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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 14, 2007 8:09:15 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fighting Wars for the Oil Needed for Fighting Wars
See what's free at AOL.com.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 14, 2007 4:40:24 PM PDT
Subject: The Pentagon v. Peak Oil -- How Wars of the Future May Be
Fought Just to Run the Machines That Fight
http://www.ichblog.eu/text/content/view/1676/1/ *The Pentagon v.
Peak Oil -- How Wars of the Future May Be Fought Just to Run the
Machines That Fight*
By Michael T. Klare
06/14/07
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.
"ICH" -- 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.
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 (D.o.D.) is, in fact, the world's
leading consumer of petroleum. It can be difficult to obtain
precise details on the D.o.D.'s daily oil hit, but an April 2007
report by a defense contractor, LMI Government Consulting, suggests
that the Pentagon might consume as much as 340,000 barrels (14
million gallons) every day. This is greater than the total
national consumption of Sweden or Switzerland.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/05/01/
pentagon_study_says_oil_reliance_strains_military/
*Not "Guns v. Butter," But "Guns v. Oil"*
For anyone who drives a motor vehicle these days, this has ominous
implications. With the price of gasoline now 75 cents to a dollar
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 D.o.D. 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 cut back on its gas use in order to
protect favored weapons systems under development. Of course, the
D.o.D. 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 an American 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 U.S. Department of Energy (D.o.E.) 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 gasoline prices of about $2 per gallon. 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 D.o.E. 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 Department of Defense. 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 vehicle in place of an SUV 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 number one consumer of
petroleum products, the D.o.D. 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 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 2007 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."
http://www.lmi.org/NewsandEvents/news/News07_006.aspx
And this is likely to be the least of the Pentagon's worries. The
Department of Defense is, after all, the world's richest military
organization, and so can be expected to tap into hidden accounts of
one sort or another in order 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 D.o.D. must now confront the
looming -- but hard to assess -- reality of "Peak Oil"; the very
real possibility that global oil production is at or near its
maximum sustainable ("peak") output and will soon commence an
irreversible decline.
http://www.peakoil.net/
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
down the pike -- 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, moreover, that this shift will apply, above all, to the form
of energy most in demand by the Pentagon: the petroleum liquids
used to power planes, ships, and armored vehicles.
*The Bush Doctrine Faces Peak Oil*
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
http://www.iags.org/es.html security" by academic strategists,
the D.o.D. 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.
http://www.oft.osd.mil/ http://www.lmi.org/NewsandEvents/news/
News07_006.aspx
The resulting study, "Transforming the Way the D.o.D. Looks at
Energy," was a
http://www.oft.osd.mil/ 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."
LMI arrived at this conclusion from a careful analysis of current
U.S. military doctrine. At the heart of the national military
strategy imposed by the Bush administration -- the Bush Doctrine --
are two core principles: transformation, or the conversion of
America's stodgy, tank-heavy Cold War military apparatus into an
agile, continent-hopping high-tech, futuristic war machine; and pre-
emption, or the initiation of hostilities against "rogue states"
like Iraq and Iran, thought to be pursuing weapons of mass
destruction. What both principles entail is a substantial increase
in the Pentagon's consumption of petroleum products -- either
because such plans rely, to an increased extent, on air and sea-
power or because they imply an accelerated tempo of military
operations.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html
As summarized by LMI, implementation of the Bush Doctrine requires
that "our forces must expand geographically and be more mobile and
expeditionary so that they can be engaged in more theaters and
prepared for expedient deployment anywhere in the world"; at the
same time, they "must transition from a reactive to a proactive
force posture to deter enemy forces from organizing for and
conducting potentially catastrophic attacks." It follows that, "to
carry out these activities, the U.S. military will have to be even
more energy intense.... Considering the trend in operational fuel
consumption and future capability needs, this ‘new' force
employment construct will likely demand more energy/fuel in the
deployed setting."
The resulting increase in petroleum consumption is likely to prove
dramatic. During
Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the average American soldier
consumed only four gallons of oil per day; as a result of George W.
Bush's initiatives, a U.S. soldier in Iraq is now using four times
as much. If this rate of increase continues unabated, the next
major war could entail an expenditure of 64 gallons per soldier per
day.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/05/01/
pentagon_study_says_oil_reliance_strains_military/
It was the unassailable logic of this situation that led LMI to
conclude that there is a severe "operational disconnect" between
the Bush administration's principles for future war-fighting and
the global energy situation. The administration has, the company
notes, "tethered operational capability to high-technology
solutions that require continued growth in energy sources" -- and
done so at the worst possible moment historically. After all, the
likelihood is that the global energy supply is about to begin
diminishing rather than expanding. Clearly, writes LMI in its April
2007 report, "it may not be possible to execute operational
concepts and capabilities to achieve our security strategy if the
energy implications are not considered." And when those energy
implications are considered, the strategy appears "unsustainable."
The Pentagon as a Global Oil-Protection Service
How will the military respond to this unexpected challenge? One
approach, favored by some within the D.o.D., is to go "green" --
that is, to emphasize the accelerated development and acquisition
of fuel-efficient weapons systems so that the Pentagon can retain
its commitment to the Bush Doctrine, but consume less oil while
doing so. This approach, if feasible, would have the obvious
attraction of allowing the Pentagon to assume an environmentally-
friendly facade while maintaining and developing its existing,
interventionist force structure.
But there is also a more sinister approach that may be far more
highly favored by senior officials: To ensure itself a "reliable"
source of oil in perpetuity, the Pentagon will increase its efforts
to maintain control over foreign sources of supply, notably oil
fields and refineries in the Persian Gulf region, especially in
Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
This would help explain the recent talk of U.S. plans to retain
"enduring" bases in Iraq, along with its already impressive and
elaborate basing infrastructure in these other countries.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/
The U.S. military first began procuring petroleum products from
Persian Gulf suppliers to sustain combat operations in the Middle
East and Asia during World War II, and has been doing so ever
since. It was, in part, to protect this vital source of petroleum
for military purposes that, in 1945, President Roosevelt first
proposed the deployment of an American military presence in the
Persian Gulf region. Later, the protection of Persian Gulf oil
became more important for the economic well-being of the United
States, as articulated in President Jimmy Carter's "Carter
http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.org/documents/speeches/
su80jec.phtml Doctrine" speech of January 23, 1980 as well as in
President George H.W. Bush's August 1990 decision to stop Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, which led to the first Gulf War --
and, many would argue, the decision of the younger Bush to invade
Iraq over a decade later.
Along the way, the American military has been transformed into a
"global oil-protection service" for the benefit of U.S.
corporations and consumers, fighting overseas battles and
establishing its bases to ensure that we get our daily fuel fix.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1888/
michael_klare_on_oil_wars_and_the_american_military
It would be both sad and ironic, if the military now began fighting
wars mainly so that it could be guaranteed the fuel to run its own
planes, ships, and tanks -- consuming hundreds of billions of
dollars a year that could instead be spent on the development of
petroleum alternatives.
~~~
[Michael T. Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at
Hampshire College, is the author of "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and
Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported
Petroleum" (Owl Books).
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805079386/nationbooks08 ]
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