The
Pentagon v. Peak Oil
By Michael Klare
16 June, 2007
TomDispatch.com
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.
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 (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, 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.
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 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 U.S. 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 U.S.
plans to retain “enduring”
bases in Iraq, along with its already impressive and elaborate
basing infrastructure in these other countries.
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
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. 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).
Copyright 2007 Michael T.
Klare
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