Fuel costs for Iraqi war approaching $1 billion per week

[graywarrior]

Don't let the magazine turn you away from this article


March 10, 2008 Issue
Copyright © 2008 The American Conservative

Oil for War

After invading one of the most petroleum-rich countries on earth, the U.S. military is running on empty.

by Robert Bryce

(snip)
Today the average American G.I. in Iraq uses about 20.5 gallons of fuel every day, more than double the daily volume consumed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2004. Thus, in order to secure the third-richest country on the planet, the U.S. military is burning enormous quantities of petroleum. And nearly every drop of that fuel is imported into Iraq. These massive fuel requirements—just over 3 million gallons per day for Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Energy Support Center—are a key reason for the soaring cost of the war effort.

(snip)
In 2007 alone, the U.S. military in Iraq burned more than 1.1 billion gallons of fuel. (American Armed Forces generally use a blend of jet fuel known as JP-8 to propel both aircraft and automobiles.) About 5,500 tanker trucks are involved in the Iraqi fuel-hauling effort. That fleet of trucks is enormously costly. In November 2006, a study produced by the U.S. Military Academy estimated that delivering one gallon of fuel to U.S. soldiers in Iraq cost American taxpayers $42—and that didn’t include the cost of the fuel itself. At that rate, each U.S. soldier in Iraq is costing $840 per day in fuel delivery costs, and the U.S. is spending $923 million per week on fuel-related logistics in order to keep 157,000 G.I.s in Iraq. Given that the Iraq War is now costing about $2.5 billion per week, petroleum costs alone currently account for about one-third of all U.S. military expenditure in Iraq.


(Link to article)
http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_03_10/cover.html

[whistle]

1. How many barrels per day is that...at $140 pbl that is over 1.1 million barrels per day

[cliss]

2. I'll skip the irony and focus on the gas-guzzling.

Waging a war takes a lot of gas.

I've read that some of the military vehicles are gas-guzzlers which is beyond belief. A Bradley fighting vehicle has the astonishing mileage of 0.5 miles per gallon. That's 1/2 mile per gallon. Some vehicles use so much gas that they often have a re-filling vehicle running right behind them Cuz they'd run out of gas.

Waging a war for oil, and then burning right through it. Makes a lot of sense.

[exothermic]

3. Well, we have been buying $700 hammers for decades. What's new?

:shrug:

[predfan]

4. If we were only paying for the FUEL COSTS in real time, not passing

them down to our children, we'd have to add another 52 cents to the federal gas tax in this country.

That'd roughly generate $52B. Ask your conservative friends how pleased they are to saddle their kids and grandkids with these costs, and why we're doing it.