“We pushed almost, I believe, between 400 and 500 million barrels of oil under the nose of Iran over the course of Project Freedom,” he said. “So we’ve been in control of moving traffic through there for quite some time.”
Total under U.S. escorts (cumulative): 400 to 500 million barrels
over multiple months (as cited by Hegseth)
Daily pre-war monthly equivalent: ~600 million barrels
per month
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made that statement on
July 21, 2026,
Operation Project Freedom had been running for approximately
2.5 months
By the time Hegseth gave his testimony in late July, the cumulative 400 to 500 million barrels of oil had been moved over that roughly 78-day (2.5 month) span
In that same 78-day time span, approximately
1.56 billion barrels of oil would have normally moved through the Strait of Hormuz before the war.
This means that despite the escort efforts to keep the strait "open," the actual oil flow during the operation was running at only
25% to 32% of its normal, pre-war capacity.
In actual real-world shipping logs from that period, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that
exactly 1,000 vessels were assisted in moving those 500 million barrels through the Strait of Hormuz. [
1]
Why the Actual Count Was 1,000 Vessels
The official military count of 1,000 ships is higher than the pure mathematical capacity of supertankers for two main reasons: [
1]
- Not all vessels were oil tankers: The military escort count includes other commercial merchant ships (like container ships or food transport) that traveled in the same protected convoys.
- Shuttle Tanker Strategy: Due to the risk of Iran targeting massive supertankers, shipping companies heavily relied on a "shuttle" system. They used smaller, more agile Aframax or Panamax ships to sneak oil through the narrow strait, then transferred the cargo to larger supertankers once they reached safer waters in the Gulf of Oman. [1, 2]
To move the pre-war normal of
1.56 billion barrels over that same 78-day period, it would have required roughly
780 to 2,080 tanker transits, depending on the size of the ships.
Because the pre-war global shipping industry heavily optimized for cost, the vast majority of oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz before the war was carried by the largest possible vessels—
VLCCs (Supertankers).
The Big Picture Difference
Before the war, the strait saw an average of
10 to 14 massive supertankers passing through every single day just for crude oil.
When you factor in other commercial traffic (like liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, container ships, and smaller regional cargo vessels), the total pre-war traffic through the strait was roughly
3,000 to 4,000 ship transits over any given 78-day stretch.
This highlights why the 1,000-vessel total under Project Freedom—which included all types of escorted cargo ships, not just oil—represented a massive bottleneck compared to normal peacetime commerce.
