U.S. Military: “Going Green” is Putting our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines at Risk

There has been a push by the Obama administration’s Department of Defense to “go green”.  But what if this effort puts our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines at risk on the battlefield?

The Environmental Protection Agency has been pushing to outlaw lead bullets.

Fox News reporter Perry Chiaramonte wrote in his column “End of the line for the lead bullet?“:

The bid to ban lead bullets, seen by some as harmful to the environment, started slowly more than a decade ago. But with two dozen states, including California, banning bullets made of the soft, heavy metal, the lead bullet’s epitaph was already being written when the federal government finished it off.

First, the military announced plans to phase out lead bullets by 2018.”

Then the federal Environmental Protection Agency, citing emissions, ordered the shutdown of the Doe Run company’s lead smelter in Herculaneum, Mo., by year’s end.

Whether by state or federal regulation, or by market forces, lead bullets will be all but phased out within a few years in favor of so-called green bullets, experts say. [Emphasis added]

Major John L. Plaster, US Army (Ret.) in a column titled “It Has To Be Green” writes, “Spanning a decade-and-a-half, and costing taxpayers about $100 million, the process of adopting the lead-free 5.56×45 mm NATO M855A1 ball cartridge was hardly transparent. At times, lethality, accuracy and battlefield performance seemed to take a backseat to environmental factors.” [Emphasis added]

Going green also impacts the military budget dramatically.

Brian Slattery and Michaela Dodge in their article “Biofuel Blunder: Navy Should Prioritize Fleet Modernization over Political Initiatives” write, “For the past several years, the President and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus have directed the U.S. Navy to dedicate increasingly precious budgetary resources to establish a “green fleet”—i.e., to replace conventional diesel fuel for ships with biofuels harvested from organic material. Supporters claim that instability in the fossil fuel market justifies paying more for unproven technologies, but this initiative will in effect cause fiscal instability in an already unstable Department of Defense budget.”

Slattery and Dodge list multiple reasons that biofuel is not the answer including:

• Diesel Will Be Plentiful. The American petroleum sector is currently undergoing a booming revival, and new sources of fuel such as shale will decrease demand for diesel elsewhere in the U.S. economy. This will help secure sources of diesel to be readily available to the U.S. military.
• No Established International Infrastructure. That could cause considerable challenges given the Navy’s global reach. It might be difficult or even impossible to refuel a “green” ship in foreign waters, because a foreign biofuel infrastructure capable of meeting the Navy’s needs is almost non-existent. Even if the U.S. builds its own supply chain for the Navy, it would still have to rely on diesel if refueling in foreign ports.
• Increased Corrosion. Studies have shown that biofuels are more corrosive than regular diesel and can therefore increase maintenance costs within the Navy’s fleet. This would only worsen the current fleet’s dire situation, since inspection failures are already occurring at an alarming rate within the fleet. Increasing average age of U.S. fleet; delayed, deferred, and underfunded modernization; and use of fuels with potentially harmful consequences is a recipe for a fleet readiness crisis.
• Increased Expenses. Biofuels are disproportionately more expensive than conventional fuels. A gallon of biofuel costs $26, whereas the Department of Defense purchases diesel at about $3.60 per gallon. Many argue that this rate will decrease over time as biofuel production increases, but in the interim, the Navy’s readiness would be further damaged by wasting precious resources on biofuels that are seven times more expensive than the Navy’s conventional fuels—not including the increased maintenance costs.
• An Already Unstable Funding Environment. Even in a fiscally robust environment, biofuels are not a wise allocation of the Pentagon’s funds. The U.S. military is currently facing serious funding reductions due to sequestration, which was mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Under these cuts, the Navy will be unable to sustain its current shipbuilding rate, which has already been below the necessary level for a number of years.

Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein lists 14 Weird Ways the US Military Is Becoming a Clean, Green Fighting Machine: Here are a few of Weinstein’s weird examples:

DARPA

Project Aquaman: The “Materials With Novel Transport Properties” (MANTRA) program seeks to create a 75-gallon-an-hour water desalination plant small enough to fit into a “man-portable backpack system…allowing decentralized water sustainment for increased troop agility and mobility.”
DARPA or Derpa? Pretty realistic, so long as you’re not fighting in a desert. Er…

ARMY

Waste? Not! At New York’s Ft. Drum, one of the Army’s largest bases, animal and plant waste could soon light up the parade grounds, and that’s no crap.

AIR FORCE

Big Brother in Your Tank: 30,000 vehicles are being outfitted with gas cap rings that track fuel consumption and identify needed maintenance, saving more than a million man-hours needed to check odometers. (Wait, what?!)

NAVY

Thar She Blows: The Navy boasts the world’s largest diesel/wind hybrid power plant…in Gitmo. It’s part of a broader initiative to green the prison base, including bicycle MPs and solar-powered floodlights.

MARINES

Green Grunts: In Afghanistan, Marine bases use “ground renewable expeditionary energy systems” (GREENS), foldable solar panels. On patrol, solar “blankets” power communications gear, cutting 20 pounds of batteries per pack.

Ehren Gosssens from Bloomberg in his article “The Army Goes Green, but Not to Save the Earth” reports, “The Army has spent $10 million to equip Special Forces units with SunDial’s [solar panel] systems. It’s part of a $4 billion green campaign the Army launched in 2009, with plans to spend billions more over the next three decades. The mission isn’t about saving the environment. It’s about saving money and lives.”

But are any of these initiatives about saving lives or pushing a more expensive and costly “green agenda” on our military? The cost of this greening is being felt in the reduction in our military forces.

Going green is negatively impacting our military capabilities and mission readiness.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Jalopnik.com and Shutterstock.