The Military-Petroleum Complex

In November 2002, before the invasion of Iraq, then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld told Steve Kroft of CBS that U.S. saber-rattling toward Iraq had “nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” In 2003, Rumsfeld called the assertion that the United States had invaded Iraq to get at its oil “utter nonsense.” (“We don’t take our forces and go around the world and try to take other people’s . . . resources, their oil. That’s just not what the United States does.”) In 2005, speaking to American troops in Fallujah, Rumsfeld reiterated the point: “The United States, as you all know better than any, did not come to Iraq for oil.” Strong denials for sure, but were they true?
Rumsfeld’s boss — and a man who knows a thing or two about addiction – President George W. Bush, proclaimed, in early 2006, that “America is addicted to oil.” Later that year, Bush almost came clean about Iraq, admitting (after a fashion), according to Peter Baker of the Washington Post, that “the war is about oil.” For the first time he used petroleum as a justification for continuing the occupation of Iraq, saying, “You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources.” Bush’s acknowledgment was no great revelation. After all, oil is not only a key driver of the U.S. economy but also a major source of the nation’s energy. As a former oilman (with Dick Cheney, the former head of oil-services giant Halliburton, as his vice president), Bush knew this all too well—hence an invasion of one of the Middle East’s key oil lands topped by an occupation where, initially, looters were allowed to tear almost every part of the Iraqi capital to pieces, save for the Oil Ministry.

But Rumsfeld’s military was more than just an armed occupier sent to lock down the planet’s oil lands. It was also a known petrol addict. In his book Blood and Oil, Michael Klare laid out the little-acknowledged facts about the Pentagon’s oil obsession:

The American military relies more than that of any other nation on oil-powered ships, planes, helicopters, and armored vehicles to transport troops into battle and rain down weapons on its foes. Although the Pentagon may boast of its ever-advancing use of computers and other high-tech devices, the fighting machines that form the backbone of the U.S. military are entirely dependent on petroleum. Without an abundant and reliable supply of oil, the Department of Defense could neither rush its forces to distant battlefields nor keep them supplied once deployed there.

And the deployments DoD has “rushed its forces” to in recent years – in Afghanistan and Iraq – have sucked up massive quantities of oil. According to Fuel Line, the official newsletter of the Pentagon’s fuel-buying component, the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), from October 1, 2001, to August 9, 2004, the DESC supplied 1,897,272,714 gallons of jet fuel, alone, for military operations in Afghanistan. Similarly, in less than a year and a half, from March 19, 2003, to August 9, 2004, the DESC provided U.S. forces with 1,109,795,046 gallons of jet fuel for operations in Iraq. In 2005, Lana Hampton of the DoD’s Defense Logistics Agency revealed that the military’s aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles were guzzling 10 to 11 million barrels of fuel each month in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Yet, while the Pentagon reportedly burns through an astounding 365,000 barrels of oil every day (the equivalent of the entire nation of Sweden’s daily consumption), Sohbet Karbuz, an expert on global oil markets, estimates that the number is really closer to 500,000 barrels.

With such unconstrained consumption, recent U.S. wars have been a boon for big oil and have seen the Pentagon rise from the rank of hopeless addict to superjunkie. Prior to George Bush’s Global War on Terror, the U.S. military admitted to guzzling 4.62 billion gallons of oil per year. With the Pentagon’s post-9/11 wars and occupations, annual oil consumption has grown to an almost unfathomable 5.46 billion gallons, according to the Pentagon’s possibly low-ball statistics.

As a result, the DoD had some of the planet’s biggest petroleum dealers, and masters of the corporate universe, on its payroll. In 2005, alone, the Pentagon paid out more than $1.5 billion to BP PLC – the company formerly known as Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (on whose behalf the CIA and its British counterpart covertly overthrew the Iranian government back in 1953) and then British Petroleum. In 2005, the Pentagon also paid out over $1 billion to N. V. Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij — also known as the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (and best known in the United States for its Shell brand gasoline) – and in excess of $1 billion to oil titan ExxonMobil.

In 2005, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Petroleum, and BP ranked sixth, seventh, and eighth on the Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s five hundred largest corporations in terms of revenue. The next year, they bumped their way up to first, third, and fourth, respectively. They also ranked 29th, 30th, and 31st on the DoD’s 2006 list of top contractors, collectively raking in over $3.5 billion from the Pentagon. The big three petrogiants are, however, only the tip of a massive, oily iceberg. Also on the Pentagon’s 2006 list were such oil services, energy, and petroleum conglomerates as:

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