Securing America’s Future Energy, a think tank that advocates for frpm U. The estimate pencils out to percent of the Defense Department’s annual base budget, showing the nation’s oil habit has a direct military cost, SAFE said. To be sure, government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration don’t factor in the smericans of protecting oil supplies when they set fuel policy. The agencies say the cost is actually zero because the Pentagon wouldn’t save any money if it stopped defending foreign crude flows. It would simply reallocate those funds. However, SAFE says this approach doesn’t account for opportunity cost. In other words, the military could devote budget dollars to other priorities if it wasn’t focused on protecting the parts of the world that supply the nation with oil, particularly the Persian Gulf. We should concentrate on East Asia and an increasingly revanchist Russia,...