Donal, I am glad that you continue to cover different aspects of our country's and the world's problems related to energy.Considering the enormity of the troubles we can expect as we enter the downside of peak oil, I consider it to be a very under-covered subject.

 From Wikipedia:

 The Department of Defense was the largest single consumer of energy in the United States in 2006.[34]

In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006).[35]

The DOD is responsible for 93% of all US government fuel consumption in 2007 (Air Force: 52%; Navy: 33%; Army: 7%. Other DoD: 1%).[35] The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons (1.7×1010 L) of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. A large Army division may use about 6,000 US gallons (23,000 L) per day. According to the 2005 CIA World Factbook, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 34th in the world in average daily oil use, coming in just behind Iraq and just ahead of Sweden.[36] The Air Force is the largest user of fuel energy in the federal government. The Air Force uses 10% of the nation's aviation fuel. (JP-8 accounts for nearly 90% of its fuels.) This fuel usage breaks down as such: 82% jet fuel, 16% facility management and 2% ground vehicle/equipment.

 As striking as the above figures are, they actually represent much less than the total military related/dedicated use of fossil fuel. Consider the fuel used by the infrastructure of the military industrial complex to build the weapons and equipment used by our military. We spend an enormous amount of money importing a product, oil, which we then burn up as quickly as we can in the long term counter-productive effort to be able to destroy other country's infrastructure, the vcarious *works of man*, which were built with a great deal of energy input and which will be rebuilt with even more energy imput if it is possible to do so. We do this today largely because we know that the world is running out of this same form of energy.  
 We are using an enormous amount of precious liquid fuel to attempt to keep control of and leverage on the remaining world's supply of liquid fuel. Twelve million, six-hundred thousand gallons a day used directly by our military would be enough so that 40mpg cars could drive 184,325,000,000 miles a year. That is close to the total annual mileage driven in autos in the U.S. in recent years.
 This is not to say that we should do away with our military so we could continue to drive expensive and inefficient people movers. It is to say that IMO we should do away with about 80% of our military and count on the remaining 20% to be able to keep the Mongol hordes from our shores while we invest the rest and more into preparing for the day that we cannot buy enough oil on the world market.