WASHINGTON, March 26 (UPI) -- The effectiveness of the new Iraqi armed forces is being crippled by chronic fuel shortages.
Iraq sits on the world's second largest known oil and gas reserves. However, violence and a badly degraded oil industry infrastructure mean Iraq cannot pump or refine its own oil and relies on imports from Syria and Turkey.
The Iraqi ministry of defense rations fuel to Iraqi army. The rations are set from above and do not reflect the actual needs of the unit, which varies depending how often they patrol or conduct offensive operations, U.S. Army Col. Stephan Twitty, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division based in Mosul, told UPI Friday.
"This system will never work for an army," Twitty said. "There must be a system where fuel is pushed from the higher headquarters to their units based on operating tempo, not on a monthly rationed cycle."
Logistics -- the ability to sustain an army with food, fuel, housing, weapons, spares and ammunition -- remains a real challenge in Iraq
"They are able to provide their soldiers food, water," Twitty said in a Pentagon press briefing Friday. "But ...they do not have a mature resource fueling process; it is all 'Here's your fuel rations for the month,' and if you run out of fuel within that month, okay, we're out of luck," Twitty said. "In many cases they run out of fuel."
In January, half an Iraqi brigade was sidelined by a lack of fuel in a cordon and search operation for insurgents.
"It was a battalion and a half that conducted that mission, simply because we did not have the fuel available to get the entire brigade out," Twitty said. "We lost a valuable opportunity to pick up a couple of bad guys as a result of it."
