Page 1 of 2 The wars that oil the
Pentagon's engine By Michael T
Klare
Sixteen US gallons - more than 60
liters - of oil. That's how much the average
American soldier in Iraq or 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 American
soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and
30,000 in the surrounding region (including
sailors aboard US warships in the Persian Gulf)
and you arrive at about 13.25 million liters of
oil: the daily petroleum tab for US
combat operations in the
Middle East war zone.
Multiply that daily
tab by 365 and you get 4.9 billion liters: the
estimated annual oil expenditure for US 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 US Defense
Department 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.
And foreign wars, sad
to say, account for but a small fraction of the
Pentagon's total petroleum consumption. Possessing
the world's largest fleet of modern aircraft,
helicopters, ships, tanks, armored vehicles, and
support systems - virtually all powered by oil -
the Department of Defense (DoD) is the world's
leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult
to obtain precise details on the DoD's daily oil
hit, but an April report by a defense contractor,
LMI Government Consulting, suggests that the
Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels
(53 million liters) every day. This is greater
than the total national consumption of Sweden or
Switzerland.
Not 'guns vs butter' but
'guns vs oil' For anyone who drives a
motor vehicle these days, this has ominous
implications.
With the price of gasoline
in the United States now 75 cents to US$1 a gallon
(20-26 cents a liter) more than it was just six
months ago, it's obvious that the Pentagon is
facing a potentially serious budgetary crunch.
Just like any ordinary American family, the DoD
has to make some hard choices: it can use its
normal amount of petroleum and pay more at the
Pentagon's equivalent of the pump, while cutting
back on other basic expenses; or it can reduce its
gasoline use to protect favored weapons systems
under development.
Of course, the DoD has
a third option: it can go before Congress and
plead for yet another supplemental budget hike,
but this is sure to provoke renewed calls for a
timetable for a US troop withdrawal from Iraq, and
so is an unlikely prospect at this time.
Nor is this destined to prove a temporary
issue. As recently as two years ago, the US
Department of Energy (DoE) was confidently
predicting that the price of crude oil would hover
in the $30-per-barrel range for another
quarter-century or so, leading to US gasoline
prices of about $2 per gallon (53 cents a liter).
But then came Hurricane Katrina, the crisis in
Iran, the insurgency in southern Nigeria, and a
host of other problems that tightened the oil
market, prompting the DoE to raise its long-range
price projection into the $50-per-barrel range.
This is the amount that figures in many current
governmental budgetary forecasts - including,
presumably, those of the DoD.
But just how
realistic is this? The price of a barrel of crude
oil today is hovering in the $66 range. Many
energy analysts now say that a price range of
$70-$80 per barrel (or possibly even significantly
more) is far more likely to be our fate for the
foreseeable future.
A price rise of this
magnitude, when translated into the cost of
gasoline, aviation fuel, diesel fuel, home-heating
oil, and petrochemicals will play havoc with the
budgets of families, farms, businesses, and local
governments. Sooner or later, it will force people
to make profound changes in their daily lives - as
benign as purchasing a hybrid car in place of a
sport-utility vehicle or as painful as cutting
back on home heating or health care simply to make
an unavoidable drive to work.
It will have
an equally severe affect on the Pentagon budget.
As the world's No 1 consumer of petroleum
products, the DoD will obviously be
disproportionately affected by a doubling in the
price of crude oil. If it can't turn to Congress
for redress, it will have to reduce its profligate
consumption of oil and/or cut back on other
expenses, including weapons purchases.
The
rising price of oil is producing what Pentagon
contractor LMI calls a "fiscal disconnect" between
the US military's long-range objectives and the
realities of the energy marketplace. "The need to
recapitalize obsolete and damaged equipment [from
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan] and to develop
high-technology systems to implement future
operational concepts is growing," it explained in
an April report. However, an inability "to control
increased energy costs from fuel and supporting
infrastructure diverts resources that would
otherwise be available to procure new
capabilities".
And this is likely to be
the least of the Pentagon's worries. The DoD is,
after all, the world's richest military
organization, and so can be expected to tap into
hidden accounts of one sort or another to pay its
oil bills and finance its many pet weapons
projects. However, this assumes that sufficient
petroleum will be available on world markets to
meet the Pentagon's ever-growing needs - by no
means a foregone conclusion. Like every other
large consumer, the DoD must now confront the
looming - but hard to assess - reality of "peak
oil" and the very real possibility that global oil
production is at or near its maximum sustainable
("peak") output and will soon begin an
irreversible decline.
That global oil
output will eventually reach a peak and then
decline is no longer a matter of debate. All major
energy organizations have now embraced this view.
What remains open for argument is precisely when
this moment will arrive. Some experts place it
comfortably in the future - meaning two or three
decades from now - while others put it in this
very decade. If there is a consensus emerging, it
is that peak oil output will occur somewhere
around 2015.
Whatever the timing of this
momentous event, it is apparent that the world
faces a profound shift in the global availability
of energy as we move from a situation of relative
abundance to one of relative scarcity. It should
be noted that this shift will apply, above
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