U.S. bills Saudis and UAE $331M for refueling planes
Times
WASHINGTON — For nearly four years, American taxpayers have been footing the bill for a chunk of the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen: the gas for many of the Saudi warplanes flying combat missions and the jets that provide the mid- air refueling.
Now the Pentagon is correcting this accounting error and has sent Saudi Arabia and its main partner, the United Arab Emirates, a bill for those overdue charges: about $331 million.
Specifically, the Pentagon is seeking about $36.8 million for jet fuel and $294.3 million for flight hours by U.S. refueling aircraft, Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Thursday.
“Due to errors in accounting by the Pentagon, the United States had not prop- erly charged Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emir- ates for those services,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking minority member on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.
He said the bill was “good news for U.S. taxpayers, and underscores the need for strong oversight of the Department of Defense.”
Military officials said the UAE had been paying some fuel costs during the air campaign. But they acknowl- edged that requests from Reed earlier this year for a fuller accounting by the military’s Central Command of the charges revealed the undercharging.
The United States refueled Saudi and UAE warplanes operating in Yemen from March 2015 until Nov. 11. A resolution approved by the Senate on Thurs- day would keep the Pentagon from restarting that support.
In a separate measure this week, the Senate also voted to cut off all other U.S. military support to the air campaign.
The sticker shock of the refueling and flight-hour costs most likely contributed to a decision by Saudi Arabia to end the refueling, American military officials said. In recent months, the Pentagon had been refueling fewer than 20 percent of the coalition’s missions in Yemen, Defense Secre- tary Jim Mattis has said previously.
Launching lumbering Air Force tankers aloft and conducting the midair refueling is a technically tricky and enormously expensive task. Under the Pentagon’s arrangement with the Saudis and the UAE, first reported by The Atlantic, the country that receives the fuel is required by law to pay the costs.
But that is not what has been happening.
At first, congressional officials suspected that the tab might be in the millions, or tens of millions, of dollars.
But when offic i als at U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, completed their review of what the Saudis and the UAE owed, the figure had swelled — mainly because of the high costs of operating complex American refueling aircraft and their crews.
A spokeswoman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fatimah Baeshen, said Thursday that the kingdom was reviewing the charges. The UAE ambassador to the United States, Yousef Otaiba, said in an email, “The UAE will cover its bills.”