“On August 21, 1975, the Congressional Research Service presented to the Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the House Committee on International Relations a document entitled ‘Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study.’ ” The document explored “the possibility of seizing Persian Gulf facilities should the [OPEC oil] embargo escalate into a strangulation of American industrial capacity. …Achieving American objectives, the Research Service summarized, would require two to four military divisions, maybe sixty thousand troops, ‘tied down for a protracted period of time.’ To keep the oil fields running, ‘drafting U.S. civilian workers to supplant foreign counterparts might be mandatory.’ Because ‘U.S. parachute assault forces are too few to cover all objectives quickly [and] amphibious forces are too slow,’ skilled localized sabotage teams could be expected to ‘wreak havoc’ before invasion forces were in place.”
– Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil, Pages 208-209