GREENER BERETS
The Pentagon is the largest consumer of petroleum in the United States. In recent years it has used between 130 million and 145 million barrels of oil annually—comprising 2 percent of America’s total petroleum demand. That translates to nearly 400,000 barrels per day, roughly the total daily energy consumption of the United Arab Emirates. Over the last century, no institution has done more to propel America’s rise to power than our military—or consumed more oil in the process. We have petroleum to thank for building the Department of Defense into an asyet-unmatched fighting machine—but our troops are only as powerful as the flow of fuel that sustains them.
“And herein lies the dilemma. Oil makes this country strong; dependency makes us weak,” noted Michael Klare, a professor at Hampshire College who wrote the books Resource Wars and Blood and Oil.
I was baffled and hopeful when I read about Zilmer’s memo in a September 2006 issue of USA Today. Here was a no-nonsense Marine Corps general who has served more than thirty years in the U.S. military (not your typical tree-hugger) stationed in a country that’s virtually floating on an ocean of oil (Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves, after Iran and Saudi Arabia) demanding clean energy solutions that only a few years earlier had been regarded as rinky-dink hippie technology suitable only for yurts and Earthships. Zilmer’s plea struck me as a clear harbinger of change in America’s attitudes about energy. If there was ever an opportunity to “man up” the effete image and role of solar panels, wind power, and other fossil fuel alternatives, this was it. Just think of what the Pentagon could do to fast-track alternative-energy innovations going forward—after all, it was military R & D that led to the invention of jet airplanes, helicopters, radar, remote-control mechanisms, cell phones, global positioning systems (GPS), microchips, and the Internet.
But for all the promise it augured, Zilmer’s memo also carried overtones of despair that spoke to the massive challenges that come with fueling the military—one more oil-dependent today than ever before in history. The newspaper story left me wondering: How did the American military get so hooked on petroleum? How much does it really cost—in both blood and treasure—to fuel war? What would it take to transform the world’s biggest and strongest military into a petroleum-free enterprise? And how did this become the primary concern of a man leading 30,000 troops?
The current imbroglio in Iraq, I would learn as I researched twentieth-century military history, is by no means the first war tied to oil. It’s the culmination of decades of foreign policy and international relations that have been deeply connected to, and shaped by, petroleum. For the better part of a century, oil has not just been fueling our military equipment and shaping our battle strategies; it has also been provoking the very wars in which these machines and tactics are deployed.
OILS OF WAR
While the “fateful plunge” from coal to petroleum undoubtedly gave the Allies a leg up in World War I, by World War II oil had become more than an advantage—it was a tactical necessity. To get a full-color account of this first fully oil-dependent war, I visited David Painter, a professor of history at Georgetown University and one of the leading experts on America’s energy diplomacy. Reference books consumed almost every inch of space in Painter’s office—filling the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and rising in stacks like stalagmites from the floor. The only section of visible wall in the room held a print of a Christo sketch of half a million stacked oil drums, titled America: The Third Century. Painter wore round horn-rimmed glasses and a necktie slightly askew, and had the introspective patience of a man who’s spent a lifetime searching the past for clues to understand the present.
Painter explained that World War II was a high-tech, heavy-artillery operation, one in which Allied forces used 7 billion barrels of oil—many times more fuel than they did in World War I, when machinery was mostly powered by coal. Oil is the most convenient form of energy—it generates 40 percent more thermal capacity than coal, which means it can take vehicles greater distances at higher speeds. The major weapons systems used in World War II—long-range bombers and other aircraft, aircraft carriers, surface warships, submarines, tanks, and trucks—were fueled by oil, and most had been produced in American factories. Moreover, the United States had become the main source for the 100-octane fuel and specialty lubricants that improved the speed, power, and reliability of the most sophisticated aircraft engines. “The high-performance engines climbed faster, flew higher, and got better mileage—huge tactical advantages,” said Painter. American citizens, for their part, understood the importance of oil in fueling this war, and were asked, as a patriotic duty, to carpool, ration gasoline, ban auto racing, and observe no-driving days.
What surprised me more than the sheer volume of oil consumed in World War II battles were Painter’s stories of how the capture and control of oil had been, for the first time in history, a motivation for war. When the United States entered World War II, it produced two-thirds of the world’s petroleum. Nearly all the oil—6 billion of the 7 billion gallons—that fueled the Allied war effort came from U.S. fields. Only the Soviet Union, among the other great powers, had any significant oil production, while Britain and France were short on domestic oil and dependent on foreign suppliers. “Oil was known as the ‘master resource,’” Painter explained, “in the sense that it enables you to do so many things: energy for mining, for agriculture, for manufacturing, for home heating, for transportation—not just for direct military use.”
The Germans and Japanese also had extremely limited domestic petroleum reserves and had been shut out of the major foreign oil-producing areas, leaving both nations highly vulnerable. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler understood this vulnerability—how could he build an autonomous Third Reich if it relied on foreign countries to fuel its industries? So Hitler advanced a technology that the United States is now exploring seventy-five years later: he pushed the development of synthetic fuels from coal (a resource abundant inside German borders) shortly after taking power in 1933. By the outbreak of World War II, coal-derived “synfuels” accounted for nearly half of Germany’s oil needs. But the process of deriving fuel from coal was complicated and expensive, and it required huge installations of steel that could be spotted by surveillance planes and became easy targets for Allied bombers.
Germany relied mainly on the Soviet Union and Romania for its oil supplies, but Hitler quickly realized this wouldn’t be enough to fuel his military machine and sustain his long-term vision of the Third Reich. He began eyeing as a potential fuel source the oil-rich fields in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains. This was one of his primary motivations for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. When Hitler’s intent became clear, Russian troops destroyed their oil fields, refining equipment, and pipelines to prevent their resources from being tapped—one of several desperate measures ordered by Joseph Stalin. “Not one step back!” Stalin told his army. “The execution of this task means the preservation of our country, the destruction of our enemy, and a guarantee of victory.”
Like Germany, Japan was heavily motivated by oil. The “master resource” was a driving factor in Japan’s infamous attack on U.S. forces at the Hawaiian base of Pearl Harbor. By the end of the 1930s, Japan depended on the United States to provide the vast majority of its oil needs. Even after Japan announced its “Axis” alliance with Germany and Italy, the United States continued to supply it with petroleum. (As internal documents would later reveal, Roosevelt did not want to do anything that Japan might interpret as provocative, such as banning oil, for fear that this would trigger an attack before the United States was prepared to respond.) When Japan suddenly tried to import massive amounts of 100-octane aviation fuel, Roosevelt and the State Department limited oil exports to Japan to 86 octane. “If we stopped all oil, it would simply drive the Japanese down to the Dutch East Indies,” Roosevelt wrote to his secretary of state, who was urging an oil ban, “and it would mean war in the Pacific.”
But Japan was already conspiring to capture its own fuel source in order to fulfill its nationalistic ambitions, which were much like Germany’s. “Japan hoped to conquer all of Southeast Asia, including the oil fields of the East Indies, and open the shipping lanes between those