Is anybody listening at DOD?

Maybe it was because I had just spent $2.70 for each gallon of regular gas I bought, but I found the article, “Gas Pains” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly quite serendipitous. The author, Robert Bryce, reports on the use of fuel by our military in Iraq. Here are some numbers I found amazing:

1. 27,000 vehicles in Iraq today almost two years after the end of the war,

2. 20,000 soldiers and contractors involved in the re-fueling of these vehicle,

3. 2,000 fuel trucks leave Kuwait every day,

4. 1,700,000 millions gallons of fuel used everyday, which works out to nine gallons a day per soldier on the ground.

According to Bryce, fuel efficiency is not a concern of DOD. Yet, because of the constant need to re-fuel, the opportunities for the insurgents to attack the fuel convoys are increased.

The really sad part about this is that the Defense Science Board, a division of DOD, in 2001 issued a report on Improving Fuel Efficiency of Weapons Platforms which stressed the importance in warfare of fuel-efficient vehicles. Here are their major findings:

a) Although significant warfighting, logistics and cost benefits occur when weapons systems are made more fuel-efficient, these benefits are not valued or emphasize in the DoD requirements and acquisition process.

b) The DoD currently prices fuel based on the wholesale refinery price and does not include the cost of delivery to its customers. This prevents an end-to-end view of fuel utilization in decision-making, doe not reflect the DoD’s true fuel costs, masks energy efficient benefits, and distorts platform design choices.

c) The DoD resource and accounting processes (PPBS, DoD Comptroller) do not reward fuel efficiency or penalize inefficiency.

d) Operational and logistics wargaming of fuel requirements is not cross-linked to the Service requirements development or acquisition program processes.

e) High payoff, fuel-efficient technologies are available now to improve warfighting effectiveness in current weapon systems through retrofit and in new systems acquisition.

The article quotes the chairman of the study: “the prevailing wisdom at the Pentagon is that ‘fuel efficiency is for sissies’”.

From the little I’ve learned over the past few months, the Defense Science Board, a division of the Department of Defense, does good work. If they were actually listened to, this might be a slightly better world.