£250 a gallon – the price of petrol in Afghanistan!

The U.S. Military is spending anything from $400 to $1,000 for each gallon of fuel it uses in Afghanistan – and they’re using 800,000 gallons a day.

The cost of war is huge. And fighting a war in Afghanistan was never going to be a cheap option. But it is a truly astonishing fact that the U.S. Military reckons that it costs$400 a gallon for fuel in Afghanistan. And we’re guessing that’s $400 a gallon of U.S. fuel. If you assume that, then the price rockets to $480 a gallon in Imperial terms. To make things worse the Military admits that prices can be as high as $1,000 a gallon – $1200 in Imperial terms.

So how on earth do they come up with that figure? Is it a case, as we’ve so often heard in the past, of Governments being ripped off by suppliers charging through the nose simply because the bills are often not checked? They claim not not.

The per gallon figure is in fact ‘Fully Burdened’, that is they include the cost of transport – often by plane or helicopter in to very remote areas – and the cost of protection for the fuel. But even when you factor all that in it does seem a ridiculous figure.

So how much fuel is the U.S. military using in Afghanistan? Well – if you take just the U.S. Marines – they are getting through 800,000 gallons a day. At a cost of $320,000,000. Fair makes your eyes water. That’s $116.8 billion a year.

This is not a commentary on whether the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting (although history surely teaches us that no one has ever fought a war in Afghanistan and won), rather a comment on the seemingly unbelievable cost the U.S. Military seems to be incurring in simply ‘Fuelling’ the campaign.

And I thought our local B.P. was expensive at £5 a gallon.

Source: The Hill via Jalopnik