One powerful voice is curiously absent from the recent round of White House conferences and media extravaganzas on global warming: the Pentagon's. That's strange, since the U.S. military would be hit particularly hard by the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that President Clinton has in mind.
Just how serious the effect will be was made clear by a Sept. 5 memo from Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security Sherri Goodman, which was reprinted recently by Defense Environment Alert. Writing to senior Pentagon leadership, Ms. Goodman warned that a 10% reduction in military fuel use--one of the contingencies that military planners expect would be required by the proposed treaty on global warming to be signed in December in Kyoto, Japan--would result in "unacceptable impacts to national security."
Ms. Goodman's memo begins by underscoring the immense quantity of fossil fuels used by the nation's armed forces: "Overall, DoD [the Department of Defense] uses 1.4% of the energy used within the United States," she wrote. The Pentagon's gross energy consumption totals "about 24 million metric tons of carbon equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions." Her memo then offers examples of the damage the Kyoto treaty would do to U.S. military readiness. A 10% reduction in fuel use, Ms. Goodman wrote, would:
- "downgrade [the Army's] unit readiness and require up to six additional weeks to prepare to deploy. Strategic deployment schedules would be missed, placing operations at risk. Further more a 10% reduction in training hours for flight crews could reduce their readiness status, requiring four-to-six weeks of additional training to deploy and will jeopardize crew safety." In addition, the Army would lose 328,000 miles per year from its tank training exercises.
- "cut 2,000 steaming days per year from [the Navy's] training and operations for deployed ships. This would impact the National Security Strategy . . . result[ing] in some ships being deployed at a less acceptable readiness rate. Naval aviation (Navy and Marines)would also be adversely impacted. . . . The readiness of Marine Corps air-ground task forces would also be significantly affected."
- "result in the loss of over 210,000 [Air Force] flying hours per year. This would reduce Air Force readiness to the point it would be incapable of meeting all of the requirements of the National Military Strategy. Fighter and bomber crews would be unable to maintain full combat readiness. This means that many advanced capabilities would be lost."
As if all this weren't bad enough, Ms. Goodman's memo also states that her "analysis assumes DoD's fuel needs are relatively stable and predictable. This means assuming that a major crisis requiring the use of military forces that will increase fuel use will not occur." That's a dangerous assumption that no security planner should ever have to make.
For all these reasons, Ms. Goodman attached to her memo a proposed "national security waiver" to the Kyoto treaty. This waiver, she wrote, "should address military tactical and strategic systems used in training to support readiness or in support of national security, humanitarian activities, peace keeping, peace enforcement and United Nation's actions." That seems reasonable.
Yet the Pentagon won't say whether this waiver recommendation is its official position. It is clear, however, that this issue seems not to be getting the sort of attention one would expect from the Pentagon leadership, given the stakes. At a Washington conference this month, the chief of staff of the Army, senior civilian and military strategic planners and the chairman of the National Defense Panel all confessed that they were unaware of what--if anything--is being done to protect U.S. military readiness as part of the Clinton administration's environmental decision-making. If the Pentagon is not going to look after its operational requirements, we can be sure that no one else in the Clinton administration will.
Last month, the Joint Chiefs of Staff courageously told President Clinton that they could not support a ban on antipersonnel land mines, a politically popular initiative to which the president was personally committed. Not long after, Mr. Clinton announced: "As commander in chief, I will not send our soldiers to defend the freedom of our people and the freedom of others without doing everything we can to make them as secure as possible. . . . There is a line that I simply cannot cross, and that line is the safety and security of our men and women in uniform."
The same line needs now to be drawn for Mr. Clinton with respect to the Kyoto climate treaty, which would seriously threaten the nation's security, as well as that of our men and women in uniform.
Mr. Gaffney held senior defense positions in the Reagan administration. He is currently director of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.
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