Stop funding America's enemies

Stop Funding America's enemies.David Axe, May 26 2006 DefenseTech.org


"Imagine if, in the middle of World War II, the U.S. government and its people gave Hitler billions of dollars, to train troops and build new weapons. Sounds impossible, right? But that's more or less the situation we find ourselves in today, former CIA director Jim Woolsey recently told the Naval Postgraduate School.The U.S. is in the opening stages of a "Long War" with Islamic extremists. And these adversaries -- whether they're found in madrassas in Riyadh or the government in Tehran -- are funded, in so small part, by oil revenue. Petrodollars go, more or less directly, to training radicals. Petrodollars get funneled to those who make and plant bombs."Except for our own Civil War," Woolsey notes, "this is the only war we fought that we are paying for both sides. We pay Saudi Arabia $160 billion for its oil, and $3 or $4 billion of that goes to the Wahhabis, who teach children to hate. We are paying for these terrorists with our SUVs."And we are paying for them with our tanks, our Bradleys, and our fighter jets, observes Defense Technology International which has a special issue out on "The Military and the End of Oil." In 2004, the U.S. military gobbled up 400,000 barrels of fuel a day, at cost of $6.7 billion. A year later, those costs had climbed to $8.8 billion. In 2006, the price tag is expected to total $10 billion."The irony of this situation becomes more apparent when you realize that the war in Iraq makes the military consume 56,000 more barrels a day. When you hear about those huge supplemental funds in the tens of billions of dollars a year Bush is demanding for the war in Iraq. You realize that most of that is coming from two things, fuel costs and maintenance costs. The same mile per gallon standards applied to civilan cars do not apply to military cars for two reasons. One: The miltary's average vehicles weigh much more then most civilian vehicles, fact is the more weight the power train has to propel, the more fuel it consumes. Second point, the defense of our nation is a national priority regardless of the cost. The main reason for maintenace costs is because of the high use of military vehicles in Iraq and the complexity of the vehicles. If we ever want to gain an advantage in this war, Americans and our government have to make it a priority to invest research and development funds into better hybrid cars and cars that run on biofuels. The next step is to invest in getting this technolgy out through our military's procurment budget. Americans must say to automakers that we want to stop hearing about advanced fuel saving technolgies and want to buy vehicles with these technologies. Reducing maintenace cost's for miltary vehicles will go along with investing in new fuel saving technologies. Miltary planes also take up a huge amount of fuel to operate, we must also invest more in bio fuels for military planes. Were starting to do this and must continue to do this more by increasing R&D funds for such activities.