US pays $400 per gallon for gas in Afghanistan

US pays $400 per gallon for gas in Afghanistan

rawstory.com

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 servicemember on the ground in Afghanistan.

Why so much? The cost includes shipping, which sometimes includes the pricetag of a helicopter flight. Sending fuel by helicopter is woefully inefficient, because it uses up almost as much fuel as...

(visit the link for the full news article)

The government's Defense Energy Support Center provides fuel to the military at $2.78 per gallon, the conveyance of which then grows exponentially more expensive as it travels through dangerous combat zones.

Gen. James Conway, who runs the Marine Corps, told a Navy forum that perilous risky routes up gasoline that originally cost $1.04 gallon up to $400.

“These are fairly major problems for us,” Conway was quoted as saying.

We sit here going bankrupt, Osama Bin laden STILL has not been indicted for the crime of 9/11, and to top it all off, Obama calls the war in Afghanistan a "necessary war!"

Necessary for who?

Necessary because hey, we have to raise more taxes on the American people, and we've got the greedy ass MIC that has to make even MORE money.

What other reasons can there be at this point?

Because I don't see any other reasons in the first place we should have ever even been IN Afghanistan.

rawstory.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

...which found that the US spends $1 million per year for each servicemember on the ground in Afghanistan.

And how many more troops did Obama just approve to send to Afghanistan??

You do the math!

Can we really afford this? Could we EVER really afford this? NO!

And maybe, just MAYBE, if we weren't IN Afghanistan, THE FRICKEN GAS WOULDN'T BE SO EXPENSIVE!!!!!!!!!

JEEZ!

:shk:

It's stuff like this that just gets my gonads.

Why don't we just get the gas from our newly conquered...I meant democracy installed...Iraq and ship it to Afghanistan? It would be so much cheaper that way. Don't they owe us for freeing them? This post is a joke but the lose of lives fighting a pointless war is not!!!

LifENcircleS

Absolutely unbelievable, why is it I think Federal Express could deliver a gallon of gas to remote spots in Afghanistan cheaper than 400.00?

One of the dirty little secrets regarding Afghanistan and Iraq is we never really hear the exact numbers or costs of all the private security/mercenary/contractor firms that are involved in the War Effort and are being paid directly or indirectly by the U.S. Government.

I would imagine most of the associated cost here is giving this gasoline to private firms to ship out to the remote bases and the staggering sum that those firms pay their employees to work in active war zones.

Part of the Military Industrial Complex now seems to be the Blackwater/XE type of firms and Eric Princes of the world who provide tens of thousands of additional military type personnel into these war zones in roles that traditionally were handled by the U.S. Military directly at a fraction of the cost.

For some reason the politicians think it’s a better idea to say we have 70,000 troops in Afghanistan rather than say the truth we have 70,000 U.S. Troops and 70,000 paid mercenaries in Afghanistan.

I agree with you that we do not belong in Afghanistan and there never was a legitimate credible reason for us to start a war there either. It’s clear that we are not fighting a real war there but have taken on the role of security guards in a hostile warzone to protect various European and Asian business interests and property in Afghanistan.

We are continually breeding a terrorist problem with our foreign policy that amazingly enough despite all the crimes we are committing in Iraq and Afghanistan hasn’t really resulted in a backlash of extremist violence aimed at Americans.

The War on Terror is all hype, it’s bad for America, it’s bad for the world, and Obama really is four more years of George Bush on steroids.

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Seems pretty reasonable in this post-911, post Dick Cheney' Presidency era. After all, they are in the Middle East.

Good replies you guys, thanks.

lol @ Federal Express.

It might be curious, just for comparison's sakes, what the total cost of gas per gallon was, all things inclusive, for any of the other wars, like WWII for example- and adjusted for inflation. Or maybe even the Gulf War. Korea? Vietnam?

I mean why does this seem so ridiculously absurd?

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
Because I don't see any other reasons in the first place we should have ever even been IN Afghanistan.

Wasn't Osama and his gang pretty openly running terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before the US went in to shut them down? I actually thought there was more reason to go into Afghanistan than into Iraq.

I don't particularly want to see those terrorist training camps restarted there, so there should be a stable administration in place that will prevent that before we withdraw.

But there has to be a cheaper way to get gas there.

Man oh man. A new story related to this I just saw:

Mr. Wheeler, who conducted the study, compared the Obama administration's requests for funds with the $636 billion spending bill that the Senate passed. He discovered that senators added $2.6 billion in pet projects while spending $4 billion less than the administration requested for fiscal 2010, which began Oct. 1.

Mr. Wheeler said that senators took most of the cash for the projects from the "operations and maintenance" or O&M accounts.

"These are the accounts that pay for troop training, repairs, spares and supplies for vehicles, weapons, ships and planes, food and fuel," Mr. Wheeler said.

Raiding those accounts to fund big-ticket projects the military does not want, but that benefit senators' home states or campaign contributors, amounts to "rancid gluttony," he said.

washingtontimes.com...

That is a worthy of reading article in itself. But then I must ask, if they are pillaging these accounts, of which the fuel expense is a main item, then WHERE is this $400/gallon going to come from?

Does anyone see the irony here? Because if you don't see it there, then check your pay stub. Ahh, now you see it!

reply to post by TrueAmerican


I would say they are raiding that account because the 400.00 per gallon is a bogus artificially raised figure to ensure x amount of dollars are placed into the account. Because they know that the fuel doesn’t cost anywhere near that much to deliver they have no qualms about taking money out of that account as the account is basically designed as a slush fund for grossly inflated incidentals that are the type that won’t be fully or accurately accounted for by the GAO.

They know the account will have a surplus of funds because they have grossly over exaggerated the costs of the items the fund was designed to pay for.

They know roughly how over funded it is since they were the ones who cooked the costs in the first place.

The rest then becomes discretionary money for those who control and oversee the process.

Imagine then if you would how many other Pentagon Accounts are also over funded by exaggerated costs and what then happens to the surplus in those accounts?

It’s just like Eisenhower warned, the Military Industrial Complex has taken over the nation.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


Excellent, PT!

To me that makes all the sense in the world. And by now, with all the other stories that have surfaced over the years of stupid, insane government spending (you know, the $100.00 hammer stories)- the public is used to it already at large. So what's another story of $400.00/gallon? Just the cost of doing business. Because that's what war is- a business to them.

I thought this war was BS from the beginning.

Between loss of US troops and what you just pointed out, it's costing the tax payer one million per soldier to continue to piss off the middle east and prod the terrorists into attacking us on our soil on a regular basis as we've done to many civilians in their countries.

No one can tell me the US gov isn't bright enough to figure out.

Great thread S&F

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
Good replies you guys, thanks.

lol @ Federal Express.

It might be curious, just for comparison's sakes, what the total cost of gas per gallon was, all things inclusive, for any of the other wars, like WWII for example- and adjusted for inflation. Or maybe even the Gulf War. Korea? Vietnam?

I mean why does this seem so ridiculously absurd?

I can tell you that, when I was flying missions out of Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, the Saudi's gave us our Jet A aircraft fuel free of charge. Also, last year flying sorties out of Iraq, the paperwork that gets signed each time you fuel an aircraft had a price for JP-8 of about $4 a gallon. I'm not sure about the prices in remote areas / Afghanistan.

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

 

Excellent, PT!

To me that makes all the sense in the world. And by now, with all the other stories that have surfaced over the years of stupid, insane government spending (you know, the $100.00 hammer stories)- the public is used to it already at large. So what's another story of $400.00/gallon? Just the cost of doing business. Because that's what war is- a business to them.

Basically when you get right down to it the entire wealth of the United States is being siphoned out through the Military Industrial Complex.

What better way and place to do it than in a small very remote and basically primitive nation like Afghanistan that very few outsiders not associated with the War effort are going to visit because of it’s primitive remoteness and inherent dangers to monitor the process over there.

Let’s think about the sheer insanity involved for a moment. We will fire a 100,000 plus dollar Tomahawk Cruise Missile at what is essentially a 10.00 dollar stone hut.

If you actually just took a Taxi for 85.00 dollars from the U.S. Embassy pulled up to the front door of the stone hut, knocked on it and offered the occupants 10,000 (1/10th the cost of the missile) to knock down their own hut and relocate the occupants would likely slit one of their own wrists to sign the contract in blood. They would then proceed to knock down their own hut and probably emigrate out of Afghanistan.

The U.S. Tax Payer would save about 90,000 dollars and the people who lived in the stone hut would love the United States versus hating the United States.

But…here is the big but; the Military Industrial Complex makes no money off of that scenario. Even though it’s more cost effective, more efficient, and permanently solves the problem.

Ultimately the Pentagon has to use the weapons that it purchases from the Military Industrial Complex to keep the procurement cycle in motion that feeds and enriches and empowers the Military Industrial Complex. At the moment we go any length of time without a war the people expect and rightly so a peace dividend of lower military expenditures and lower taxes.

The easiest way to squander these weapons and keep the procurement cycle going in high gear so the dividends are paid to the Military Industrial Complex is by targeting an unpopular third world nation that lacks any strategic allies to speak out against the atrocities being committed there. In other words Afghanistan is little more than a real time, live fire, military exercise for the Pentagon as it gets to use and waste real ordinance fighting a fictional enemy at a leisurely open ended pace with no clear cut goals or end game. It’s the perfect scam except for the poor innocent civilians of Afghanistan and for the poor tax payers in America.

Most of the hardware and software being used is bought at a highly inflated price and because so many civilian contractors are used it’s easy to route those excess costs through them and have them send the kickbacks back to the Senators and Congressmen who sign off on it all.

That’s what’s really going on over there. The Taliban was a CIA invention in the first place to fight the Soviets as the Mujahedeen and senior commanders have continuously ensured that the Taliban can actually not just survive but grow along the way to keep justifying the occupation and the expense.

When you further consider the Bin Laden Family and the Bush Family are partners in the Carlyle Group and own the preferred stock of most of these expensive high-tech military ordinance companies you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put the scam together. You just have to care and tragically most of us don’t.

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
Basically when you get right down to it the entire wealth of the United States is being siphoned out through the Military Industrial Complex.

And that, my friends, just about sums it up. Cleanly, concisely and to the point.

There's a new buzz word for it though:

The Terror-Industrial Complex.

"What is the greatest threat facing us now?" Powell asked. "People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. ... The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex."

rawstory.com...

Watch for it in the MSM. A convenient way for them to further bury the real issue behind a veil of words designed to hide the truth.

Seems to me like it would be worth the drive to go to Pakistan and find a convenience store and fill up a few tankers. All the Pakistani-owned convenience stores in my area have reasonably priced gas. Maybe even pick up a few lottery tickets. Who knows, we might get lucky and be able to pay off a few days of war costs.

400 dollars a gallon?

Somebody is playing with the numbers. My buddy a few years ago sent me an email from there saying that they were paying around 40 cents a gallon.

Either the article is wrong or somebody misplaced a decimal point.

reply to post by TrueAmerican



Check how much money was siphoned to the Kennedy Library or the Ted Kennedy endowment?! I believe it was over $20million.

Money well spent to a true patriot. I am going to throw up again.

reply to post by PRS395


Throw up? You mean you still have some left?

Sheesh, I vomited all I was going to vomit back in 2003 when I first started researching 9/11. The rest has been just confirmation.

I mean jeez, you see stuff like this, and it just makes me want to go sign up for one of those militia groups hellbent on taking back this country from evil. Of course, I would never do such a thing.

Looks like Al gores carbon tax should be reserved ONLY for the military over thier then