Operation Earnest Will, the 1987-1988 American escort operation for reflagged Kuwaiti tankers, cost the United States approximately five billion dollars in 1987 currency — a figure that, adjusted for inflation and accounting for the expansion of the threat environment since then, understates what a comparable operation would cost today. The escort problem in the modern strait is harder, not easier, than it was during the Tanker Wars. More threats, more capable threats, more vessels requiring protection, and a global economy that is more exposed to disruption than it was forty years ago. The numbers for a sustained escort operation in the contemporary Gulf are large enough that the economics of protection become a strategic variable independent of the purely military calculations.