One little-known agency called the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) coordinates all of the DoD’s energy purchases, ensuring that the fuel sustaining the U.S. military is available at all times, wherever needed—including in fields of combat. I traveled to the DESC with two goals in mind: to better understand the equation of fuel with military power (an equation that had both motivated and been sealed by that first meeting aboard the Quincy) and to better grasp the hidden costs of our continued operations in the Middle East.
Tucked inside the bucolic Fort Belvoir army base in Fairfax County, Virginia, the DESC headquarters is located in the new Andrew T. Mc-Namara Headquarters Complex. The sprawling six-story complex looked like an upscale suburban strip mall, with a freshly paved parking lot the size of an eighteen-hole golf course, immaculate landscaping, a brickand-steel façade, and expansive tinted windows. The center also houses the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Defense Logistics Agency, and several other divisions whose exact functions were hard to discern, but all, I could see, meant business.
I reflexively stiffened my back as I entered the building, with its walls of brushed steel and blond wood, black lacquered granite floors, and a rigorous security detail. The man who was screened before me, in his mid-forties, wearing a crisp black suit and mirrored aviators, surrendered a thick black leather suitcase that looked borrowed from the set of Mission: Impossible along with two firearms, one from an ankle holster.
I was led silently down a long corridor to the office of Colonel Shawn Walsh, the DESC official who oversees bulk fuel contracts for the war on terror. A direct and serious man in his mid-forties, Walsh was sporting camouflage fatigues and a crew cut. He came to the DESC after serving in 2003 in Iraq, where he led the 1,200 soldiers of the 240th Quartermaster Battalion in missions that included securing fuel convoys. His office was spartan and unadorned, with the exception of a framed collage given to him as a parting gift from his battalion. Featured there were snapshots of armored fuel convoys snaking like anacondas along dusty roads under cover of night, wide sunrise vistas of Iraqi deserts, and grinning compatriots at a Hawaiian-themed party on the eve of Walsh’s departure from Iraq.
Walsh began our conversation with a basic primer on the Pentagon’s fuel supply chain in the Middle East: “We use just over a million and a half gallons of fuel a day,” he said. I tried to imagine a 1.7-million-gallon body of liquid—that’s enough fuel to fill about four Olympic-sized swimming pools. “It adds up to roughly 12 million gallons a week, 50 million gallons a month, and—with the supply trucks carrying about 10,000 gallons of fuel apiece—a heck of a lot of truckloads.”
Surprisingly, none of this fuel Colonel Walsh delivered actually came from Iraq’s copious oil fields, nor could it be transported by pipeline. “The Iraqi infrastructure is not to a point where we can do that,” Walsh explained. Despite the tremendous volume of oil lying beneath Iraqi soil, the country’s drilling equipment, refining facilities, and pipelines have been devastated—first by the Iran-Iraq war, then by United Nations sanctions imposed in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (sanctions which proscribed open-market fuel purchases from Saddam Hussein’s regime), and finally by the combat and chaos sparked by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Intelligence officials had predicted prior to the invasion that Iraqi fuel production would increase nearly 30 percent “within several months of the end of hostilities,” and that this would then aid in fueling and funding the occupation, but in fact just the opposite has happened: Iraqi oil production fell by more than a third after the 2003 invasion (a supply plunge that contributed to the concurrent surge in global prices). By 2008, Iraq could barely meet its own internal demand for refined fuels, let alone serve the needs of the U.S. military.
So Walsh and his logistics officials sourced bulk purchases of fuel from refineries in four neighboring countries: Kuwait, Pakistan, Turkey, and Jordan. The fuel comes in several different varieties for aviation, ground vehicles, and diesel generators. To facilitate fuel distribution, Walsh’s battalion spent the first six months of 2003 laying a tactical pipeline from the supply countries into Iraq, but eventually abandoned the effort: “It was an aboveground pipeline and very vulnerable to attack, to sabotage,” Walsh explained. His soldiers had to guard the pipeline twenty-four hours a day (wearing infrared goggles at night) to fend off thieves who would try to puncture the pipeline and siphon off fuel or, worse, bomb it. “The pipeline also proved to be an obstacle in the desert because we couldn’t maneuver vehicles over it. So we scrapped it for both security and strategic reasons and moved to a system in which all fuel distribution into Iraq is made by trucks.”
The distribution is organized via a hub and spoke system. The DESC contracts with truck drivers to transport fuel from several major refineries in the neighboring countries to central hubs inside Iraq, known as “bag farms” for the collapsible fabric bags in which the fuel is stored. These bags, which look like gigantic pillows, can hold anywhere from 10,000 to more than 210,000 gallons of fuel each, and can be easily disguised to prevent looting and avoid aerial attacks. Local units then help transport the fuel from the bag farms to their base camps—the “spokes” of the distribution system.
Some seven hundred supply trucks circulate on the roads of Iraq each day carrying everything from Lucky Charms and personal mail to bulletproof vests, fuel, and ammunition. Civilian truck drivers—not soldiers—drive the vehicles that transport fuel between the refineries and hubs, while military personnel man the choppers and Humvees that surround the convoys for protection.
KBR, the biggest employer of civilian truck drivers in Iraq, won multibillion-dollar contracts to repair Iraq’s infrastructure and provide fuel delivery in the early stages of the war. A Defense Department investigation later uncovered evidence that the company had significantly overcharged taxpayers by as much as $61 million for oil distribution to troops; KBR contested the findings, but nevertheless, the Pentagon reportedly terminated the company’s fuel deliveries in Iraq.
The job of driving supply trucks is undoubtedly dangerous, but the money has drawn many to sign on. KBR drivers who made roughly $30,000 a year in the U.S. working in truck fleets for Home Depot, SYSCO, and Walmart could get paid between $80,000 and $120,000 a year for shepherding fuel convoys in Iraq, and were eligible for a handsome tax break if they stayed in the field more than 330 days. Houston resident Stephen Heering took the assignment in 2004 of driving fuel trucks in Iraq for Halliburton (then KBR’s parent company) to help dig his family out of debt and build a nest egg for his young son’s college education. Thirty-three years old at the time, he described himself as being tired of living paycheck to paycheck; convoy driving promised financial security. But four months into his job on the roads of Iraq, Heering quit after rebels ransacked his truck and threatened him at gunpoint. “[KBR] said it would get better, but people started getting hurt bad,” Heering said in a Time interview. “They’ll find new meat. I guess that’s the way it is in the money world. If it makes ’em money, they don’t care if it costs them a life.”
In 2005, a Halliburton convoy of four fuel trucks suffered an ambush in which three drivers were killed. Preston Wheeler, of Mena, Arkansas, captured the attack on a video that later became a YouTube sensation: “Truck 5 cannot move, please help me, I am taking fire,” Wheeler pleads in the background. “I am fixin’ to get killed, goddammit…I have no gun. I am by myself.” Wheeler was shot and lost some mobility in his right arm. Soon thereafter, he lost his job at KBR. “They don’t no more care about me,” Wheeler later said in a television appearance, “than they care about a dog walking on the road.”
In addition to the threat of ambushes, convoy drivers face frequent breakdowns caused by the merciless heat, engine-clogging sand, and the unforgiving terrain of pocked dirt roads. Civilian truckers wear body armor but are not permitted to carry firearms. The convoys are required to run their routes even in the worst conditions of weather and unrest—after all, the more challenging the conditions get, the more supplies the soldiers need to fend off attacks, stay cool, and keep the hospitals running. Not surprisingly, the military has struggled with a shortage of drivers. “We got trucks,” Army sergeant Frank Vallejo