950,000 Gallons of Coffee and 2 Million Energy Drinks Fueled Epic Fury

Gen. Dan Caine offered an interesting tally on Wednesday as he noted the amounts of caffeine, nicotine and rations that powered U.S. forces through Operation Epic Fury, hours after a two-week ceasefire between Washington and Tehran took effect and handed American troops their first pause in 38 days of combat.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff used a Pentagon briefing to break down the logistics behind a force of more than 50,000 service members deployed across U.S. Central Command, U.S. European Command and stateside installations supporting the campaign.

The figures were delivered alongside a warning from the Pentagon's top uniformed officer that the reprieve in fighting could prove fleeting.

Consumption by the Numbers

"Along the way, we consumed more than six million meals, and by my estimate, more than 950,000 gallons of coffee, two million energy drinks, and a lot of nicotine, but I am not saying that we have a problem," Caine said at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

The tally amounts to roughly 7.6 million 16-ounce cups poured across less than six weeks of fighting, or about 25,000 gallons a day.

Caine said the numbers obscured more than they revealed about what service members actually endured. He described combat in the theater as rough, relentless work carried out in chaotic, hot, dark and unpredictable conditions.

The briefing came as the halt in hostilities, announced the previous evening, began to take hold. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking alongside Caine, called the campaign a decisive battlefield victory and said the department had done its part for the time being.

Hegseth said American forces would remain postured in the region to ensure Iran complied with the terms of the truce.

Caine was blunt about the fragile nature of the agreement. A ceasefire, he said, was only a pause, and the joint force stood ready to resume strikes at the same pace if ordered back into action.

Operation Epic Fury began Feb. 28 with three stated military objectives. Caine listed them as destroying Iran's ballistic missile and drone capabilities, sinking the Iranian navy and dismantling its defense industrial base.

The chairman said the joint force struck more than 13,000 targets, flew over 10,000 missions, intercepted roughly 1,700 incoming ballistic missiles and attack drones, and sank 150 Iranian ships. Thirteen American service members were killed in action during the operation, while more than 300 were wounded.

Fuel for a Modern Force

The coffee, energy drinks and tobacco cited at the briefing placed Operation Epic Fury in a long tradition of American troops leaning on legal stimulants to stay awake and alert through deployments that routinely test the limits of human endurance.

Coffee has been a staple of American rations since the Civil War, when Union soldiers were issued beans they roasted and ground themselves before long marches.

Cigarettes were included in C-rations for decades before the Defense Department phased them out in the mid-1970s. Amphetamines, nicknamed "go pills," were issued to Army Air Forces pilots during World War II and remained in limited use with select Air Force aircrews in the decades that followed.

The energy drink era arrived with the Global War on Terror. National Beverage Corp., which manufactures the Rip It brand, reached an arrangement in 2004 to make its canned caffeine widely available to deployed service members in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The 8-ounce cans became a fixture of chow halls, guard posts and convoy staging areas across the entire Central Command theater. A single can delivered roughly 100 milligrams of caffeine alongside taurine and guarana seed extract, and troops on extended shifts were known to consume several cans in one sitting.

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research began studying the pattern at the height of those wars. A 2012 report in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report drew on a 2010 survey of 1,249 soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan.

The report found that roughly 45 percent of deployed troops were drinking at least one energy drink daily and about 14 percent were consuming three or more cans a day.

A follow-on study by Walter Reed psychologists, published in the journal Military Medicine in 2018, tracked more than 600 infantry soldiers in the months after they returned home.

The authors concluded that heavy energy drink use during the post-deployment window was associated with elevated rates of fatigue, aggressive behavior and mental health problems.

Nicotine has kept pace with caffeine in the field. The 2015 Health Related Behaviors Survey, the Defense Department's official health survey of active-duty personnel, found that 12.7 percent of service members were current smokeless tobacco users, compared with 3.4 percent of U.S. civilians.

Caine closed his remarks by thanking the joint force and the families of deployed troops. Regardless of the ceasefire, troops still manning their posts in the region will likely keep consuming energy drinks and coffee as they continue their daily jobs.