With 600 personnel going overseas, the deployment will therefore cost about $400 million a year. Super Hornets like the ones Australia is set to deploy for use over Iraq. Credit:AFP "It's a small number in terms of the government's fiscal situation," Mr Thomson told Fairfax Media. "It's inconsequential in terms of the surplus and the deficit." Treasurer Joe Hockey has avoided saying how much the deployment to the UAE will cost the budget, saying only that the Department of Defence will be able to absorb some of the costs. "Obviously we properly account for those things as they unfold and you'll see it in the mid year economic and fiscal outlook," Mr Hockey said on Monday.

"Defence has the capacity to absorb a significant amount of these sorts of costs but after that it does come out of the rest of the budget." "Ultimately you can't put a price on protecting human beings and that's what we're doing," he said. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Defence Budget Brief 2014-15, Australia has spent nearly $20 billion dollars on military deployments overseas in the past two decades. Since 1998, Australia has committed more than $16.5 billion on military operations and overseas deployments, with Defence absorbing $1.6 billion of the cost of operations. Deployments to Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands have now finished.

The total cost of sending Australian troops to the most recent Iraq war was about $2.5 billion. The total commitment to operations in Afghanistan was far more expensive, at $9.3 billion. Mr Thomson said the cost of Australia's deployment to Afghanistan was more expensive than it was to Iraq because the terrain and utilities in Afghanistan were far harder to navigate. "Remember, we went into Iraq and stayed for less than a year, then we went back and helped the Japanese and then we were on a training mission there for a while, but it wasn't as expansive as the role we played in Afghanistan," Mr Thomson said. "Iraq tended to be cheaper than Afghanistan because Afghanistan is a godforsaken place in terms of logistics. You've got to fly everything in and out. You've really got to pay people a lot of money to go in there.

"In the UAE, a lot of the personnel and equipment will be based in pretty habitable environs. We'll be operating from established airfields so we're not going to have to pay as much to get things in and out [like we did in Afghanistan]. Loading "You're probably looking at $400 million per year, that's the back of an envelope estimate. It's impossible to be more precise than that [at this stage]." Follow us on Twitter