Re: SC45

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

Rising fuel prices hit Air Force, other services hard

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.

The Army’s M-1 Abrams tank, in service in Iraq, gets less than a mile per gallon. The cost of fueling the Navy's 278 diesel propelled-ships, including one non-nuclear aircraft carrier, has jumped by 10 percent over 2006.

The problem is particularly burdensome for the Air Force, which consumes more than half of all the fuel used by the government and purchases significantly more than the Army and the Navy. Every $10 increase for a barrel of oil costs the Air Force $600 million............

7 MILLION GALLONS OF FUEL A DAY, and what do you want to bet, that the real amount is significantly higher. When the energy starts getting real scarce, and much more expensive than it is even now, the Huge Monstrosity that the US Military Machine has turned into, will keep the energy coming to itself, even as the US economy begins to founder, and the US people begin to find it harder and harder to maintain the quality of life that they now enjoy.