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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

What is the competency of the military for assessing 1. world petroleum reserves and consumption 2. the economic consequences of an oil shortage?!

I think it's far more likely that Spiegel is misrepresenting the context of the study. The German military, in particular, has a reputation for making contingency plans for everything. It seems to me far more credible that the purpose of the study is rather "in the unlikely event that 'peak oil' is reached soon AND this leads to 'total collapse of the markets', the German Army should respond with actions A, B and C".

Discovering such a plan would then have no more significance than finding out, say, about a study of the defensive measures required if Germany is invaded by the Czech Republic.

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Do you not think that the United States (and any other country for that matter) hasn't progressed down this same path?

The competency of any military assessing world petroleum reserves and consumption is enormous! Petroleum is the achillies heel of an army. Petroleum is probably the single most valuable commodity for maintaining any army's fighting posture in this day and age. With maybe water and food being a close second.

But remember, petroleum must be continuously and logistically transported to troops fighting on the ground or in the air. You can't just locally procure a sustainable petroleum source for an army on the move.

Yes, modern armies do depend on a good supply of petroleum. That doesn't mean they are fully staffed with geologists, economists, market analysts etc. Pretty much the entire economy is highly dependent on fossil fuels, but the competency to estimate the reserves is concentrated in a narrow field, and estimates of a whole economy's response to oil shock are mostly speculation.

I'd bet the single largest consumer of intelligence data from the CIA is the US Military, which, is considerably staffed by the US Military.

I might be splitting hairs here, but it is a well known fact that a tremendous amount of CIA employees are geologists, economists, and market analysts.

Realistically, while the CIA's job is to supply the nation's President and governmental agencies with intelligence, the end result of a lot of work the CIA does is for the US Military. And you can bet a ton of work is done around the Petroleum supply.

Look, this is not a study by the CIA. It's been prepared by the German military, and the article sources no other primary information. If there is a study done by actual geologists and market analysts, I'll get excited when I see it.

Thanks to history and stupid bureaucratic politics, though, the military has their own intelligence agencies as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Naval_Intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Intelligence_Agency

One interesting study about this area, done by the JASON group for the DoD, is "Reducing DoD Fossil-Fuel Dependence, JSR-06-135":

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/fossil.pdf

I think the peak oil scenario is a bit more likely though than the Czech Republic invading Germany.

The point is that it's probably a contingency plan, and its task is not to estimate the probability of the contingency, but rather what to do should it occur.

I'll agree with this. But the development of a contingency plans most certainly includes individuals that are highly skilled in economics, geology, and a vast number of other sciences.

We got an Austrian taking over our government a few decades ago. So I wouldn't rule out some sneaky take over by the Czech.

The cost of energy is important to a country because it is one of many throttling point for how aggressively a country can grow. If it becomes unaffordable, and as a result difficult to grow, it can lead to a lot of things (like unemployment and civil unrest).

As far as questioning their competency, I don't even understand what you mean. They have engineers, information, and resources... i'm sure the competent enough to put things together and draw possible conclusions. The oil/commidity trade is very very tied to governments, military embargoes, etc.

For a small idea of how politically charged oil is, one example is the pipeline between Iran and Israel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Israel_pipeline

Oil and the price of it is incredibly important to governments.

The army does not extract and market oil. Just because they depend on it doesn't mean they can predict worldwide reserves, rates of consumption, and economic effects of fluctuations in the oil supply. Heck, the oil companies themselves are hard pressed to do a small subset of all of these tasks.

this is analogous to saying that a food corporation has no ability to predict worldwide reserves, consumption, and the economic effects of the wheat that they consume. Or that an airline doesn't employ economists that closely monitor oil consumption and supply.

Army's spend an incredible amount of time looking at the long term effects of the oil supply chain.

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