From arens%venera.isi.edu@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU Wed Feb 20 22:07:41 1991 Return-Path: <@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU:ACTIV-L@UMCVMB.BITNET> Date: Wed, 20 Feb 91 15:35:48 CST Reply-To: arens%venera.isi.edu@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU Sender: Activists Mailing List From: Yigal Arens Subject: ARTICLE: US Military Fuel Consumption To: Multiple recipients of list ACTIV-L Date: Wed, 20 Feb 91 11:10:30 -0800 From: schooler@ISI.EDU Date: Wed, 20 Feb 91 10:36:08 -0800 From: drewry@pa.dec.com >From heller@wse.dec.com Mon Feb 18 19:16:52 1991 The following is an article entitled ``Military Guzzlers - Why do you think they're called "tanks"?'' from the January 24-30 1991 issue of _Metro_. It's a bit long, but very provocative. Especially interesting (or sickening) is the section "GALLONS PER MILE". Read and gag. =jennine ===================================================================== ``In an attempt to determine how much oil has been consumed by the US military in the Persion Gulf, I contacted the Defense Fuel Supply Cetner. After a brief discussion, a DFSC official informed me curtly: "I don't believe we would want to make that information public. We wouldn't want the enemy to find out." While precise information on military energy consumption is difficult to obtain, Worldwatch Institute researcher Michael Renner notes that during peacetime , the US military uses the equivalent of approximately 37 tons of oil each year. If the fuel needs of the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons program and the military's space program are factored in, however, the Pentagon's total peacetime energy bill could top 105 million tons of oil. In his excellent chapter "Assessing the Military's War on the Environmnet" in the forthcoming State of the World Report, Renner states: "The Pentagon is the single largest consumer [of oil] domestically, and very likely worldwide... It uses enough energy in 12 months to run the entire US urban mass transit system for almost 14 years." One of the few published investigations of the military's oil habits was conducted by Tom Cutler in the July 1989 issue of _Armed Forces Journal International_. "The military's share of the total oil market in peacetime amounts to only about 2 to 3 percent of commercial demand," Cutler reported. Total US oil consumption is 17 million barrels a day (six billion barrels a year), which means the Pentagon may be consuming a little more than half a million barrels of the nation's oil each day. But that is not the whole picture since, as Cutler notes, "one third or more of US military oil consumption occurs outside US territorial boundaries." The military is critaclly dependent on oil for all of its operations. Oil supplies 79 percent of the Defense Department's energy needs while only 8 percent of the military's energy comes from electricity, 8 percent from natural gas and 4 percent from coal. Compare this to the world's energy budget - 34 percent from oil, 20 percent from natural gas, 30 eprcent from coal, 8 percent from nuclear (_1990-91 World Resources_ and US Dept of Energy). Between wars, one would think the military's main purpose would be to "guard the peace." Not so. During times of peace, Tom Cutler writes: "The military's primary objective is to ensure adequate oil supplies for the national defense..." Cutler should know: he is a former head of NATO's Petroleum Planning Committee and is the author of _The Military Demand for Oil_. During wartime, the military's use of energy escalates dramatically. In 1940, the military's share of the nation's total energy was only 1 percent. Five years later, following the outbreak of WWII, military consumption had jumped to 29 percent. (In the postwar era, the military never relinquished its growing claim on the country's oil. At its peak, the Vietnam War was consuming more than one million barrels of oil a day.) The Defense Fuel Supply Center is the world's biggest customer for crude oil. The DFSC purchases three-fourths of the military's oil products >from within North America. While only 5 percent of the Pentagon's purchases actually come directly from the Middle East, one of the military's most trusted suppliers had been the Kuwait National Pertroleum Company (the ninth-largest foreign supplier of US military oil). GALLONS PER MILE Because the military's tanks, planes and ships burn fuel at such intense rates, it becomes impractical to talk about consumption in "miles per gallon." Military fuel use is, instead, tabulated in "gallons per mile," "gallons per minute" and "barrels per hour." The biggest gas-hogs in the Pentagon's arsenal are the Navy's nonnuclear aircraft carriers, which burn 134 barrels (5,628 gallons) per hour, and battleships, which consume 68 barrels (2,856 gallons) per hour. At its top speed of 25 knots, the USS Independence (a 1,070-foot-long aircraft carrier with 4.1 acres of flight deck and a crew of 2,300) consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day. Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll Jr. (USN Ret.) of the Washington DC-based Center for Defense Information, is a former commander of the Independence. While stationed off Vietnam, Carroll recalls, the ship consumed 100,000 gallons of fuel a day. Every four days the Independence took on a million gallons of new fuel - half of which went to supply the carrier's jet aircraft. Steaming to the Persioan Gulf in 14 days, the Independence would consume more than two million gallons of fuel. Simply "standing by" in the Gulf, the carrier must still consume oil at a voracious pace in order to purify 380,000 gallons of fresh water daily and produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of a city of 40,000 people. At full throttle, the 120,000-lb M-1 Abrams tank can eat up seven barrel (252 gallons) of fuel per hour. In actual battlefield simulations, however, these tanks have proven to have a built-in energy-conservation feature - the M1's 1500-horsepower engines break down, on average, every 152 miles. It takes nearly 500,000 gallons a day to supply an armored division of 348 tanks (_Defense Monitor_). The same amount of fuel would allow 348 fuel-efficient General Motors Geo automobiles to circle the Earth 2.8 times at the equator and still have enough gas left for Sunday shopping. The Pentagon's biggest gas-guzzler is the US Air Force. The combined aircraft of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps consume 61 percent of all the Pentagon's oil. A B-52 bomber gulps down 3,612 gallons per hour. F-4 Phantom fighter/bombers devour 1,680 gallons per hour. While a fully loaded passenger jet consumes around 17 gallons per minute, a single-passenger F-15 fighter, at peak thrust, burns 25 gallons per minute. An F-16 jet on a training mission ignites more fuel in a single hour than the average car owner consumes in two years. To reach supersonic speeds, a pilot turns on the plane's afterburners. While this can triple a jet's speed, it increases fuel consumption 20 times. With its afterburner kicked in, Cutler writes, the "relatively fuel-efficient" F-15 fighter torches fuel at the astounding rate of 240 gallons per minute. And as the military opts for bigger, faster and more sophisticated weapons, fuel efficiency continues to plummet. Now try to magnify these figures by factoring in the 300 US jets staioned on four aircraft carrier groups in the Gulf, another 700 planes stationed in Saudi Arabia and 22 Stealth bombers. Meanwhile, the hundreds of planes stationed in the Gulf continue to consume oil, even while they just sit on the ground. To its dismay, the Pentagon has discovered that the intense heat of the desert sun causes the metal skins of the jets to expand, creating fuel leaks. OIL AND LOGISTICS "Fuel is the single largest commidity that that military logisticians must transport in terms of both volume and weight," Cutler writes. In a modern military force, he continues, "two-thirds of the weight of supplies would be for petroleum alone." According to _Jane's All the World's Aircraft_, a fully loaded C-5 Galaxy cargo plane taking off on a 6,000-mile flight will weigh more than 418 tons. Nearly 4-percent of that weight (167 tons) is fuel. In the first two weeks of Operation Desert Shield, more than two billion pounds of weapons, food, medical supplies and ammunition had to be trucked in from around the US and assembled at distant ports and airfields to be transported more than 7,000 miles to the other side of the Earth. The volume of the inital two-week effort exceeded the entire 1948 Berlin Airlift. The cost of air conditioning alone must be staggering. Water must be cooled to make it palatable. Everything from computers to advanced weapons must be sheltered from the searing heat. Oil is burned to power the air conditioners that cool command centers. In order to keep planes flying through heat or chemical fogs, soldiers are trained to use the "Multiman Intermittent Cooling System" - a large air-conditioning unit equipped with ten long hoses used to pump cool air into the chemical warfare suits worn by runway workers. There is another problem with desert heat. According to a Sept 1990 report from the Congressional Research Office: "Sanitation problems can quickly become unmanageable under the hot sun... Dead bodies, for example, swell and burst. Flies that feed on garbage and human waste broadcast disease." _San Franciso Chronicle_ columnist Herb Caen recently uncovered the macabre fact that it takes three cups of oil to manufacture each military body bag. If war breaks out, how much Saudi oil must be burned in generators to support the refrigerated warehouses of the Pentagon's "graves registration units" who will have to tag and bag thousands of corpses? Unless otherwise noted, the figures in this article are based on a US barrel of oil containing 42 US gallons. (The British oil barrel holds 35 Imperial gallons). Because some figures were derived from foreign sources, these estimates by be somewhat fluid. (In a famous study, the Defense Dept once tried to answer the question "How many gallons are in a 55-gallon drum?" The Pentagon was unable to reach a firm conclusion.)'' -- By Gar Smith * Reprinted without permission