US Military, the world’s largest polluter is implementing energy security strategy reducing future resource risk and increasing mission assurance

In the domain of defense, energy has the potential to be both an enabler of hard power but also, via denial, arguably itself to be a weapon of war. Energy enables nearly everything the military does, and the primary objective is mission assurance and decisive advantage on the battlefield.  Energy security ensures  powering of  capable major weapons systems and communications infrastructure at the desired levels of performance, range, and readiness.

 

Energy, of course, is a weapon of war. Putin’s army is targeting Ukrainian fuel depots, supply chains, and refineries in its brutal assault. Cutting off the other side’s access to gasoline, diesel, and oil is a tried and true tactic to gain a military upper hand.

 

According to the International Energy Agency, Russia is the world’s largest oil exporter to global markets, and its natural gas fuels the European economy. The energy crisis is particularly acute in Germany, which relies on Russia for roughly half of its natural gas and coal and for more than one-third of its oil.

 

In 2021, 60% of Russia’s revenues were from energy exports. While, as of April 7, Europe had given Kyiv over €1 billion to support Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, it paid Russia €35 billion for energy imports during that same period. In other words, Europe has been paying for Russia’s attack on its smaller, democratic neighbor with one hand because it is still buying Russian energy exports, while sanctioning other Russian activities with the other. The need to secure oil supplies and to maintain the stability of world oil markets has played a major role in shaping US foreign policy and dictating US military strategy and deployment.

 

The Ukraine crisis has shown there is now a strategic argument for net zero from a national security perspective. Militaries have long been innovation pioneers, developing technology that may well be crucial to net-zero innovation, they have themselves historically been laggards when it comes to actually reducing the emissions of their operations.

 

But resupplying energy to combat theaters and the battlespace edge leads to vulnerability of supply lines which has been exploited by enemy fighters. One in nearly 40 fuel convoys in Iraq in 2007 resulted in a death or serious injury, according to a study commissioned by the Defense Department. In Afghanistan the same year, one in 24 fuel convoys suffered casualties and U.S. Marine Corps suffered casualty for every fifty convoys in Afghanistan.

 

Therefore one of the militaries long term goal is  enhancing the ratio of the fighting “tooth” of the military to the supporting logistics “tail”. The size and requirements of the tooth of the fighting force directly affect the size and requirements of the resupplying tail. For example, when combat vehicles and warfighters deploy to theaters, they require additional vehicles and personnel as combat support elements (such as medical, supplies and other needs), and these combat support elements, themselves require resupply from other combat service support elements along the tail. In the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, about 4 gallons of fuel per soldier was consumed per day. In 2006, the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan burned about 16 gallons of fuel per soldier on average per day, almost twice as much as the year before. Reducing energy and water requirements for the fighting tooth represents a significant and realizable opportunity to shift the fundamental tooth-to-tail ratio in the Armed Services.

 

The US military had been the largest single consumer of energy in the world. In FY 2013, the Department spent almost $17 billion dollars to provide more than 111 million barrels of liquid fuels for military operations, training, and readiness.  The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the federal government’s biggest energy consumer. In 2021 it used 77 percent of the government’s total consumption—15 times the energy consumption of the second-place agency, the U.S. Post Office

 

Energy considerations have long been essential to mission delivery of armed forces worldwide. These include operations in theater of conflict, for land, air, and water transport, and for installations and forward operating locations.

 

The military also consumes huge amount of electricity, which accounts for even more greenhouse gas emissions. In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours of electricity at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The demand is further expected to increase in future as new and diverse capabilities are developed in future to respond to complex, global security environment.

 

Among the DoD’s biggest energy uses comes from the energy needed to power, heat and cool buildings in its facilities, including Army and Air Force bases, Navy yards and fuel required for non-tactical vehicles. The largest consumer of installation facility energy in 2020 was the Army, at 36 percent of the military’s total spending. The next-highest user was the Air Force, at 30 percent, and the Navy, at 28 percent.

 

Electrical grid are also vulnerable to natural disasters like tornados, hurricanes and winter storms, which cost between $18 and $33 billion every year in power outages and US infrastructure damage. They are also susceptible to deliberate attacks on the grid. These can either be physical attacks—like the 2013 sniper attack on a Silicon Valley substation, which cost $100 million and lasted 27 days —or computer hacking that causes cascading disruptions like in the Ukraine blackouts in 2016. In 2012, the US Department of Defense reported about 200 cyber incidents across critical infrastructure systems and nearly half targeted the electrical grid.

 

Improved energy performance  can reduce the risk and effects of attacks on supply lines and enable tactical and operational superiority. Security is also derived through minimizing the energy required for vehicles and forward locations. Reducing and diversifying fuel use are also drivers behind economic considerations of military energy use.

 

Another driver behind the American military’s move to clean sources of energy is climate change – a threat that military leaders continue to warn policy makers is very real and will impact the military, whether it’s responding to natural disasters or responding to conflicts caused by scarce resources. The U.S. military generates 750,000 tons of toxic waste annually, more than the five largest U.S. chemical companies combined, making the U.S. military the world’s largest polluter.

 

From fighter jets to lumbering aircraft carriers, the armed forces produce substantial emissions: the estimated 59 million metric tonnes of CO2 the US Department of Defense emits each year is more than the annual emissions of many European countries. In the UK, the Ministry of Defence is responsible for around half of the country’s total public sector emissions.

The US Air Force (USAF) is the single largest consumer of jet fuel in the world, a quarter of the world’s jet fuel. B-52 bombers consume 3,300 U.S. gallons per hour, and the F-16 fighter uses 800 gallons per hour.  CO2 emissions from jet fuel are larger — possibly triple — per gallon than those from diesel and oil. Further, aircraft exhaust has unique polluting effects that result in greater warming effect by per unit of fuel used.

 

It also makes sense for the defence sector to fully align itself with climate action due to the fact that climate change brings massive military risk, both in how it destabilises environments where bases may be situated or equipment held, and how it increases the risk of social or economic change that can trigger conflict.

 

While boosting the military energy readiness by actively promoting low-and no-carbon energy alternatives, the Defense Department is also working to reduce its use of fossil fuels and the resulting greenhouse gases being produced.

 

Resilient, sustainable and adequate sources of energy are key elements of the energy strategy of the US armed forces. Department of Defense (DoD) had embarked upon an ambitious program of expanded renewable energy generation on bases and in the field, with a goal of producing 25% of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. The armed forces nearly doubled renewable power generation between 2011 and 2015, to 10,534 billion British thermal units, or enough to power about 286,000 average U.S. homes, according to a Department of Defense report. The number of military renewable energy projects nearly tripled to 1,390 between 2011 and 2015, department data showed, with a number of utilities and solar companies benefiting.

 

Solar photo voltaic (PV)-powered Distributed microgrid tech can secure the electrical grids at military bases to reduce the impact of cyber attacks, physical attacks from terrorists and natural disasters. Depending on geographical locations across the US, military installations get electricity from solar, wind, geothermal, waste-to-energy landfill gas and biomass.Renewable technologies, such as solar devices for servicemen, waste-to-energy, solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicles and other ways of using locally-sourced energy, are key to fuel diversification goals.

 

The  senior military officials intend to “forge ahead under the new administration with a decade-long effort to convert its fuel-hungry operations to renewable power,” according to Reuter report. “We expect that it’s going to continue during the Trump administration,” said Lt. Col. Wayne Kinsel, head of the infrastructure unit of the Air Force Asset Management Division for Logistics, Engineering and Force Protection. “It’s really not political.”

 

“The military recognises the importance of renewable energy in achieving their missions in more effective ways,” says Galen Nelson, Director of Innovation at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, who collaborates with military leaders in the Bay State on clean energy projects. “Military leaders are committed to incorporating clean energy into their assets, not least because the cost of renewable energy has come down dramatically in recent years.”