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During the town hall meetings this past August, opponents of healthcare reform legislation expressed great alarm at the projected $1 trillion ten-year cost. They said it would put a crushing burden on their children and grandchildren. These healthcare reform opponents should have been wailing and gnashing their teeth over the recent Pentagon revelation that the "fully burdened" cost of a gallon of gasoline used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan is $400. A fully burdened cost includes the cost of shipping the fuel to Afghanistan, the loss of fuel when supply convoys are ambushed and the voracious consumption of fuel by military vehicles and combat aircraft.
Two illustrations of voracious consumption of fuel are the F-16 jet fighter and the B-52 bomber. The F-16 uses in less than an hour as much fuel as the average motorist uses in two years. The F-16 fuel consumption pales in comparison to the B-52. According to the book At the Abyss, written by Thomas C. Reed, a former Secretary of the Air Force, an eight-engine B-52 at full-throttle uses a ton of fuel every four minutes. At a fully burdened cost of $400 a gallon, the one-hour fuel cost of a B-52 would be $1,440,000. Some B-52s have been used in bombing runs in Afghanistan.
These fully burdened fuel costs are only one element in a current military budget which roughly equals the combined military spending of the rest of the world. This budget is exclusive of the cost of our nuclear weapons complex, which is in the Department of Energy budget; also, it is exclusive of that part of the payment on the national debt which is due to past militarily-related deficit spending -- especially the huge military spending runup in the eight Reagan years.
Thus, as related to the projected ten-year cost of healthcare reform, the U.S. military budget, at its 2010 FY rate, will consume a trillion dollars in about a year and a half, or about six and two-thirds trillion in ten years, exclusive of cost of living increases.
Those aghast at the cost of healthcare reform should join the effort to bring down our military spending from the near-50 percent it represents of world military spending, down to a figure much more in line with the five percent the U.S. represents of the world's population.
