McClatchy: Rising fuel prices hits Air Force, other services hard

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17724.html

Rising fuel prices hits Air Force, other services hard
By Dave Montgomery | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Tue, July 10, 2007



WASHINGTON — You think your gasoline costs are high? Every time the price at the pump jumps a nickel, it causes budgetary heartburn for the U.S. Air Force, whose gas-guzzling fleet of nearly 6,000 aircraft devours about 7 million gallons of fuel a day.

The cost of a fill-up for a B-52 bomber, an eight-engine behemoth that holds nearly 48,000 gallons of jet fuel, can easily surpass $100,000. A sleek F-16 fighter sucks up more than $300 worth of fuel a minute when it kicks in its afterburners and blasts through the sound barrier.

"We burn a lot of gas," acknowledged Assistant Air Force Secretary Bill Anderson, who oversees fuel consumption for the service.

The skyrocketing price of oil is causing a strain on the Defense Department, the largest petroleum consumer in the nation, if not the world. With combat forces deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. strategists are struggling to keep up with burgeoning fuel costs for a war machine that includes uneconomical fuel-eaters such as ships, tanks, helicopters and an array of fixed-wing aircraft.

more...

And it exists mostly to make sure it gets petroleum?

Wow.

one of the early battles was from England bombing train tracks the Germans were building in Basra, Iraq? Seems the Germans had just switched their navy from coal to oil...and so had England....! England ended up taking Iraq. And here we are basically fighting for the same damn oil! If the military had any brains, they'd be looking for alternative energy sources (like the nuke subs) or maybe more efficient ones.