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Huff'Po Knows Military

By John

This is too good to pass up. Mike Goldfarb at The Worldwide Standard braved the fever swamps of the Huffington Post to bring you this precious gem of an op-ed from English professor and apparent military genius Barry Sanders.

You're going to have to read it in chunks, because there are so many factual errors I have to copy the Goldfarb style of deconstruction.

The Green Zone: The Military's Addiction to Oil

Feeding the appetites of these voracious machines, with gasoline or diesel or kerosene, requires intricate logistical planning and support from some 2,000 trucks, a battery of computers, another 20,000 GIs, and, according to an Associated News report for September 2007, as many as 180,000 workers under federal contracts--more contract workers, in fact, than soldiers. Of the twenty-eight private security companies operating in Iraq, the major ones are Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy, Kellogg, Brown and Root, DynCorp International, and the Vinnell Corporation. The largest of them is not even American, but British, named the Aegis Corporation.

DynCorp does aircraft maintenance, logistics work, and provides security guards to deployed locations. KBR helps build operating bases. Vinnell trains the Saudi National Guard. Also, it'd help to learn the definition of mercenary. I know that every since some genius applied the term to Blackwater it's been the latest hot topic. But a merc is a soldier who fights the wars of a foreign government. Think the Hessians during our Revolutionary War or the Swiss Guard. Blackwater provides security for State and other VIPs. That's it. I can't stand the way people try to add a sprinkle of sensationalism to their rants by twisting around words to provoke an emotional reaction. It's dishonest and annoying.

Many of the contract workers are former military Special Forces troops, such as Navy Seals and the Army's Delta Force. The Seals conduct their operations with the philosophy of "spray and pray," a credo which seems to determine a good deal of the behavior of the mercenaries working for Blackwater USA, whose CEO, Erik Prince, left a career appointment in the Seals to start what is now a billion-dollar federal contracting firm, Blackwater USA.

Two paragraphs in and I'm already embarrassed for the guy. "Spray and pray?" SEALs and Delta are the most precise scalpels in our inventory. The thought of either unit running into combat with firing their weapons on full auto without even the courtesy of aiming is just plain idiotic. This also has nothing to do with military fuel consumption, Sanders is just going off on a weird inaccurate rant here.

The Navy uses an enormous amount of fuel for its nuclear and non-nuclear aircraft carriers. The recently decommissioned USS Independence, at its top speed of 25 knots per hour, consumed 134 barrels of fuel an hour, or close to 5,600 gallons an hour. (The ship boasts 4.1 acres of flight deck and a crew of 2,300.) On its way to the Persian Gulf in 2002, a trip that took fourteen days, the Independence went through two million gallons of fuel. Every four days, the ship took on an additional one million gallons of fuel, half of which went to supply the carrier's jets.

Uh, the Indy was decommed in the 1990s. It never steamed to the Gulf in '02. Also, I'm not sure if a carrier needs an UNREP every four days, but perhaps one of our Navy readers can confirm/deny? It's obvious that a conventionally powered boat like the Indy will eat more fuel than a Nimitz class, every four days seems a bit high.

Buckle up for the next paragraph folks, it's a dooz.

According to the 2006 Navy Almanac, at the beginning of 2006, the Navy held an inventory of 285 combat and support ships, along with 4,000 planes and helicopters. The DoD keeps classified the number and kinds of vessels stationed in the Gulf. But, we do know that President Bush ordered the USS Stennis and the USS Ronald Reagan to the Gulf in January 2007 as part of the surge. He also sent a "strike group," led by the nuclear aircraft carrier the USS Eisenhower, along with a cruiser, a destroyer, a frigate, a submarine escort, and a supply ship. Already sitting in the Gulf were ten other "Carrier Task Forces" built around the aircraft carriers Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Chester W. Nimitz, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, Harry S. Truman, and the Abraham Lincoln. Ninety attack planes sit on each carrier's deck, ready at any moment to fly into combat.

That's right. Every carrier in our inventory, plus one that has been waiting to be turned into scrap metal since 2003 (Constellation), was in the Persian Gulf earlier this year. Soak it in folks, military commentary doesn't get much better than this.

Of all the branches, the Air Force uses the most fuel. In 2006, for instance, the Air Force consumed nearly half of the DoD supply, 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel, the same amount of fuel consumed from December 1941 to August 1945, during World War II. Flying machines, like the Apache helicopter, blow through fuel at an astonishing rate. Powered by two General Electric gas-turbine engines, each rated at 1,890-horse power, the Apache gets about one-half mile to the gallon. Just one pair of Apaches in a single night's raid will consume about 60,000 gallons of jet fuel. Any of the large helicopters--the Sea Stallion, Super Stallion, Sea Dragon, or Pave Low III--sucks up five gallons every mile. But that's nothing compared with the fighter planes. With its afterburners fired up, the F-16 Fighter Jet uses 800 gallons per hour, the F-15 about 1,580 gallons per hour. More dramatically, the F-4 Phantom Fighter uses 40 barrels of fuel, or more than 1,600 gallons an hour, each and every hour. But the gas hog award goes to the B-52 Stratocruiser, which has eight jet engines, and zips through an astonishing 86 barrels of fuel, or roughly 3,334 gallons per hour. In one hour of flight--600 miles--the B-52 uses as much fuel as the average driver uses in seven years.

We haven't flown the F-4 in over a decade. How dramatic. Not mentioned was the fact that the Air Force has been one of the most aggressive organizations in the world when it comes to the push for alternative fuel sources. What lacked in accuracy could have been slightly compensated for in honesty, but... whatever.

The Pentagon places the fuel it reserves for supposed international purposes--primarily for the Navy--in a category called International Bunker Fuel. Bunker Fuel--or more accurately called Bunker Oil--remains off the record, ghost stuff, as non-existent as the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, making the CO2 emissions for the military even grosser than anyone's assumptions and calculations. The problem is further compounded by the fact that Bunker Oil contains a higher concentration of sulfur than other diesel fuels, and so pollutes not just with CO2, but with SO2 (sulfur dioxide), as well. The two gases in combination do more damage to the environment, for they form a thicker layer in the atmosphere and hold the heat in more tenaciously. In actuality, then, the military may be consuming twice as much fuel as the DoD suggests, or even higher--perhaps three times as much--and polluting much more--again, perhaps, by a factor of three. Surprisingly, the United States does not figure into its own annual CO2 numbers any of the greenhouse gases that the military generates.

Can we assume that this guy knows about as much about climatology and the science behind global warming that he does about the military? I've read this paragraph three times and I still don't know what point he's trying to make here. Bunker fuel, specifically No.5, is what powers most ships...military and civilian alike. Why is he arguing that it's use is some sort of "off the record" conspiracy? And who the hell ever said that the prisoners at Gitmo were "non-existent?"

Okay so he rambles on about fuels, switching fire to JP-8 fuel which is a component of the Air Force's alternative energy program, and says this:

One of those studies, completed in March 2000 and funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency, says absolutely nothing about the contamination caused by that same jet exhaust when a squadron of F-22s, say, fly sortie after sortie, at fairly low elevations, over a crowded neighborhood in Baghdad.

Uh. We have F-22s at Elmendorf AFB, Langley AFB, and Tyndall AFB. They haven't been to Baghdad, and I can't see any possible reason for a fighter which prides itself on stealth to be flying at "fairly low altitudes." Now I remember doing an FTX in a training area at the end of Tyndall AFB's runway a few years ago where, to the delight everyone, two F-22s buzzed us at about 50 feet as they were taking off. I wasn't gassed by some mysterious noxious emission and -even at the end of a runway at one of our busiest fighter bases- I don't remember the air being the least bit smoggy.

Trying to calculate CO2 pollution for military flying is near impossible. For one thing, if we consider the Stealth F-117, we know nothing of its fuel consumption. We do know, however, that sorties for that plane at the beginning of the Iraq War lasted 1. 6 hours. Flying out of some distant bases raised the average sortie time to 5.4 hours, with some sorties lasting up to seven hours--refueling accomplished in the air. Forty-two F-117s each flew over 1,300 combat sorties.

Hi, I get all my information from Wikipedia.

Forty-two F-117s each flew over 1,300 combat sorties.

Really? Each one flew 1,300 sorties? Not the combined force? Kind of makes this equation:

Using an average of five hours per sortie, at 619 miles per hour, time in the air for just this one type of plane comes to 190,827,000 miles, resulting in an astonishing 26 million tons of carbon. To get some idea of the magnitude of that number, it would take a fully loaded Boeing 747-100, flying from Los Angeles to New York, 328,165 trips to produce that same amount of pollution. On average, 40 flights leave from LAX for JFK daily, so those 328,165 trips, in commercial terms, would take 8,204 days, or almost 23 years. Sixty other kinds of planes flew sorties over Iraq. The total amount of carbon dioxide that went into the atmosphere is not just high--but goes totally unreported.

...seem a bit off, doesn't it?

Anyway, this guy might be a bright English professor, but he is way, way, waaaaay out of his league here. Zero grasp of the subject matter. Not even a basic understanding of the military..."spray and pray," yeeesh.

It's embarrassing.

And it syncs up precisely with an enormous pet peeve of mine, military commentary from folks who know zip about the military. Blind leading the blind. We're fighting two wars and this guy wants the military to stop and form a carbon counting commission. So not only did HuffPo fail to fact check this column, they gave the guy a whole series on the subject called "The Green Zone."

I hope they turn it off. Seriously. I don't have the energy to do this again.

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