Drill a Gas Well, Bring a Soldier Home? US Domestic Drilling and Troop Deployment

Abstract

Advocates for increasing domestic drilling for natural gas, particularly hydraulic fracturing of shale formations, have rallied behind the slogan “Drill a gas well, bring a soldier home,” suggesting an association between domestic drilling and reduced troop deployments abroad. But is there any empirical evidence for a correlation? I investigate this question using 60 years of data on US troop movements and domestic gas drilling and a vector autoregression approach to account for factors that affect both. Surprisingly, results of basic specifications not only support the idea of a correlation between drilling and troop withdrawal, but cannot reject that there is a one to one negative correlation. That is, drilling one well may in fact be correlated with one soldier coming home. Results are not robust or conclusive, although there is enough suggestive evidence to warrant further research.