Expensive Afghanistan: Million Dollar Soldiers and $400 for a Gallon of Gas

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Taxpayers Pour Money Into a Black Hole to Subsidize Oil & Dope Industries

Big U.S. politicians, including Nobel ‘Peace Prize' Laureate President Obama, want to escalate the unofficial war in Afghanistan by putting 40,000 or more boots on the ground. What they hide from the public is the cost: One million dollars per soldier per year!



“The cost of sending one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million versus an estimated $12,000 for an Afghani soldier, according to Steve Daggett, a specialist with the Congressional Research Service…The Obama administration is calculating $1 billion per 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan.” http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/63121-crs-calculates-cost-of-us-troop-presence-in-afghanistan

Meanwhile, more people are losing their jobs and homes all over America and there is little public money to help them. One million dollars could create over a hundred jobs! One billion dollars could create thousands upon thousands of jobs! That much money could also buy a lot of health insurance for all those Americans who can't afford it and are dying because they can't afford it. http://healthcaregenocide.blogspot.com/

It costs the U.S. military $400 for one gallon of gas in Afghanistan. Because a military humvee has extra plating for mines and other needs, it gets less gas mileage than a regular gas sucking hummer. This means that a military humvee gets about 4 miles to a gallon of gas or in military budget terms, it costs $400 to travel ten miles.

...

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/10/18/expensive-afghanistan-million-dollar-sol

[unhappycamper]

1. That and the fact that we are flying an average of 11 C-5/C-17s a day

from Charlestown SC to Afghanistan.

I tried looking up how much gas per hour a C-5 uses but came up (kinda) dry. I did find a 2007 study that said:

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11837&page=87

Our nation’s dependence on imported oil leaves it dangerously vulnerable to attack. A single well-designed attack on the petroleum infrastructure in the Middle East could send oil to well over $100 per barrel and devastate the world’s economy. Schultz and Woolsey (2005) analyzed this vulnerability in a paper entitled “The petroleum bomb.” As shown in Figure 1-1, the U.S. dependency on foreign oil is expected grow to 70 percent by 2025, and Figure 1-3 shows that the nonfighter aircraft in the Air Force inventory consume 69.9 percent (approximately 1.82 billion gal/yr) of DoD aviation fuel. From mid-2004 to mid-2006, the cost of jet fuel increased from approximately $1/gal to $2.53/gal, a significant extra cost burden. These two key factors led to the creation of the Assured Fuels Initiative in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).


Then this puppy showed up:

http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/man/uswpns/air/cargo/c5galaxy.html

Four turbofan engines mounted on pylons under the wings power the C-5. Each engine pod is nearly 27 feet (8.2 meters) long, weighs 7,900 pounds (3,555 kilograms) and has an air intake diameter of more than 8 1/2 feet (2.6 meters). The Galaxy has 12 integral wing tanks with a capacity of 51,150 gallons (194,370 liters) of fuel - enough to fill 6 1/2 regular-size railroad tank cars. The fuel weighs 322,500 pounds (145,125 kilograms) and permits the C-5, carrying a 204,904-pound (92,207-kilogram) payload, to fly 2,150 nautical miles (3,440 kilometers), off-load, and fly another 500 miles (800 kilometers) without aerial refueling.

So basically 51,150 gallons of fuel will get you about 1/3 of the way to Afghanistan.


on edit: changed C-117 to C-17 in message title.

[blindpig]

2. +1

k&r

[leveymg]

4. Jet fuel is about $3/gallon - times 50,000 X 3 = $450,000/flight in fuel costs, alone.

Times 11 flights out of one AFB = @$5 million/day X 300 days/yr = $1.5 billion/yr in fuel costs to supply Afghanistan War from one AFB. Times 10 (USAF global airlift to AfPak) = a lot of revenues for ExxonMobil/Shell/Chevron-Texaco, etc. That's just for getting stuff there.

[SammyWinstonJack]

3. Yabut, it's the 'right' war to fight. Gotta get the bad guys.

:eyes:

[madrchsod]

5. this is his Vietnam

will he man up and tell the american people his war is over? or will he continue to send our sons and daughters into the hell hole of Afghanistan?

i think he`ll continue the war until the country bleeds dry.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Money is not a problem.

If the US finds itself running short of war funds the Fed can always print up some more. Too bad they won't give it to you. They will only lend it to you at interest which gets tacked onto the national debt. But then again, that's a problem the kids and grand kids can deal with.

Media Distortion: Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians to "Save Our Troops"

Eight Years of Horror Perpetrated against the people of Afghanistan

By Marc W. Herold

I wish to focus in my talk upon the execution of (not the rationales for) war and on the effects of this U.S-led war upon Afghanistan and its people. A fully referenced version of my talk is coming up on RAWA's web site as I speak.

Let me begin with a brief comment. As all marketing accepts, words matter and we thus need to struggle which meaning dominates. Let me give you two examples: the U.S/NATO presence in Afghanistan is not about peace-keeping but rather about a foreign occupation; and those fighting such occupation are neither terrorists nor insurgents but rather the resistance (though maybe not our preferred type of resistance). A strange thing happened during the last twenty years: any force opposing U.S. geo-political designs around the world is now labeled terrorist. As Mike Davis so tellingly pointed out, the car bomb or suicide-bomber is the air force of the poor.<4> The Axis armies of mid-twentieth century were never labeled terrorist. You see this war is as much about words, meanings, images and information as it is about IED's and GPS-guided bombs.

I begin with an uncomfortable fact: race/ethnicity matters in the execution of America's post-Korean wars in the Third World (whether in Indochina, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan). We see this in the differential value put on the lives of those "Others", as well as in the language/framing of official discourse and in the language of common U.S. soldiers (graffiti, inscriptions on bombs and missiles destined to rain down upon Afghanistan or Iraq like "Here's a Ramadan present from Chad Rickenberg", <5> in e-mails , at Abu Ghraib, use of the term 'Islamo-fascists', etc.). <6> U.S. official and media demonization of "the enemy" - a long U.S. tradition <7> - gets translated into such inscriptions on bombs and the like. In 1989, Christopher Hitchens published excerpts from a songbook produced and distributed by the US Air Force's 77th Tactical Fighter Squadron (based in South Carolina): "Phantom flyers in the sky, Persian-pukes prepare to die, Rolling in with snake and nape <8>, Allah creates but we cremate."<9>

snip

The U.S corporate media has spent eight long years serving as the Pentagon's mouthpiece - naturally some news reporters buck the trend maintaining independence, e.g., Carlotta Gall (New York Times) and Kathy Gannon come to mind. I have documented this in numerous publications. <18> During 2001-5, this media was enthralled with the notion of "precision weaponry," assuring the U.S public that the U.S was waging a clean, antiseptic war. Once the Taliban & Co. resistance began going on the offensive and war-related deaths soared, the media simply chose to omit reporting upon Afghan civilian casualties; the only exception being cases where the death toll was huge and simply could not be hidden, e.g., a fine example of that was the recent slaughter of close to 100 Afghan civilians executed by two USAF F-15E Strike Eagles. <19> Special effort was devoted to not printing any photos of innocent Afghans killed or wounded by U.S bombs or ground forces. <20> Photos like the following never appear in the U.S corporate media or in Human Rights Watch (and publications of the other humanitarian interventionists):

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23746.htm

[SammyWinstonJack]

7. +1 nt

[Christa]

8. K & R nt

[tinrobot]

9. So, an infantryman makes about $30-50K per year....

Who gets that other $950,000?