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[Juliana Dutra <kila01 AT yahoo.com>]

Gas Pains

One of the U.S. military's greatest vulnerabilities in
Iraq is its enormous appetite for fuel. The insurgents
have figured this out

by Robert Bryce

The Department of Defense now has about 27,000
vehicles in Iraq—and every one of them gets lousy gas
mileage. To power that fleet the Defense Logistics
Agency must move huge quantities of fuel into the
country in truck convoys from Kuwait, Turkey, and
Jordan. All that fuel gives American soldiers a
tremendous battlefield advantage (in communications,
mobility, and firepower, among other things). But
overseeing and carrying out this process requires the
work of some 20,000 American soldiers and private
contractors. Every day some 2,000 trucks leave Kuwait
alone for various locales in Iraq.

In short, the American GI is the most energy-consuming
soldier ever seen on the field of war.. The U.S.
military now uses about 1.7 million gallons of fuel a
day in Iraq.. each of the 150,000 soldiers on the
ground consumes roughly 9 gallons of fuel a day. And
that figure has been rising.

Some of the rise in consumption is due to the
insurgents' use of improvised explosive devices..
"This is a war of convoy ambushes and car bombs. There
is no front line.".. IEDs have forced the Americans to
add armor to their fleet of Humvees in Iraq. A fully
armored Humvee weighs more than five tons and requires
a larger engine and heavier suspension than the
non-armored model. The added armor will help protect
U.S. soldiers from IEDs ..but it also means higher
fuel consumption for their vehicles. Which means, in
turn, that more tanker trucks will have to be driven
into Iraq and those trucks will provide more targets
for the insurgents.. It's difficult to guard them all.
When
insurgents see that American patrols are increasing in
one region, they can quickly and easily shift their
attacks on fueling stations, pipelines, truck
convoys, refineries to another region.

It's a vicious cycle: attacks on convoys produce a
need for more armor, which produces a need for more
fuel, which produces larger convoys, which produce
more targets for attack. 

In decades past, U.S. Army logisticians assumed that
30 percent [of the tonnage carried by supply lines]
was fuel, and the rest was food, water, and supplies.
Today the fuel component may be as high as 70
percent..

The insurgents' tactics may not stop the flow of motor
fuel to American troops, but they are part of the
broader war that is forcing the United States and its
allies in Iraq to defend every pipeline, every
refinery, every tanker truck, and every fuel depot.
Even in peacetime that's a difficult task.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military in Iraq is in a bind. It
has no choice but to continue fortifying its vehicles
with armor and pumping imported fuel into, for
example, the Bradley fighting vehicle (which gets less
than two miles per gallon) and the M1 Abrams tank
(less than one mile per gallon)... soldiers on the
ground are beginning to see that "the more
fuel-efficient we are, the more tactically sound we are."