Peter W. Singer from the Brookings Institution recently privateed a policy paper on US energy security. He claims that the “U.S. Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of energy, using more energy in the course of its daily operations than any other private or public organisation, as well as more than 100 nations.”

This issue was highlighted to me last summer by Col. Larry Wilkerson, (the former chief of staff to Colin Powell). Larry believes that the US was working from an “old world plan,” and that conservation of energy is needed in the armed services, as the current technology is not fuel efficient, “the Defence Department’s petroleum budget went off the charts! Not ideal for operations in the 21st century.”

In a related essay, Singer argues that energy has “too long been looked only though an environmental lens” and that the time has come to address the “irony of fuelling our national defence from a source that threatens our nation’s security.”

Whilst in the US I also met with Daniel Serwer from the United States Institute of Peace. Serwer dealt with energy issues for the State Department in the 1980s, the period then the oil price began to decline sharply. He claims that conservation is largely a matter of price and that the US has to make a fundamental decision, whether it will allow oil prices to decline or will it begin to capture some of the revenue and keep prices up, “thereby slowing the flow of vast resources to non-friends like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and others.” He believes had the US done this in 1984, when the oil price started to fall, the world would look vastly different today. “This is likely the single most important foreign policy and security issue facing the country. If we continue to enrich the wrong people, we have no hope of reasserting US influence and re-establishing US credibility.”