Perhaps in an irony of ironies, our Middle East military forces, sent to protect our "strategic assets" (re: our oil under their sand), are paying an extraordinary high price to ensure the safe delivery of that fuel to our troops.
According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, nowhere on the planet are the rising costs of petroleum and fossil fuel energy supplies as acute as they are for Uncle Sam's Army:
• Until recently, the Army spent about $200 million a year annually on fuel, but paid $3.2 billion each year on 20,000 active and 40,000 reserve personnel to transport it.
That was before $70-per-barrel oil. In the spring of 2006, the Defense Energy Support Center reported the US military used about 128 million barrels of fuel last year, costing about $8 billion, compared with about 145 million barrels in 2004 that cost $7 billion.
I don't know if a wind-driven humvee would make sense, but at $300 a gallon, and the human risks of delivering a highly explosive fuel system into harsh regimes, I gaurantee that a $20,000 3kW system for high wind locations such as remote camps in high-wind driven Afghanistan mountain ranges starts to look attractive...
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