[R-G] The Military-Petroleum Complex

[Anthony Fenton]

The Military-Petroleum Complex
Nick Turse | March 24, 2008
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5097
Foreign Policy In Focus 	
www.fpif.org

In November 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, then secretary of  
defense Donald Rumsfeld told Steve Kroft of CBS that U.S. saber- 
rattling toward Iraq had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to  
do with oil.” In 2003, Rumsfeld called the assertion that the United  
States had invaded Iraq to get at its oil “utter nonsense.” (“We don’t  
take our forces and go around the world and try to take other  
people’s . . . resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United  
States does.”) In 2005, speaking to American troops in Fallujah,  
Rumsfeld reiterated the point: “The United States, as you all know  
better than any, did not come to Iraq for oil.” Strong denials for  
sure, but were they true?

Rumsfeld’s boss -- and a man who knows a thing or two about addiction  
– President George W. Bush, proclaimed, in early 2006, that “America  
is addicted to oil.” Later that year, Bush almost came clean about  
Iraq, admitting (after a fashion), according to Peter Baker of the  
Washington Post, that “the war is about oil.” For the first time he  
used petroleum as a justification for continuing the occupation of  
Iraq, saying, “You can imagine a world in which these extremists and  
radicals got control of energy resources.” Bush’s acknowledgment was  
no great revelation. After all, oil is not only a key driver of the  
U.S. economy but also a major source of the nation’s energy. As a  
former oilman (with Dick Cheney, the former head of oil-services giant  
Halliburton, as his vice president), Bush knew this all too well—hence  
an invasion of one of the Middle East’s key oil lands topped by an  
occupation where, initially, looters were allowed to tear almost every  
part of the Iraqi capital to pieces, save for the Oil Ministry.

But Rumsfeld’s military was more than just an armed occupier sent to  
lock down the planet’s oil lands. It was also a known petrol addict.  
In his book Blood and Oil, Michael Klare laid out the little- 
acknowledged facts about the Pentagon’s oil obsession:

     The American military relies more than that of any other nation  
on oil-powered ships, planes, helicopters, and armored vehicles to  
transport troops into battle and rain down weapons on its foes.  
Although the Pentagon may boast of its ever-advancing use of computers  
and other high-tech devices, the fighting machines that form the  
backbone of the U.S. military are entirely dependent on petroleum.  
Without an abundant and reliable supply of oil, the Department of  
Defense could neither rush its forces to distant battlefields nor keep  
them supplied once deployed there.

And the deployments DoD has “rushed its forces” to in recent years –  
in Afghanistan and Iraq – have sucked up massive quantities of oil.  
According to Fuel Line, the official newsletter of the Pentagon’s fuel- 
buying component, the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), from  
October 1, 2001, to August 9, 2004, the DESC supplied 1,897,272,714  
gallons of jet fuel, alone, for military operations in Afghanistan.  
Similarly, in less than a year and a half, from March 19, 2003, to  
August 9, 2004, the DESC provided U.S. forces with 1,109,795,046  
gallons of jet fuel for operations in Iraq. In 2005, Lana Hampton of  
the DoD’s Defense Logistics Agency revealed that the military’s  
aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles were guzzling 10 to 11 million  
barrels of fuel each month in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Yet,  
while the Pentagon reportedly burns through an astounding 365,000  
barrels of oil every day (the equivalent of the entire nation of  
Sweden’s daily consumption), Sohbet Karbuz, an expert on global oil  
markets, estimates that the number is really closer to 500,000 barrels.

With such unconstrained consumption, recent U.S. wars have been a boon  
for big oil and have seen the Pentagon rise from the rank of hopeless  
addict to superjunkie. Prior to George Bush’s Global War on Terror,  
the U.S. military admitted to guzzling 4.62 billion gallons of oil per  
year. With the Pentagon’s post-9/11 wars and occupations, annual oil  
consumption has grown to an almost unfathomable 5.46 billion gallons,  
according to the Pentagon’s possibly low-ball statistics.

As a result, the DoD had some of the planet’s biggest petroleum  
dealers, and masters of the corporate universe, on its payroll. In  
2005, alone, the Pentagon paid out more than $1.5 billion to BP PLC –  
the company formerly known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (on whose  
behalf the CIA and its British counterpart covertly overthrew the  
Iranian government back in 1953) and then British Petroleum. In 2005,  
the Pentagon also paid out over $1 billion to N. V. Koninklijke  
Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij -- also known as the Royal Dutch  
Petroleum Company (and best known in the United States for its Shell  
brand gasoline) – and in excess of $1 billion to oil titan ExxonMobil.

In 2005, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Petroleum, and BP ranked sixth,  
seventh, and eighth on the Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s five  
hundred largest corporations in terms of revenue. The next year, they  
bumped their way up to first, third, and fourth, respectively. They  
also ranked 29th, 30th, and 31st on the DoD’s 2006 list of top  
contractors, collectively raking in over $3.5 billion from the  
Pentagon. The big three petrogiants are, however, only the tip of a  
massive, oily iceberg. Also on the Pentagon’s 2006 list were such oil  
services, energy, and petroleum conglomerates as:

Ranking    Company name                         Total take from the  
DoD (in dollars)

6                 Halliburton                                    
6,059,726,743
34               Kuwait Petroleum                       1,011,270,194
45               Valero Energy                             661,171,541
55               Refinery Associates of Texas   576,557,185
66               Abu Dhabi National Oil             494,286,000
70               Bahrain Petroleum                     477,535,378
83               CS Caltex                                     
356,313,452
94               Tesoro Petroleum                      310,564,052

It’s almost impossible to catalog all the companies with at least some  
ties to the oil game that are doing business with the Department of  
Defense, but if just the most obvious names on DoD’s payroll are any  
indication, the U.S. military is mainlining petroleum from a  
remarkable assortment of places. For instance, in 2005 alone, the  
Pentagon payroll listed 145 companies (from A & M Oil to Wyandotte  
Tribal petroleum).

These 145 companies -- far from constituting a complete list of energy- 
related firms on the DoD dole – took in more than 8 billion taxpayer  
dollars in 2005. To put that figure in perspective, that was more than  
the army paid out in the same year to the military-corporate  
powerhouses Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General  
Electric, and the Bechtel Corporation, combined. Or over $2.7 billion  
more than it spent in 2005 on bombs, grenades, guided missiles, guided  
missile launchers, unmanned aerial vehicles, bulk explosives, all  
guns, rockets, rocket launchers, and helicopters.

No doubt due to his outfit’s penchant for petroleum guzzling, in 2005,  
then secretary of defense Rumsfeld issued a memo calling on DoD staff  
to develop plans for employing alternative power sources and energy- 
saving technologies. As defense technology expert Noah Shachtman noted  
in early 2007, while the “Department of Defense might not care about  
the environment,” it had met its green goals ahead of schedule. As a  
result, the Pentagon now touts itself as environmentally conscious,  
drawing attention to its use of wind power at the naval station at  
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and its dabblings in “cleaner, ‘greener’ hybrid  
fuel.” On March 24, 2006, the Pentagon’s American Forces Press Service  
published an article, “Hydrogen Fuel Cells May Help U.S. Military Cut  
Gas Usage,” speculating that someday such technology might  
significantly reduce the military’s “dependence on hydrocarbon-based  
fuels for transportation needs.”

That day is not yet in sight. In fact, on March 23, 2006, the day  
before that article was published, the Pentagon quietly announced a  
series of DoD contracts that demonstrated the degree of its continuing  
addiction to oil: a $241,265,176 deal with Valero Energy; a  
$171,409,329 agreement with Shell Oil; separate contracts of  
$156,616,405 and $23,923,354 with ConocoPhillips; a $124,152,364  
agreement with Refinery Associates of Texas; a $121,053,450 deal with  
Calumet Shreveport Fuels; a $118,374,201 jet fuel contract with Gary- 
Williams Energy Corporation; a $75,094,613 agreement with AGE  
Refining; a $43,994,360 deal with Tesoro Refining; and a $29,524,800  
contract with Western Petroleum – all of which had a completion date  
of April 30, 2007.

Couple this with the fact that, on Rumsfeld’s watch, the Environmental  
Protection Agency granted the DoD a “national security exemption” on  
trucks that failed to meet current emissions standards; that the army  
canceled plans to introduce “hybrid-diesel humvees” (the current  
military model gets just four miles per gallon in city driving and an  
equally dismal eight miles per gallon on the highway); and that it  
similarly dropped plans to retrofit the fuel-guzzling Abrams tank with  
a more efficient diesel engine (the current model, in service in Iraq,  
gets less than a mile per gallon), while the air force deep-sixed  
plans for the possible replacement of aging “surveillance, cargo and  
tanker aircraft engines” – and you’re looking at a Pentagon patently  
incapable of altering its addiction-addled ways in any near future.

Since then, it’s been more of the same. In March 2007, the Pentagon,  
now under Rumsfeld’s replacement, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,  
went on a two-day bender of epic proportions. On March 22 and 23, the  
DoD announced that it had struck “fixed price with economic price  
adjustment” deals, to be fulfilled by April 30, 2008, with ExxonMobil,  
Shell, ConocoPhillips, Valero, Refinery Associates of Texas, and ten  
other petrogiants to the tune of $4 billion. Another petro-binge  
occurred around the 2007 Labor Day holiday. Over the course of three  
days, the DoD acknowledged fuel contracts with BP, Chevron, Tesoro,  
and four others worth more than $1.4 billion.

The Pentagon needs two things to survive: war and oil. And it can’t  
make the first if it doesn’t have the second. In fact, the Pentagon’s  
methods of mass destruction -- fighters, bombers, tanks, Humvees, and  
other vehicles -- burn 75 percent of the fuel used by the DoD. For  
example, B-52 bombers consume 47,000 gallons per mission over  
Afghanistan. But don’t expect big oil (or even smaller petroplayers)  
to turn off the tap for peace. Such corporations are just as wedded to  
war as their most loyal junkie. After all, every time an F-16 fighter  
“kicks in its afterburners and blasts through the sound barrier,” it  
burns through $300 worth of fuel a minute, while each of those B-52  
missions means a $100,000 tax-funded payout.

According to retired lieutenant general Lawrence P. Farrell Jr., the  
president of the National Defense Industrial Association (“America’s  
leading Defense Industry association promoting National Security”),  
the Pentagon is “the single largest consumer of petroleum fuels in the  
United States.” In fact, it’s the world’s largest energy consumer,  
according to Shachtman. That, alone, guarantees the military-petroleum  
complex isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon – just some fuel for  
thought next time you head out to a Shell, BP, Exxon, or Mobil station  
to fill ’er up.

Nick Turse, a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, is the associate  
editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com.