How Wars of the Future May Be Fought ...
Just to Run the Machines That Fight Them
by Michael T Klare
WorkingForChange (June 14 2007)
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 US warships in the Persian Gulf) and
you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons 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 1.3 billion gallons: 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 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 (DoD) is, in fact, 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 2007 report by a defense contractor, LMI Government
Consulting {1}, suggests that the Pentagon might consume as much as
340,000 barrels (fourteen million gallons) 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 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 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 cut back
on its gas use in order 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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".
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 DoD 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.
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 US 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".
LMI arrived at this conclusion from a careful analysis of current US
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.
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 US
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 US 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.
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 DoD, 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 US plans to retain "enduring" bases in Iraq,
along with its already impressive and elaborate basing infrastructure in
these other countries.
The US 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
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" {2} for the benefit of US corporations and
consumers, fighting overseas battles and establishing its bases to
ensure that we get our daily fuel fix. 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).
Notes:
{1} LMI Government Consulting
http://www.lmi.org/NewsandEvents/news/News07_006.aspx
How it LMI (Logistics Management Institute) Began: In September 1961,
shortly after taking office, Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara sent
a memorandum to President John F Kennedy advising that he and the
Materiel Assistant Secretaries had identified a "number of highly
complex problems of long standing" relating to procurement, logistics,
and relations with the Defense industry. "I have concluded", Secretary
McNamara wrote, "that we can achieve major breakthroughs in logistics
management where we spend half of the Defense budget by sponsoring the
establishment of a special, full-time organization of highly talented
business management specialists". It would be a "nonprofit, fact-finding
and research organization, guided by a group of Trustees of national
reputation and supported by a contract with the Department of Defense".
President Kennedy returned the memorandum with his handwritten notation
of agreement. Three weeks later - October 03 1961 - the Logistics
Management Institute was born.
{2} "Michael Klare on oil wars and the American military: Transforming
the American Military into a Global Oil-Protection Service",
TomDispatch.com (October 07 2004)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1888/michael_klare_on_oil_wa...
