In a thought-provoking article Michael Klare explores "How wars of the future may be fought just to run the machines that fight them".
My question is, if the amount of fossil-fuel energy that the mighty US military machine consumes daily is more than Sweden's national consumption, what is the carbon-debt? Tropospheric or stratospheric? The way war is conducted now is unsustainable. To maintain expeditionary forces and a pre-emptive posture, the US Military will either have to adapt - learn to fight mean, lean and green - or go out of business.
Or maintain a permanent presence in the Middle East.
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. ...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.  clipped from www.alternet.orgThe 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.
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