Conservative Revolutionary American Party III: The Pentagon as Global Gas-Guzzler

June 14, 2007: As the world's number one consumer of petroleum products, the DoD will obviously be disproportionately affected by a doubling in the price of crude oil. If it can't turn to Congress for redress, it will have to reduce its profligate consumption of oil and/or cut back on other expenses, including weapons purchases.

To guide its exploration of the issue, the Office of Force Transformation within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy commissioned LMI to conduct a study on the implications of future energy scarcity for Pentagon strategic planning.

The 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."

It was the unassailable logic of this situation that led LMI to conclude that there is a severe "operational disconnect" between the Bush administration's principles for future war-fighting and the global energy situation. The administration has, the company notes, "tethered operational capability to high-technology solutions that require continued growth in energy sources" -- and done so at the worst possible moment historically. After all, the likelihood is that the global energy supply is about to begin diminishing rather than expanding. Clearly, writes LMI in its April 2007 report, "it may not be possible to execute operational concepts and capabilities to achieve our security strategy if the energy implications are not considered." And when those energy implications are considered, the strategy appears "unsustainable."

Along the way, the American military has been transformed into a "global oil-protection service" for the benefit of U.S. corporations and consumers, fighting overseas battles and establishing its bases to ensure that we get our daily fuel fix. It would be both sad and ironic, if the military now began fighting wars mainly so that it could be guaranteed the fuel to run its own planes, ships, and tanks -- consuming hundreds of billions of dollars a year that could instead be spent on the development of petroleum alternatives.

The Bush Doctrine -- are two core principles: transformation, or the conversion of America's stodgy, tank-heavy Cold War military apparatus into an agile, continent-hopping high-tech, futuristic war machine; and pre-emption, or the initiation of hostilities against "rogue states" like Iraq and Iran, thought to be pursuing weapons of mass destruction. What both principles entail is a substantial increase in the Pentagon's consumption of petroleum products -- either because such plans rely, to an increased extent, on air and sea-power or because they imply an accelerated tempo of military operations.

Comment: It would be smarter to be investing in sailing ships and raising horses for an army and navy of the future. It is going to take years to bred enough horses to increase their numbers back to plow our fields and to ride around chasing the cattle rustlers (to fight the invading Huns. Maybe we should train our soldiers to be cannibals?

Also to use the oil we have left in the earth to build sustainable energy infrastructure and to focus on reducing world population. A population of a growing size, that puts unreasonable demands on limited water, top soil, and fish stocks sustainability and increases the risk of war over resource.

But didn't Cheney's secret energy meeting with the oil company bosses already foresee this? And decided to got take the oil and keep secret from the American people that we are headed for a disaster.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174810/michael_klare_the_pentagon_as_global_gas_guzzler

Studies Find DNA Damage From Anti-Coca Herbicide
By Stephen Leahy
Tierramérica

Saturday 16 June 2007

Toronto - U.S.-funded aerial spraying of coca plantations in Colombia near the Ecuador border has severely damaged the DNA of local residents, a new study has found.

Blood samples from 24 Ecuadorians living within three kilometers of the northern border had 600 to 800 percent more damage to their chromosomes than people living 80 km away, found scientists from the Pontificia Catholic University in Quito, Ecuador.

The border residents who were tested had been exposed to the common herbicide glyphosate - sold by the U.S. agribusiness giant Monsanto under the brand Roundup - during a series of aerial sprayings by the Colombian government begun in 2000, part of the anti-drugs and counterinsurgency Plan Colombia, financed by Washington.

The concentration levels of Roundup were measured at more than 20 times the maximum recommended rate and may be the reason behind the genotoxic (capable of causing genetic mutation) effect on the exposed individuals.

Since 1994 there have been many studies that show potential health impacts of Roundup on people and wildlife.

In 2005, Relyea documented that Roundup was lethal to frogs. More than 90 percent of the tadpoles exposed to small doses were killed by a chemical called polyethoxylated tallowamine (POEA), which is part of normal Roundup formulation. POEA allows glyphosate to penetrate plant leaves.

Experiments with frogs in the United States showed that "more than 80 percent of the adults exposed to Roundup spray at normal rates died in a day." There is no data about the impacts of the spraying of Colombian frogs and amphibians.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/061807HB.shtml

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