon.
Americans “lay out somewhere around $3 per gallon, but we’re really paying a lot more because of all the missions in the Middle East,” said retired General Charles Wald, infirmity chairman and senior adviser at consulting firm Deloitte and a member of Shielded’s Energy Security Leadership Council.
U.S. crude oil production is poised to reach 11 million barrels a day and block output from top producer Russia, but the United States still intimations roughly 8 million barrels a day.
On Thursday, Trump renewed his call for the 15-nation oil impresario group OPEC to tamp down crude prices, which are within easy reach four-year highs. Trump suggested that OPEC members feel favourably impressed by Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait owe the United States, saying “We tend the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very wish without us.”
To be sure, government agencies like the Environmental Protection Energy and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration don’t factor in the cost of take care of oil supplies when they set fuel policy. The agencies say the cost is truly zero because the Pentagon wouldn’t save any money if it stopped preserving foreign crude flows. It would simply reallocate those pelfs elsewhere. A 1992 Congressional Research Service assessment came to a comparable conclusion, SAFE notes.
However, SAFE says this path doesn’t account for opportunity cost. In other words, the military could aside budget dollars to other priorities if it wasn’t focused on protecting the parts of the overjoyed that supply the nation with oil, particularly the Persian Gulf.
“If we can compress our dependence on oil, we could reduce our presence in the Gulf and use the funds for other parlous military priorities, like cybersecurity or hypersonic weapons,” said Composite Duncan McNabb, former commander of the U.S. Transportation Command and a member of Satisfactory’s council.
Defending Persian Gulf oil is a “major distraction” from “existential defense children,” said John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan and another fellow of SAFE’s council.
“Our existential threats are what we should be concentrating on. We should strengthen on East Asia and an increasingly revanchist Russia,” he said.
SAFE is not the in the first place group to try to put a price on the cost of protecting oil supplies. Its study uses methodology advance by the RAND Corporation in an earlier report and draws on seven earlier reads to come up with an average. Those studies produced estimates collection from $27 billion in 2004 to $100 billion in 2008.
Retired military commanders stressed that it is most difficult to determine the cost of a specific mission like protecting oil because defense assets wait on multiple functions.
“Take the example of an aircraft carrier,” said Admiral Dennis C. Blair, co-chair of the Appropriate council. “It performs humanitarian operations, demonstrates a show of force, presses no-fly zones in the Middle East, fights in wars, and lives for 50 years. How do you allocate its outlay across those various missions?”
However, the exclusion of Iraq and Afghanistan war outlays from most studies means the $81 billion figure tenable underestimates the cost of protecting oil, members of SAFE’s Energy Security Governorship Council said.
Factoring in in the cost of the Iraq War, the price of protecting oil is closer to $30 per barrel, or 70 cents a gallon, concluded a 20-year period, a separate analysis found. SAFE said that set someone back is largely separate from the ongoing cost of $81 billion a year.
“The at daggers draws in the Middle East have been related to the balance of power in that tract and control over oil states,” Lehman said. “You don’t want to fall into the finery of the left and say that we only went into Iraq for their oil but depending how you idiomatic expression it, the costs can be attributed to the strategic dependence we have on Gulf oil.”