It’s not just the troops’ uniforms that are green: The U.S. military says its investments to conserve energy and water are beginning to pay off, with benefits for cost, national security and troop safety.
The Army has cut water usage at its permanent bases and other facilities around the world by 31% since 2004, according to Pentagon data. The amount of energy used per square foot at Army facilities declined 10.4% during that same period.
The data do not include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where increased troop levels caused energy usage to rise, but the military has several green measures in place there.
For example, the military has spent more than $100 million on “spray foam” insulation for tents in Iraq and Afghanistan, cutting leakage of air conditioning by at least 50%, says Tad Davis, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for environmental issues. The energy savings usually recover the investment within 90 days, he says.
The military’s green efforts will result in at least $1.6 billion in savings through the projects’ lifetime, says Joe Sikes, director of facilities energy at the Defense Department.
Ninety days. They recoup their money in ninety days on some investments.
WyldPiratd
Not to be a negative nellie, but I wonder how much the decrease in stateside water and energy use from 2004 was due to the enormous numbers of troops deployed to the Middle East.
polyorchnid octopunch
Yeah… unlike the Republicans and their ilk (masters?) they don’t have to toe a party line about how it’s bad to be green.
djork
A friend and I were brainstorming for get rich ideas. We thought that the military should jump on the green bandwagon and
MattF
This is the great advantage of MilSpec: once it’s set, you gotta do it.
The Grand Panjandrum
Jeez where’s a fella go to get away from the socialist tree hugging nazis these days?
djork
@djork:
Arggh, fat finger hit send and I don’t see an edit button. Anyhoo,
We thought the military should jump on the green bandwagon and were trying to figure out some green weapons. The best we could up with was a giant magnifying glass that roasted the enemy like ants. I wonder if I can interest Raytheon in it?
akaoni
That said, the military continues to air condition tents in the desert…
stuckinred
AC in tents? Wow, I have to admit that half way through my tour in Vietnam we got a couple of floor fans.
bemused
The US Military, Pentagon & Defense Dept are treehuggers, who knew! This is pretty impressive in that it shows fast results in large cost savings plus improving troop safety. I can’t wait to see what rightwingers dream up that this policy is the worst thing evah. The anti-green diatribes keep getting discredited but you’d hardly know this from tv news.
Chad S
They also have some experimental stuff from DARPA that converts plastic into oil that they’re trying out in bases in Iraq.
Ash Can
Why does that DFH military hate Uhmurrika?
stuckinred
Air Conditioned GP Medium. Note the roof over the tent.
Comrade javafascist
The liberal fascists have invaded the military! Alert the Red State Trike Force and the 101st Chairborn! Let’s mail the Joint Chiefs cans of 10w40. Green Initiatives must not stand! Wolverines!
(Note to self, switch to decaf.)
Starfish
They were for solar power before they were against it.
mai naem
Yeah, but Al Gore is fat.
JJ
Those tents, usually GP mediums that can fit anywhere from 15 to 25 cots, can get up to 140F during the day. If you’ve been on a nighttime patrol cycle you need to sleep during the day. Even with the AC on it’s hard, but if you’re tired enough it’s possible. A smarter way of doing things might be to have AC tents for day sleepers, but like a hotel – you show up when you need it.
The DoD actually has a few “xFOBs” stateside, where they’re playing with all kinds of cool green tech in the hopes that it will reduce cost and carbon footprint. I work in tech management consulting now, and can assure everyone here that at least since 2007 every branch has been taking green tech very seriously, and not just for cost control reasons. It’s the right thing to do, and folks might be surprised to find out how many general officers think this.
Paris
They recoup their money in ninety days on some investments.
That just shows how bad they were doing it to begin with. I closed my windows this last winter and saved an enormous amount on my heating bill. Plus I was much more comfortable.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
The Army was predicting problems from global climate change back in the 1980s. Imagine hundreds of thousands or millions of refugees on the move after multiple crop failures, nations fighting for total control of the rivers that frequently delineate international borders, and so on.
The American people don’t, and never have wanted excuses when they want something done. It doesn’t matter that in hindsight (or foresight for some) whether that something is good for the country or not. Cough, IRAQ, cough.
They know that sooner or later, just like the Somalia intervention in the 90’s, the American public will demand that a president do something about what they are seeing on TV, and that president may decide to use the military in one form or another.
Get this–it costs the US taxpayers about $400/gallon for JP-8 to make it to the HMMWVs and MRAPs in Afghanistan. This, and the massive logistical effort implied are unsustainable in the long run.
The vehicles need to be more fuel efficient, produce higher exportable energy output, higher hotel load output, and achieve lower emissions (which has tactical benefits as well).
Going green is a military imperative on many levels.
lukor gypsy howell
The “green” measures may be offset ever so slightly by blanketing huge swaths of the Middle East with depleted uranium. But it’s all good! At least we’re making the mechanized killing of civilians more environmentally friendly.
DS
A classic from the comments:
Yes. That spray-foam insulation will be the death of us all.
stuckinred
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt: Wow, land vehicles using JP4? Are they mutlifuels with JP4 the fuel of choice or is that it?
melmoth
Sounds like a buch of commie nazi green hitlerism to me.
ChrisS
@Paris:
Indeed. The military is flagrantly wasteful with energy. Yes, the parachutes we used for cargo were from the 1950s and we doing more with less equipment or older equipment, but the military would step over a dollar saved from conservation to pick up a dime saved from re-using equipment.
True story, and I’ll refrain from specific details to protect some anonymity, but my firm does environmental engineering work for the military and we’re cleaning up an aviation fuel leak at an airfield. Over the course of ~15 years that this leak was occurring, which no one knew about or suspected, we estimate they lost about ~500,000 gallons to the ground. They were losing almost 3,000 gallons a month and no one caught that.
Uloborus
I had to research this for a few weeks when I had that news job. The military is hugely into green energy. They’ve been interested for years, and keep ramping it up as a priority. Solar, wind, hydrogen, recycled fuels – they’re into all of it, because they want to cut costs and especially reduce dependence on any resource they might run short on.
One thing to keep in mind here, though. Green energy itself – solar, wind, etc? That stuff takes decades to pay for itself. There was no assurance it ever payed for itself (cept hydroelectric, rarely available) until technology started improving in very recent years.
What you’re seeing here is energy efficiency investments. And yeah, you can commonly cut energy cost by, like, a whopping 30% for cheap. Want to save the environment? Biggest thing you can do is weatherstrip your home!
PTirebiter
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
Interesting stuff, but what’s this? Can you help a brother out with his edumacation here?
Punchy
They put air-conditioners in tents? Wow.
ChrisS
@Punchy:
Still a tent, but keep in mind that these are tents in the most high-end way imaginable. It’s not a Coleman weekend escape camp tent.
In any event, it’s just another reason to not start endless wars with a volunteer army (gotta make the folks comfortable so they reenlist!).
Uloborus
@Punchy:
Yep. Heatstroke and dehydration are a bitch. Air conditioning a tent in a desert goes a long way towards keeping your troops alive.
Mumphrey
What are you, some kind of commie? Saving electricity is fascist. If Obama and Al Gore would approve, it must be, ipso facto, wrong, bad, communist, and naziriffic. Why do you hate America so much that you want the military to save money by recouping their investment in 90 days? Any good American knows the only way to balance the budget is by cutting taxes and doing away with earmarks. Damned lamestream media.
HeartlandLiberal
I am on the brand spankin’ new ‘go green’ committee where I work, a major Div I Athletics program.
I was startled (NOT) by the attitude of some on the committee, which boiled down, basically, to: “Well, if it is too much trouble or gets in our way, we won’t do it”.
I am hoping the fact that the pressure is on from the office of our university president down to get serious about this.
I have already shared my thoughts about whether it is environmentally necessary to have the new basketball building lit up lick a frickin’ roman candle all night, with TV screens in the lobby visible in the parking lot outside at 3:00 am, with no one in the building. Seems sort of, well, wasteful and light polluting in the extreme to me.
At one point during our kick off meeting a few weeks ago, one of the young people representing the new university wide sustainability office made a reference to the efforts of the “Hippies” back in the 70’s re: the environment.
I pointed out that, yes, once again (speaking as a 64 yr old on the verge of retiring within the next year), “we f*cking hippies were right, again”.
Speaking of which, it is always worth referencing, especially for the young’uns among you who don’t remember. the famous Pogo comic strip.
“Walt Kelly first used the quote “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us” on a poster for Earth Day in 1970. The poster is shown above. In 1971, he did a two panel version with Pogo and Porky in a trash filled swamp.”
We have met the enemy, and he is us
mclaren
@Uloboros:
Or you could do what Buckminster Fuller did in his dymaxion homes: create a double wall with pinholes in it so that the hot air rise in the outer shell and exhausts out the top while cool air gets sucked in through vents in the bottom.
But of course that would require an army that was competent. Since the American army is led at the highest levels by incompetent cowards, at the middle ranks by craven yes-men, and at the lowest enlisted levels by gang members and rapists, not much chance of that.
The entire spectacle of the U.S. army talking about becoming “green” is hilarious beyond description. The greenest inhabitant of this planet are dead. Their carbon footprint? Zero. If the U.S. army really wants to become green, it can simply lose a major war. All those dead troops will become extremely green.
The way things are going, sadly, looks like that’s exactly what will happen, and probably sooner rather than later. America’s military has achieved full-spectrum impotence and is no longer capable of winning a war even against bare-foot fifteen-year-olds who are armed with bolt-action rifles, as Afghanistan demonstrates. America’s military is working its way up to its Dien Bien Phu moment, and when an entire American army gets slaughtered and wiped out in some hellhole in the third world because America’s buck rogers airborne laser beam computer-guided superweapons don’t work and the whole U.S. force gets murdered by teenagers chewing qat and armed with machetes, it’ll be time to make the U.S. military truly genuinely green… Disband it. End the losing foreign wars. Reduce the size of the U.S. army to what it was in the 1930s…30,000 men.
Sly
@djork:
India is already on it.
someguy
But look on the bright side, McClaren. The Army’s wasting hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians mitigates the overpopulation problems in places like Fallujah and various Af-Pak villages. How is that not utterly green of them?
Turns out, blood does make the grass grow.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@PTirebiter: The hotel load refers to the electrical load on the vehicle that is not directly related to the engine, such as power for the radios, computer(s), turret, air conditioning, weapon systems, sensors, etc.
The exportable load is the electrical power that can be routed outside the vehicle or use in things such as Tactical Operations Centers (TOC), and so on. Refers to using the vehicle as a portable generator. The exportable load only applies when the vehicle is idled and parked.
In the last several years, the need for electrical power both in the vehicle and out has increased by several times. The original-issue M998 HMMWV from the 1980s woluldn’t even be considered today.
The next-gen light tactical vehicle specifications have, IMS, a target hotel load of 13kw and a target exportable load of 17kw, and an additional target requirement for the vehicle to be able to travel 5km with all equipment fully powered, entirely on battery power.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@mclaren:
Biohazard contamination…not so much a great idea this, maybe.
I know that this is a fantasy in certain corners of the left, but really dude, we aren’t losing to the 15-year-olds with bolt action rifles. We tend to kill the living shit out them whenver we engage them. Go to Afghanistan and ask the locals which they prefer, us or the Talibs. Whether we are nearby or not, as long as a Talib isn’t right there, they’ll say us.
As for the rest of your fantasy, I can’t stay here all day to deal with you. I have a child to rape at 10:30 and some drugs to sell at noon, and I have to pick up my dry cleaning in the meantime. I’m swamped.
Listen, do us all a favor and stick to what you actually know which, I gather, is sitting in the corner and whacking off to thoughts of dead people.
NobodySpecial
The military has sometimes been test ground zero for some of the most leftist ideas America’s put forward…you know, like integration. So I’d be looking at giving them a break, myself. Yes, there are bad people in there. Guess what? There’s bad people in your workplace, your city, and sometimes your house, and most people don’t make a point of painting you with the brush they use on them. It’s not a federal crime to use the Golden Rule.
And how exactly is it that people who are dead set on preserving as many American lives as possible stateside are so willing to make sure the soldiers that volunteer live miserable, squalid existences when they follow orders?
phein
The military has a lot of incentive to research sustainability options, and little resistance to doing so: no constant drive for profits, no idiotic Tea Party-ers gumming up the works. They’re also landlords to a lot of the remaining undeveloped forests, which are home to some high-profile endangered species, so they get a lot of attention. And, by and large, people in green suits are treehuggers, or at least, tree-stand huggers, fishermen, campers, etc.
Sustainability research for base camps in contingency operations is largely driven by tactical considerations: How to operate in a low-water environment, how to minimize transport of energy supplies, how to minimize impacts to areas where we may need to deploy again, etc. Not surprisingly, a lot of the research is now focused on relations with the local community (my own research area) in order to avoid antagonism and minimize TCO. Overall, sustainability is a pretty large effort right now in the military research community (of which DARPA is only a very small part).
martha
Speaking as someone who works in the energy efficiency world and a proud DFH, I say why are some people so proud to waste money? When you waste energy you’re just wasting money. Follow the money. Make the economic argument, always. (Even if you believe in all the enviro-nazi stuff, which I do…)
If the teabaggers are too stupid to follow them money, then they’re even dumber than I thought.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@ChrisS:
It’s more about the computers and such these days, but yeah, AC is nice when you can get it. The tents are waterproof and double layered so that they can be used year round in ANY environment. The same tent that’s in the desert right now might end up at Fort Wainright, AK for two months next year on an excercise.
@Uloborus: Every guy that dies costs (just money, now) $500,000 in SGLI/Death Indemnity, cost to prepare and ship the remains home, funeral services, headstone, so on and so on and so on. Additionally, the Army has to pay the cost of recruiting and training his/her replacement, shipping that replacement to the field to do that job, and suffering the decreased efficiency involved with not having the replacement on hand until s/he’s qualified, and then the decreased efficiency of an inexperienced Soldier.
ET
Considering that in Feb. of this year the Pentagon basically said that climate change, i.e. its affects, was a national security threat, it is good that they are trying to find ways to go green. Also, if it saves them money they can use on weapons and training so much the better.
At the Pentagon there is always some sort of energy project/future energy test/program that you can see from 395, so this seems to have been going on for quite a while.
stuckinred
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt: Some reason you don’t reply to me?
stuckinred
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt: Some reason you don’t reply to me when I ask you a question?
Persia
@martha:
This has always baffled me, too.
ChrisS
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt:
I nearly died in a tent during a field event at McChord a decade ago because the portable heater that was hooked up to the tent was pumping a lovely mixture of warm air and carbon monoxide into the tent. The ones we had for our field office in Saudi had hard walls, almost like an ultra-portable Quonset hut.
Still, endless desert wars + tents + requirement for AC = massive waste of cash.
Ending the dumb wars will make the military much more energy efficient and inexpensive.
I’m a vet. I’ve been deployed. The poor soldier of the modern day has it pretty fucking cushy. Jesus Christ, our flag football field was astroturf. The brass driving around in our little shithole of the world? Mercury Aviators. The gyms are top-notch, the food is pretty goddamn good for institutional chow. On one deployment near an international airport, we air-shipped a pallet of bottled water. There comes a point where you should stop spending a shitpile of money for your hired killers and treating them like a regular citizens.
How much are those going to cost each?
http://www.willys-mb.co.uk/images/world-war-2-jeep-s.jpg
stuckinred
BDU’s ain’t green anyway.
hopeful
I’m not at all surprised to hear that they’ve reduced their overall energy consumption. I work for a military contractor in architecture and engineering, and all federal facilities, including military facilities, are required by Executive Order to meet LEED Silver green building standards. It’s only in the fed’s best interest to save energy because it in turn saves money. This is such a no-brainer that both Bushes signed EOs regarding federal energy consumption, as well as Clinton and Obama.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@stuckinred: Sorry about that. Missed it earlier after I read the fuckwit. Responded to him, then went out to mow the lawn and bleed some energy off.
The actual fuel used is JP-8. Kerosene-based like JP-4/5, it is less directly flammable. Handling properties are very much like diesel, and as a matter of fact, can be used in just about anything that uses diesel. The Air Force uses it for their planes.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@ChrisS:
You’ll get no argument from me on either point.
As far as the HMMWV replacement, in the short term, the program, fielding now, is the M-ATV, and in the long term is the JLTV. The M-ATV costs $470,000, fully equipped ready to mount a weapon system and roll right into the fight. That is approximately $60,000/unit more than the current M-1165 Up Armored HMMWV. M-ATV can support the same hotel and exportable loads as M-1165, 2KW/1KW respectively.
I don’t know anything about JLTV projected costs. That program is only just now entering competition phase.
PonB
Great story, but incomplete without Dick Cheney’s perspective. After all, it was Cheney who said that “conservation is not an energy policy” during the California energy crisis of 2000-2001…
stuckinred
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt: Thanks for the info, being an old duece and a half driver I.m always interested in what makes em go. I’m glad to hear I hadn’t said something stupid when I showed up here a few weeks back. I really appreciate your insight into today’s Army.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@stuckinred: Thanks. And thanks for your service. The 88Ms have saved my poor feets hundreds of clicks. Have a beer on me.
There’s a long way to go, but one of the things that the Army is currently investing in is a portable power station. I’ve seen a hard shelter that fit on a 5-ton that had two pop-out wind turbine generators and two banks of solar panels and a bank of batteries. I’ve also seen roll-up solar panels that could be laid atop a GP-medium tent or a B-Hut.
B-huts, by the way, are the preferred living arrangements on the more permanent US bases. They are relatively expensive, since plywood is expensive, and they offer the same protection against small arms and fragments as tents, which is to say, NONE. Every so often, you’ll see one that is sort of almost insulated, too.
I know the guy who made this video,
This Old B-hut
Bnut
The “greening” of the military is great, and I give it full support. But let’s see if I can rattle off a few items that i’ve seen personally as wasteful ignorance:
-making us wash our Humvees and “dirty” IBA’s with fresh potable water, even though we had to take combat showers and half the local population was barely surviving
-GP mediums built for 40 that housed 80 while empty tents sat nearby with the AC running full blast
-the transportation to bases of massive amounts of stupid PX shit like 100’s of copies of “Love Actually”, but no toothbrush
-I’ve seen a C130 land that carried nothing but pristine new office chairs (nice ones, not metal folding) and new wooden desks
It’s all well and good to make a tent more efficient, but how about we start with the mid-level shit that is so obviously wasteful to everyone.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
@Bnut: I’ve seen things just like the empty tents next to over-flowing ones, the PX crap that nobody wants to buy, and other waste of that nature.
I haven’t seen potable water used to wash trucks, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve seen santized (non-potable) water used for that purpose. Corrosion prevention is pretty important.
As far as that goes, there’s all sorts of waste in the military, just like there is in the civilian world. The difference is that the money we waste is the taxpayers’ money.
stuckinred
@Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt: Goddamn! That was great. Here’s a tuber of a movie I got from our Battalion Commander of 105’s in Korea in 67
http://www.youtube.com/user/bohdi316?feature=mhw5#p/a/u/0/-IFezGyH1wU
CPinHI
Here in Hawaii, you can recognize the military housing because all the units have solar hot water heaters on top :-) As others said, they have been selectively green for a while. The Navy still dumps stuff in the ocean, but the Marines (at Kaneohe Bay, at least) have some great conservation programs on their base. Because they are military, it is MUCH easier to keep people out of the areas they want to protect.
stuckinred
@Bnut: It’s the AAAAAAAAAAAAARMY WAY!
Bnut
@stuckinred
In this case the Marine Corps way. Giving the ole environment the big green weenie.
stuckinred
@Bnut: Eat the apple as they say!
Bnut
@stuckinred
Thanks, had not heard that one in awhile, one of my faves.
stuckinred
@Bnut: I have a weird background, grew up in a Navy family, cousin 1/26 and 1/4 Marines, went in on my 17th birthday, Nov 10, 1966. . . .Army!
Bnut
@stuckinred
My family was all Navy in WW2 and Korea, and when I graduated PI in 2004 I remember them all coming up and welcoming me to the Department of the Navy. You can probably guess my comeback, lol. My grandfather looked like he wanted to slug me right there on parade deck. Love it.
stuckinred
@Bnut: My dad was and APD (High Speed Transport Destroyers) in the Pacific and his respect for Marines was enormous. The Marine Raiders made APD vets honorary members of their Association because they worked together so closely.
soonergrunt
@Bnut:
Or as we refer to the Marines, the few, the proud, the Navy-supplied bullet-stops…
And I say that with great affection for the Marines from Okinawa with whom I served closely in Afghanistan
mclaren
@Whackjob Militia Leader Soonergrunt:
Same claims we heard about Viet Nam. “We win every time we engage the Viet Cong!”
Great. So how come we lost the war in Vietnam?
Oh…wait…your username really is accurate, isn’t it. You truly are a whackjob. You do think America won the Vietnam war decisively, just as you actually do think America is winning its failed lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of course you can’t stay here, since that would require using facts and logic to debate instead of slinging around ad hominem personal insults and f-words.
So let’s take a look at the consensus of the U.S. army on the war in Iraq:
Source: San Francisco Chronicle story, op. cit.
And let’s take a look at what the best minds in the U.S. army and American foreign service — specifically, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and a senior fellow at the center for advanced defense studies — have to say about the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan:
“Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template“, Thomas H. Johnson (Prof of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey) and M. Chris Mason (retired Foreign Service officer, Sr Fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies), Military Review, Nov-Dec 2009:
stuckinred
@mclaren:
Do you know anything about the NVA and the Vietcong? I think fuckwit was being kind to you.
soonergrunt
Oh, I love this. Adults in the room? Really? You post shit like this and expect to be treated like an adult? You can link-o-rama all you want, but I doubt anyone here will buy it. You already shot your credibility with that earlier crap. Hell, you could post that the sun will set tonight and rise tomorrow, and I’m not sure that anyone here would give you the credit for being right about it. And as anybody remotely literate in the english language would know, I called you a fuckwit and not anyone else. As far as anything else you say, I don’t have anything to prove to you or anyone else.
Make sure your username isn’t remotely connected to your real name, because embarrassing yourself like this is just, well, sad.
Bnut
McLaren, I’m not necesarly dissagreeing with you on the winning or losing of the OEF and OIF, yet I see you tell soonergrunt to lave military policy to the “adults in the room”. I can’t help but think the idea of reducing the military to 30,000 is about as childish as proclaiming we have achieved total strategic and tactical victory in Iraq and A-stan.
I’ve yet to hear you give a cogent argument as to how a military with fewer members than the NYPD is going to help. I thought I was bitter about my service time, but damn man, all lower enlisted are gang members and fuckups? All officers are nefarious? Let’s bring the hyperbole down from Defcon 900.
And your Dien Bien Phu comment? Yeah, I really hope a bunch of 20 year olds looking for college money and a way out of poor-town USA get slaughtered in the jungle. About as much as I like JDAM’s slamming into villages in Helmand.
furioso ateo
@mclaren: LOL, did someone in the military beat you up, or steal your girlfriend, or something?
Edit: And are you citing “incompetent cowards” to back up your argument? With that kind of consistency, next thing you’ll do is cite the Catholic Church as a good source for child welfare.
DPirate
If there were a significant risk of electrocution every time I took a shower, I’d conserve water, too.
D-Chance.
The 2010 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. Congratulations to the Washington Post, with FOUR winners.
soonergrunt
@furioso ateo: No, he’s quoting the craven yes men and the gangbangers and rapists.
That was a nice pivot though, trying to protect the incompetent cowards, craven yes men, gang members and rapists from me (not) calling them fuckwits.
soonergrunt
Stuckinred,
You were asking earlier about the fuel situation for the trucks. All Army tactical vehicles do run JP-8. As you would guess, they can all run diesel with no modification. The Observer-Controllers at Fort Irwin (NTC) and Fort Polk (JRTC) are currently using biodiesel in the vehicles, and have been for about a year. Last I heard, that project was going very well.
The HMMWVs can use gasoline if necessary. The TM for the vehicle says to add one quart of 10W30 to a full tank of gasoline if possible. I’ll note though that I once had a mechanic threaten to beat me to death with torque wrench if I ever did that.
Bnut
@DPirate
A guy in my battalion got shocked in the portable showers. All i can think is “That MF’er got a shower?!?!?”
soonergrunt
@Bnut: Yeah. Look, it’s bad when that shit happens, but when you’re washing with Hoo-wa towels and baby wipes for weeks on end, there’s other things.
Bnut
@soonergrunt
Hoo-wa towels. Best purchase ever.
stuckinred
@soonergrunt: Sounds like my old 2 stroke yamaha RD-350!
Liberty60
I do love that the military is recognizing in their own beautifully pragmatic way that saving energy and resources is just smart, regardless of politicis- something the green movement is preaching day and night.
On the other hand, the greenest step anyone could take is to stop housing hundreds of thousands of troops in 1,000 bases around the globe.
But I guess that decision is above the pay grade of the Joint Chiefs, and rests in the hands of voters…
sigh.
mclaren
And the kooks and cranks and crackpots are out in force once again.
Yes indeedy, I can “link all I want” but those facts just bounce right off you, don’t they?
That’s all we needed to know. As always, kooks and cranks and crackpots who infest Balloon Juice worship the U.S. military and adore thuggish cops and grovel with delighted awe at every new lost war and every innocent suspect beaten to death while handcuffed.
No wonder recent polls show a majority of American support torture. You’re a bunch of gutless pathetic bully-worshipers who live to cringe and lick the boot of any punk who wears a uniform.
Balloon-Juice’s commentariat: proof once again that “Americans are the most ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the fall of the Eastern Empire,” as H. L. Mencken put it.
As always, not one of you can provide a single reasoned argument as to why the useless worthless war-losing money-slurping U.S. military shouldn’t be downsizes to 30,000 men pronto. All you can come up with is “it’s ridiculous.” Anything else? Any rational arguments? Any facts to back up your empty hollering?
No?
Of course not. In fact, 30,000 is probably excessive for the U.S. military inasmuch as we need to do coastal defense and nothing more.
— Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, “War Is A Racket,” 1935.
soonergrunt
I’m sorry, Fuckwit, what?
I didn’t read your bullshit posting just now. After the first pile of worthless shit you dropped, followed by a hackney’ed attempt to claim as your own the works of people you describe as incompetent cowards, yes men, rapists and gang members, what could you possibly have to say that would be of any value whatsoever?
Please–and I say this from the heart and in the spirit of one dedicated to the principle that social intercourse among knowledgeable persons is essential to the political life of the union–Die in a fire.
mclaren
Military Women: 1 in 3 are raped.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS — HOLD A WOMAN DOWN SO THEY CAN RAPE HER!
soonergrunt
Nobody believes that you know what you’re talking about, Fuckwit.
Nobody believes that you care about the subject either, Fuckwit.
This is entirely your fault, Fuckwit.
I am the only one still checking this thread, Fuckwit.
Even if you are telling the truth as you know it, which is unlikely, and the truth as you know it is actually correct, which assertion is laughable on its face, you cannot possibly advocate effectively for it because YOU ARE A FUCKWIT.
Really, DIAF. but do it quietly.