Brazil deployed warships, fighter jets and thousands of troops off its southern coast on Friday, starting two weeks of military maneuvers aimed at showing the world it can defend vast new oil reserves. The exercise, dubbed Operation Atlantic, will simulate an attack by a fictitious enemy on oil platforms and pipelines both on and off shore along the coastline of the states of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Espirito Santo. The maneuvers are the latest in a national debate over how to manage a slew of recent deep-sea oil finds that could thrust Brazil, which still occasionally imports crude to meet domestic demand, into the top 10 of the world's oil producers. “This is an exercise that is intended to dissuade, a show of force,” Admiral Edlander Santos, the commander of the operation, said at a ceremony near Rio de Janeiro marking the beginning of the exercise. Over the next two weeks, 10,000 troops, as many as 50 fighter jets, 17 ships and at least one submarine will be mobilized for the exercise, which will cost about 20 million reais ($11.2 million) to stage. The operation is also intended to take stock of the growing list of military hardware that Brazil covets to defend its offshore resources, which are becoming one of its top defense priorities along with a porous border in the Amazon jungle. Brazil began imagining itself as an oil superpower when state-run energy giant Petrobras announced in November it had found 5 billion to 8 billion barrels of light crude deep beneath the ocean floor in the Santos basin, the world's second-biggest oil find in the last 20 years. Just this week, Petrobras estimated that another nearby deep-sea field holds between 3 billion and 4 billion barrels of oil and natural gas. Together, the two finds could lift Brazil's proven reserves by 85 percent, and that may be just the tip of the iceberg. Some analysts estimate that 50 billion to 80 billion barrels of oil may lie deep below a thick layer of salt under the seabed along a 500-mile (800-km) stretch off Brazil's southern coast. The government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is currently drawing up a new strategic defense plan that is expected to place a heavy emphasis on defending its offshore oil wealth, which the military has begun referring to as the “Blue Amazon.” “The ‘Blue Amazon' is perhaps one of our most important strategic assets,” said Santos, who was flanked by combat troops in camouflage gear, some toting machine guns.
