The Daily Mail in London reports that the “U.S. military spends a cool $20 billion on air conditioning annually in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

The U.S. military forks out a whopping $20.2billion a year on keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cool, it has emerged.

The alarming figure is more than NASA’s entire annual budget and trumps the amount the G-8 has pledged to aid Egypt and Tunisia.

It’s even more than the clean up cost of BPs Gulf oil spill.

Why?

An air conditioning unit at a remote Afghanistan outpost takes a gallon of fuel, which soon goes in the searing 125 degree heat.

This has to be shipped into Karachi, then driven 800 miles over 18 days to the war-torn country on atrociously bad roads.

‘And you’ve got risks that are associated with moving the fuel almost every mile of the way,’ Steven Anderson, a retired brigadier general who served as General David Patreaus’ chief logistician in Iraq, told National Public Radio (NPR).

Fuel convoys remain key targets for attack, and according to Anderson, more than 1,000 troops have died while delivering vital supplies.

For Anderson the military would save money by going green. He claims experiments with polyurethane foam insulation tents in Iraq cut energy use by a staggering 92 per cent, taking 11,000 fuel convoys off the road. . . .

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