No, they're just trying to cut their long supply trains. Adaptation is a virtue, plus then you don't have to worry about the Pakistanis using your own money to blow up your supply tankers.

Isn't "every little bit helps" the environmentalist's mantra nowadays?

Anything that decreases the amount of humans in the world is ultimately good for the environment.

I thought Heller's themes were the absurdity and contradiction of war and the military. Not sure how that applies here.

@3 i'll tell that to the gulf states dealing with oceans on fire and other fun things

Daimler AG has begun taking orders for its new Mercedes-Benz hydrogen fuel-cell car that will be leased to customers in California as the automaker joins a wave of alternative-fuel vehicles reaching the U.S.

The monthly lease price may be $600 to $800 including fuel, Sascha Simon, director of advanced product planning for the automakers sales U.S. unit, said today in an interview. The leases are being limited to drivers in Los Angeles and the San Francisco area because of the restricted availability of hydrogen fuel.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20101006/…

at least with the bio-diesel napalm, the burnt off flesh has a french fry smell to it, right?

@6: Aaand until we find an efficient way to produce hydrogen (probably using a photocatalyst), hydrogen cars will not be viable. Also, water vapor can serve as a greenhouse gas too.

This is, for good or bad, the process by which significant leaps in technology get adopted and mainstreamed. The military needed a better way to kill from the air, so airplane research increased - now we can fly direct from SEA to NYC in a few hours for a few hundred dollars. The military needed better ways to communicate where the enemy is in order to blow them up, so we sunk money into figuring out better modems and now we have the internet where anyone with a webcam can show their junk to a curious grandmother. Now, the military needs a cheaper way to move cannons and unmanned aerial killing machine video games around, so we start making a bigger investment into using some of the free power sources that have been around since, literally, the dawn of our existence.

It's the equivalent of freezing your ass off for years in a lumber yard, and only realizing the value of the hammer sitting there after you use it to open the skull of someone who came up to say hi.

so they want nuclear powered everything

If you consider the war for oil hypothesis, then greener armies means less incentive to go to war, fewer deaths, and less tax burden. On a side note, I wonder how much of the energy supply we secure with our armed forces actually goes back into powering those forces. If it's any more than 30%, then something is seriously twisted.