The fully burdened cost

Business is booming for somebody:

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan...

...The Pentagon comptroller’s office provided the fuel statistic to the committee staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion. The Obama administration uses this estimate in calculating the cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan...

...The top U.S. general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, reportedly has requested that about 40,000 additional troops be sent...

...Afghanistan — with its lack of infrastructure, challenging geography and increased roadside bomb attacks — is a logistical nightmare for the U.S. military, according to congressional sources, and it is expensive to transport fuel and other supplies.

A landlocked country, Afghanistan has no seaports and a shortage of airports and navigable roads. The nearest port is in Karachi, Pakistan, where fuel for U.S. troops is shipped.

From there, commercial trucks transport the fuel through Pakistan and Afghanistan, sometimes changing carriers. Fuel is then transferred to storage locations in Afghanistan for movement within the country. Military transport is used to distribute fuel to forward operating bases. For many remote locations, this means fuel supplies must be provided by air...

...And moving fuel by convoy or even airlift is expensive, according to the Army news release from July 16, which quoted Geiss. In some places, Geiss said, analysts have estimated the fully burdened cost of fuel might even be as high as $1,000 per gallon.

Energy consumed by a combat vehicle may not even be for actual mobility of the vehicle, Geiss said, but instead to run the systems onboard the vehicle, including the communications equipment and the cooling systems to protect the electronics onboard.

Some 8o percent of U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan are due to improvised explosive devices, many of which are placed in the path of supply convoys — making it even more imperative to use aircraft for transportation.

According to a Government Accountability Office report published earlier this year, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost due to attacks or other events while delivering fuel to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan in June 2008 alone...

...The Marines in Afghanistan, for example, reportedly run through some 800,000 gallons of fuel a day...

Meanwhile, the strategerists in the Village and the Pentagram are Pravda pontificating about How to Win the War. Retired generals are penning opinion pieces for their Masters cogitating on the best way to bring one home for the Gipper. You note of course that $100 million a day for gasoline comes nowhere into their strategery.

Neither does the glaringly obvious flaw that all our logistics have to come through Pakistan, which, incidently we are going to soon be fighting for too. As if we aren't already.

Neither do dozens of different warring tribal groups speaking dozens of different languages, none of which any of our troops speak, all of which are willing to put their differences aside to shoot the Amerikans in the back.

Neither does the biggest opium growing region on earth with the most rampant criminal organization on earth involved in keeping that way- which has infiltrated the ranks of the private contractors we bring along- and the need to buy gasoline for said corrupt contractors, too.

I find this editorial piece the most interesting today, although doubtless not for the reasons the writer wrote it:

...Particularly notable, there appears to be uncertain White House support for the ambitions of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, who has asked for 40,000 to 60,000 more troops and passionately argued that the military objective be the expansive one of “shielding” the Afghan people “from all threats.”

The emerging picture is of a commander in chief trying to chart a middle way through one of the most complex challenges of his young presidency. If so, instructive lessons can be found in the contrasting ways two of his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, navigated a perilous way ahead in Vietnam.

Kennedy’s Vietnam strategy was informed by a pair of harrowing foreign policy crises in 1961 that sobered him to his responsibilities as commander in chief. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion was a humiliation that Kennedy believed would have driven him from office if he had been a British prime minister. He vowed never again to be “overawed by professional military advice.”

That same year, Kennedy was shocked by the half-baked recommendation of his generals to use tactical nuclear weapons against the Communist Pathet Lao movement in Laos, a proposal he decisively dismissed.

In this context, Kennedy was deeply skeptical when his most senior advisers argued in the fall of 1961 that only substantial numbers of American forces could prevent the government of South Vietnam from collapsing. Kennedy nonetheless rejected the deployment of combat troops. But he also rejected the notion of abandoning Saigon. Instead, he chose to chart a middle course.

Kennedy favored a strategy of arming and reinforcing the South Vietnamese Army, and of teaching them new counterinsurgency tactics. He increased the number of military advisers assigned to Saigon but maintained a ceiling of about 16,000 men.

By October 1963, operations were deemed sufficiently successful for the White House to announce the withdrawal of 1,000 advisers and its expectation that the advisory mission would be concluded by the end of 1965. At the time of Kennedy’s assassination the following month, the Pentagon had recorded only 108 American military personnel killed...

This piece goes on to reinforce the Petraeus Caesar-McChrystalline idea of using all these troops for counterinsurgency and not just for the sheer combat muscle that LBJ based his escalation on.

Doubtless the cost of educating each and every one of these troops in the dozens of languages and cultural differences they'll encounter trying to run a successful counterinsurgency among the Afghans doesn't phase our Caesars and Centurions. It bothers them so little, in fact, neither they nor their Village propagandists think about it. Success and Victory are such post-modern concepts.

Nor do the consequences of what happens to Leaders who actually work out a way to end their silly little wars or what happens to potential Leaders who might lead us out of them.

Just ask Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But be prepared to wait awhile if you expect them to answer you with words.