Take a deep breath before you read this. If you are an American taxpayer, you are paying $400 per gallon for gasoline that is fueling vehicles our soldiers are driving around Afghanistan. In return, we are getting nothing. This is information directly from the Pentagon, according to Raw Story.
“This year in Afghanistan, the price of gasoline has topped $400.
The stunning revelation emerged Thursday in a report from the Pentagon to House officials. The information conveyed offers new insight into a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, which found that the US spends $1 million per year for each service member on the ground in Afghanistan.
Why so much? The cost includes shipping, which sometimes includes the price tag of a helicopter flight. Sending fuel by helicopter is woefully inefficient, because it uses up almost as much fuel as it carries.
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.”
One thousand troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion.
It’s hard to know how to react to this news. I think gasoline should be expensive to reflect the true cost of it (which would include the costs of wars for oil, like Iraq and at least partially, Afghanistan). However, $400 is a little steep. Flying fuel around Afghanistan by heliceptor could also fall under the category of “insane”. Then again, I think the whole war in Afghanistan is crazy, so it’s hard to single even this out as particularly crazier than anything else. But sadly, some of this incredibly expensive gas is lost or wasted. From Time:
“Logistical woes persist even once U.S. troops are at their assigned outposts. Private truck drivers “strike often, delay delivery of fuel or arrive at destinations with fuel missing,” the Government Accountability Office reports. In June 2008, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost to enemy attacks or plunder.”
So deploying 20,000-40,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, times $1 billion per 1,000, equals = a massive load of our money that we could be spending on health care and other things. The government controls this war, calls the shots, and tells us to pay for it, so if we are to think as the cynical among us think of health care’s public option, this public, optional war must be some type of socialism. Forget socialized medicine — this is socialized war, fueled by socialized gasoline. We pay, and the beneficiaries of our generosity are corporations and the military industrial complex. We are even helping to fund and arm the Taliban, but that’s another story for another day. So far, 25 American soldiers have died in combat in Afghanistan in October.
Maybe only private wars should be allowed. The oil companies that want these wars to occur, and will profit from them, should fund them. Why should we fund them?
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