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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (67106)	8/8/2005 12:29:59 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

The defense expense - Almost all of that would be spent anyway. Control of oil is how we were able to defeat Japan, and was a factor in the defeat of Germany. So that strategy has been built into US strategy for a long time. If we look at the Cold War, an energy independent and isolationist US which could not defned most of the Persian Gulf fro mSoviet designs would have resulted in proloning the Cold War, and excesive Soviet influence in Europe. Part of control of sea lanes come with the forward position of the US defensive perimiter. US defenses in the Pacific don't start 50 miles from California, or in Hawaii, but in a chain running from the Aluetian islands to South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Saipan. The used to include Subic Bay and Clark Field in the Phillipines. This is backed up by Guam, Midway, Wake, etc. The US has bases in Greenland for air defense, and Norway, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Azores. Often the main purpose of these bases is to watch over the local population (Germany),and/or provide a forward defense against Soviet/Russian agression. The benefits of additional sea lane control come at a much lower cost. The US is lucky that there are some economies of scale in world domination ;-) The 410 Billion defense budget works out to about $1,300 per person, or $2,900 per working adult. That's a lot, even with $35,000 per capita GDP. With oil use of about 16 million bbls. per day, or 5.6 Billion bbls. per year, if we charge the whole defense budget to oil we get an additional 68 dollars per barrell. If we alloacted about 1/3 of the defense budget to oil, then we get about $23 more per barrell.