The Pentagon v. peak oil

[JohnyCanuck]

The Pentagon v. peak oil

by Michael T. Klare

Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That's greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million -- and yet it's a gross underestimate of the Pentagon's wartime consumption.

Such numbers cannot do full justice to the extraordinary gas-guzzling expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, for every soldier stationed "in theater," there are two more in transit, in training, or otherwise in line for eventual deployment to the war zone -- soldiers who also consume enormous amounts of oil, even if less than their compatriots overseas. Moreover, to sustain an "expeditionary" army located halfway around the world, the Department of Defense must move millions of tons of arms, ammunition, food, fuel, and equipment every year by plane or ship, consuming additional tanker-loads of petroleum. Add this to the tally and the Pentagon's war-related oil budget jumps appreciably, though exactly how much we have no real way of knowing.

snip

Peak oil is not one of the global threats the Department of Defense has ever had to face before; and, like other U.S. government agencies, it tended to avoid the issue, viewing it until recently as a peripheral matter. As intimations of peak oil's imminent arrival increased, however, it has been forced to sit up and take notice. Spurred perhaps by rising fuel prices, or by the growing attention being devoted to "energy security" by academic strategists, the DoD has suddenly taken an interest in the problem. To guide its exploration of the issue, the Office of Force Transformation within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy commissioned LMI to conduct a study on the implications of future energy scarcity for Pentagon strategic planning.

The resulting study, "Transforming the Way the DoD Looks at Energy," was a bombshell. Determining that the Pentagon's favored strategy of global military engagement is incompatible with a world of declining oil output, LMI concluded that "current planning presents a situation in which the aggregate operational capability of the force may be unsustainable in the long term."

http://www.energybulletin.net/31067.html

[PDJane]

1. "May be???"

OK.

One more time.

The US military is the biggest single polluter on the planet. Bar none. From burning pellets on the coral atolls, to DU every damn place they go, to supremely high levels of Agent Orange still.....decades after the fact. From contaminated drinking water on military bases, to declaring closed bases superfund sites, to buring poisonous gases and radioactive materials in the ocean.

From deliberately exposing the troops to radiation during the cold war, to multiple immunizations because the army is too damn busy to make sure that the troops are innoculated in a timely manner, to the conditions at Walter Reed. From leaving DU shrapnel in the bodies of servicemen and women, just to see what it will do (yes, that is the latest boneheaded directive) to cutting funds for rehabilitation from brain injuries just when the soldiers need those funds most, to denying exposed veterans compensation and sending them back to Iraq.

It's time for Americans to revolt, I think. The Pentagon has gotten out of hand. The military expenditures of the world have grown to 1.2 trillion dollars on armaments, more than half of it being spent by the US.

Misplaced priorities, people.

One third of that money could eradicate world hunger. With what's left over, you could provide health care to everyone in the US, repair the infrastructure, do lots of research on renewable energy and make a large dent in cleaning up the mess left behind. In the process, you would increase employment and win back the respect of the world.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. "The Pentagon has gotten out of hand."

Unfortunately if the USA's energy intensive lifestyle is "not negotiable" as Dick Cheney asserts, and those in authority desire to maintain the illusion for as long as possible that this is a sensible and rational belief to hold, then there really is a huge motivation to do what it takes to grab control of as much oil as you can while you still have the means to do so.