As an institution, the Pentagon runs on oil. Its jet fighters, bombers, tanks, Humvees, and other vehicles burn 75% of the fuel used by the Department of Defense. For example, B-52 bombers consume 47,000 gallons per mission, and when an F-16 fighter kicks in its afterburners, it burns through $300 worth of fuel a minute. In fact, according to an article in the April 2010 issue of Energy Source, the official newsletter of the Pentagon's fuel-buying component, the DoD purchases three billion gallons of jet fuel per year.
Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense has been consuming vast quantities of fuel. According to 2008 figures, for example, U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan used a staggering 90 million gallons per month. Given the base-building boom that preceded President Obama's Afghan surge, the 2010 figures may be significantly higher.
In 2009, according to the Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), the military spent $3.8 billion for 31.3 million barrels -- around 1.3 billion gallons -- of oil consumed at posts, camps, and bases overseas. Moreover, DESC's bulk-fuels division, which purchases jet fuel and naval diesel fuel among other petroleum products, awarded $2.2 billion in contracts to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Another $974 million was reportedly spent by the ground-fuels division, which awards contracts for diesel fuel, gasoline, and heating oil for ground operations, just for the war in Afghanistan in 2009.
The Pentagon's foreign wars have left it particularly heavily dependent on oil services, energy, and petroleum companies. An analysis published at Foreign Policy in Focus found that, in 2005, 145 such companies had contracts with the Pentagon. That year, the Department of Defense paid out more than $1.5 billion to BP alone and a total of $8 billion taxpayer dollars, in total, to energy-related firms on what is a far-from-complete list of companies.
In 2009, according to the Defense Energy Support Center, the military awarded $22.5 billion in energy contracts. More than $16 billion of that went to purchasing bulk fuel. Some 10 top petroleum suppliers got the lion's share, more than $11.5 billion, among them big names like Shell, Exxon Mobil and Valero. The largest contractor, however, was BP, which received more than $2.2 billion -- almost 12% of all petroleum-contract dollars awarded by the Pentagon for the year.
While one exceptionally powerful department of the federal government has been feeding money into BP (and other oil giants) with abandon, BP has consistently run afoul of U.S. government regulators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). According to the Center for Public Integrity, "BP account[ed] for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the [oil] refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years." Records obtained by the Center demonstrate that betweenJune 2007 and February 2010, BP received a total of 862 citations, mostly for alleged violations of "OSHA's process safety management standard, a sweeping rule governing everything from storage of flammable liquids to emergency shutdown systems." Of these citations, 760 were considered "egregious willful," which OSHA defines as a violation even more severe than those committed due to "plain indifference" or evidencing "intentional disregard for employee health and safety." As a result, BP faces $90 million in penalties which the company is currently contesting.
Over those same years, BP received around $5.7 billion in federal contracts, according to official government data. In fact, the $2.2 billion the Pentagon paid to the oil giant in 2009 accounted for almost 16% of the company's nearly $14 billion in annual profits.
This fiscal year, the U.S. military has already awarded the company more than $837 million, inking its latest deal with BP in March.
The Pentagon's Green Revolution
In recent years, the gas-guzzling Pentagon has launched a major effort to invest in developing green technology -- or at least give the appearance of doing so -- with, at best, mixed results. As defense-tech writer Noah Shachtman has pointed out, the military is "now focusing on algal feedstock for biofuel and next-generation solar panels. One of the world's largest solar-power projects is planned for the Army's main training center, at Fort Irwin, Calif. Billions in stimulus money were spent to green military facilities."
But efforts in the Bush years to develop "green" vehicles generally stalled, flopped, or barely got rolling. Under the Obama administration, more ambitious goals have been set, but tangible results are still lacking. Last year, the military's contracts for renewable fuels derived from algae, according to DESC, added up to less than 22,000 gallons.
One major reason for this, Shachtman writes, is that "the current systems for delivering power and fuel to war zones are reliable, if inefficient and unsustainable. Military leaders," he adds "don't want to jeopardize operations in Afghanistan or Iraq for something perceived as experimental or risky." As a result, whatever solar panels it has installed or renewable jet fuel it has purchased, the Pentagon remains dependent on buying huge amounts of petroleum products from BP and other large energy corporations, and when it comes to war-making, any substantive reduction in oil dependence appears far off indeed.
Nonetheless, the Department of Defense has devoted significant resources to publicizing its green efforts. The commander-in-chief has even lent a hand. On March 31st, President Obama stood in front of a "green" F-18 Hornet fighter designed to run partly on bio-fuels and announced to the nation that he was proposing to open large new areas off the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling. Less than a month later, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico.
In the weeks since, despite Obama's tough talk, his reported "anger and frustration," and his efforts to identify the proper "ass to kick," as well as the Pentagon's much-touted green-energy initiative, the U.S. military continues, as Shachtman points out, to burn "22 gallons of diesel [fuel] per soldier per day in Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100,000 a person annually."
In other words, as a direct result of war-making in distant lands, taxpayer dollars, including those from Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, will continue to flow into BP coffers, even as more wildlife dies, more beaches are fouled, and more livelihoods are lost in the Gulf of Mexico.
Tough Talk and No Action
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