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Cammo Green

Stryker Camo a Good Idea?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Stryker-camo

An inter­est­ing take from our friend Michael Yon in the National Review on the story we ran yes­ter­day about paint­ing Strykers desert tan…

The Strykers cur­rently in Afghanistan prob­a­bly should be painted brown, but it is not true that the mil­i­tary dragged through these years with­out notic­ing, or that Gates, Petraeus, McChrystal, Mellinger, and Prosser didn’t ask for some­thing they needed. Stars & Stripes plays a valu­able role as a mil­i­tary watch­dog, but this time, they’re bark­ing up the wrong tree.

Yon has spent a lot of time in the shit, so his analy­sis should be taken with a huge amount of cre­dence. But I will say, even though he argues the Strykers have been oper­at­ing in Iraq with­out the desert tan to great effect for years, it doesn’t make sense to me that it took this long to get in gear and paint them to match the envi­ron­ment. I was with a Stryker unit in Baquba back in Jan. ’08 and I will say the green camo vehi­cles stuck out like a sore thumb.

Now I’ll agree with Yon that if the CSM and CG wanted them painted tan, they’d be tan in a jiffy. The vehi­cles were fre­quently used as trans­port of senior staff on the bat­tle­field and you can bet a dol­lar for dough­nuts they’d want their vehi­cle draped in the best camo scheme possible.

– Christian

Helmet Pads In the News

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Russian-SVR.jpg

The GAO just issued a brief report look­ing at the ser­vices’ efforts to mit­i­gate blunt impact trauma by replac­ing the old sus­pen­sion sys­tem in com­bat hel­mets with one that uses padding attached directly to the inte­rior of the helmet.

The report was issued to mem­bers of the con­gres­sional armed ser­vices and appro­pri­a­tions com­mit­tees to bring their staffs up to speed on how these padding sys­tems came about. It doesn’t look at the test­ing of the sys­tems or any­thing like that and, to be per­fectly hon­est, it’s pretty “no duh” except for a cou­ple things.

First, the report indi­cates the Army and Marine Corps have been push­ing indus­try to develop more advanced pads that can absorb nearly a quar­ter more impact than the ones in cur­rent hel­mets. So far indus­try hasn’t been able to meet the requirement.

Also, the ser­vices are exam­in­ing tech­nolo­gies used by NATO coun­tries, includ­ing entire padded lin­ers, meth­ods used by high impact sports and even advanced con­cepts like aque­ous lin­ers (a CamelBak on your head?)…I’m par­tial to the Russian Special Forces hel­met myself and I won­der if some of our blacker SOF units are using a sim­i­lar ver­sion (I remem­ber see­ing pic­tures of SF oper­a­tors wear­ing mod­i­fied flight hel­mets dur­ing the over­land push into north­ern Iraq in 2003)…

Take a look at the entire report for some good back­ground on how these padding sys­tems came about and make sure to read page five, which dis­cusses new techs being looked at.
GAO Helmet Pad Report

– Christian

Congress Orders Army to Field MultiCam (maybe)

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

multicam-afghanistanSMALLER.jpg

We’re run­ning a story this after­noon on Military.com that talks about lan­guage inserted into the late 2009 war sup­ple­men­tal bill by Jack Murtha call­ing on the Army to study whether the cur­rent “ArPat” dig­i­tal all-in-one camo pat­tern is the best option for troops in Afghanistan.

According our reporter Bryan Mitchell, Murtha was jaw bon­ing with some Ranger types who com­plained about how the ArpPat camo stood out like a sore thumb in the craggy hills and forested vales of east­ern Afghanistan.

The move in Congress was prompted by Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), Chairman of the Defense Appropriations sub­com­mit­tee, who said he was first made aware of the issue dur­ing a visit with a group of non­com­mis­sioned offi­cer Rangers serv­ing at Fort Benning, Ga.

Murtha queried Army lead­ers and learned the con­cern was not reserved to a hand­ful of Georgia troops. Similar sen­ti­ments had been voiced through­out units with expe­ri­ence serv­ing in Afghanistan.

“The rea­son is that the cur­rent uni­form has been pri­mar­ily designed for a desert com­bat, like in Iraq, and obvi­ously the ter­rain is much dif­fer­ent in Afghanistan,” Murtha said in an e-mail to Military.com.

“I spoke to both General Casey and General Petraeus about the issue. They also have heard the same thing, said that the Army is look­ing into the sit­u­a­tion, and that fund­ing is avail­able for new uni­forms if the Army decides to go that route.” 

And I’ve heard the com­plaints as well. No one really under­stood why the Army picked the sort of old-school loden col­ored camo. Especially since the ser­vice had already devel­oped the MultiCam pat­tern with Crye Precision and Natick.

And isn’t that what it all boils down to? Everyone wants MultiCam. “Spec Ops guys get to wear it…why can’t I?” I even scoped out some pho­tos of Air Force PJs sport­ing MultiCam dur­ing a deploy­ment to Djibouti. And prac­ti­cally every cover shot from our friends at Tactical-Life.com fea­tures a MultiCam clad “oper­a­tor” fir­ing the high­est speed shorty car­bine around.

Look, I like MultiCam like the rest of them. But I also under­stand why the Army did what it did. They spent mil­lions of dol­lars and lots of time study­ing what would work best in a range of envi­ron­ments with an eye toward mak­ing the Soldier’s load­out eas­ier — one func­tional com­bat uni­form for a range of envi­ron­ments. MultiCam was tested along­side the cur­rent ArPat (I was at Army Times Co. when the ser­vice was decid­ing the pat­tern and was fol­low­ing it closely with my friend Matt Cox there) and sev­eral other options and the ArPat camo won out. It was new. It was rev­o­lu­tion­ary and it was unpop­u­lar. That’s what makes me think it might have been the right choice.

But I’m will­ing to be con­vinced otherwise.

Also, we don’t have a ton of cash lying around, and some in the Army argue that the ser­vice has spent bil­lions field­ing the new uni­forms and other gear in the pat­tern. Unless it sticks out like a sore thumb, why spend mil­lions more to inject another ver­sion? And keep in mind the flam­ing hoops the Army is being forced to jump through as a line inserted by one con­gress­man forces them to eval­u­ate all these uni­form alter­na­tives. Nothing’s going to come of it, I guar­an­tee you that. But Petraeus, Casey and Stevenson will have to pla­cate the Democratic bull by say­ing “that’s a very good idea. we’ll spend time, money and resources look­ing into it for you, but we’re still going to come up with the same answer…”

I liked the con­gres­sional inter­ven­tion on the M4 car­bine issue, but I don’t see the sense in this one.

– Christian

Happy Birthday Joes! (Tomorrow)

Friday, June 13th, 2008

army-birthday.jpg

They’ve sure earned their keep…Hooah Army!

Two hun­dred and thirty-three years ago, the United States Army was estab­lished to defend our Nation. From the Revolutionary War to the Global War on Terror, our Soldiers remain Army Strong with a deep com­mit­ment to our core val­ues and beliefs. This 233rd birth­day com­mem­o­rates Americas Army Soldiers, Families and Civilians who are achiev­ing a level of excel­lence that is truly Army Strong both here and abroad. Their will­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice to build a bet­ter future for oth­ers and to pre­serve our way of life is with­out a doubt, the Strength of our Nation.

And a lit­tle history…

The June 14 date is when Congress adopted “the American con­ti­nen­tal army” after reach­ing a con­sen­sus posi­tion in The Committee of the Whole. This pro­ce­dure and the desire for secrecy account for the sparse­ness of the offi­cial jour­nal entries for the day. The record indi­cates only that Congress under­took to raise ten com­pa­nies of rifle­men, approved an enlist­ment form for them, and appointed a com­mit­tee (includ­ing Washington and Schuyler) to draft rules and reg­u­la­tions for the gov­ern­ment of the army. The del­e­gates’ cor­re­spon­dence, diaries, and sub­se­quent actions make it clear that they really did much more. They also accepted respon­si­bil­ity for the exist­ing New England troops and forces requested for the defense of the var­i­ous points in New York. The for­mer were believed to total 10,000 men; the lat­ter, both New Yorkers and Connecticut men, another 5,000.

At least some mem­bers of Congress assumed from the begin­ning that this force would be expanded. That expan­sion, in the form of increased troop ceil­ings at Boston, came very rapidly as bet­ter infor­ma­tion arrived regard­ing the actual num­bers of New England troops. By the third week in June del­e­gates were refer­ring to 15,000 at Boston. When on 19 June Congress requested the gov­ern­ments of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire to for­ward to Boston “such of the forces as are already embod­ied, towards their quo­tas of the troops agreed to be raised by the New England Colonies,” it gave a clear indi­ca­tion of its intent to adopt the regional army. Discussions the next day indi­cated that Congress was pre­pared to sup­port a force at Boston twice the size of the British gar­ri­son, and that it was unwill­ing to order any exist­ing units to be dis­banded. By the first week in July del­e­gates were refer­ring to a total at Boston that was edg­ing toward 20.000. Maximum strengths for the forces both in Massachusetts and New York were finally estab­lished on 21 and 22 July, when solid infor­ma­tion was on hand. These were set, respec­tively, at 22,000 and 5,000 men, a total nearly dou­ble that envi­sioned on 14 June.

The “expert rifle­men” autho­rized on 14 June were the first units raised directly as Continentals. Congress intended to have the ten com­pa­nies serve as a light infantry force for the Boston siege. At the same time it sym­bol­i­cally extended mil­i­tary par­tic­i­pa­tion beyond New England by allo­cat­ing 6 of the com­pa­nies to Pennsylvania, 2 to Maryland, and 2 to Virginia. Each com­pany would have a cap­tain, 3 lieu­tenants, 4 sergeants, 4 cor­po­rals, a drum­mer (or horn player), and 68 pri­vates. The enlist­ment period was set at one year, the norm for the ear­lier Provincials, a period that would expire on 1 July 1776. 

– Christian

Military Going Green… But Chugging Oil

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

The Wall Street Journal takes a tour today of the Pentagon’s clean energy plans. It’s a fair and bal­anced piece — in the old, pre-Murdoch sense of the term. And it throws some needed cold water on a (slightly over-) enthu­si­as­tic essay I wrote for the cur­rent issue of Good mag­a­zine. In it, I get all rosy-glasses, count­ing off the military’s alt-power projects:
10-1.jpg

In September 2005, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment decreed that 7.5 per­cent of its power should come from renew­able sources by 2013. The Pentagon is already there [and is headed towards 25 per­cent renew­ables by 2025]… In sunny San Diego, California, Naval Base Coronado’s solar power is sav­ing the annual equiv­a­lent of 6,000 bar­rels of oil. Wind tur­bines help Warren Air Force Base in gusty Wyoming, keep­ing 4,866 tons of car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from escap­ing into the atmos­phere per year. Then there are the nine mil­i­tary bases that are pow­ered geot­her­mally, by the heat of the earth. California’s Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake kicks off 270 megawatts of elec­tric­ity, keep­ing lights turned on as far away as Los Angeles.

True, true. But while clean power is nice, the Journal notes, it’s small pota­toes com­pared to the oil, gas, and jet fuel the Defense Department guzles:

In the past 20 years, [the mil­i­tary] has cut energy use at facil­i­ties 28%. Still, oil accounts for roughly 75% of total energy use. The military’s focus has been on sav­ing power — also a laud­able goal, crit­ics say, but not an answer to depen­dence on oil…
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have increased mil­i­tary fuel use by as much as 56,000 bar­rels a day. In addi­tion, the military’s improved abil­ity to deploy troops to bat­tle­fields comes at the cost of increased fuel use: today, more than half of the fuel con­sumed in com­bat the­aters is used not by front-line sol­diers but by sup­ply con­voy… The mil­i­tary uses fuel at twice the rate it did in the first Persian Gulf War and four times the rate it did in the Second World War.

Bottom line: It ain’t easy, get­ting to green.
UPDATE 5:10 PM: “The Air Force last month suc­cess­fully demon­strated how hydro­gen fuel cells could one day be used for gen­er­at­ing power at for­ward oper­at­ing bases and remote loca­tions to help reduce the depen­dence of U.S. forces on local energy sources and for­eign oil,” Inside Defense reports.

During the Dec. 14 test, offi­cials from the ser­vices Advanced Power Technology Office stud­ied how well a newly devel­oped hydro­gen fuel cell called the Multipurpose Electric Power System could pro­vide elec­tric­ity to halo­gen lights, com­par­ing the results to the per­for­mance of a diesel gen­er­a­tor now used in the­ater…
The demon­stra­tion was the lat­est in a series of tests under the offices tent city ini­tia­tive, which exam­ines new alter­na­tive energy tech­nolo­gies that may one day help U.S. forces in the­ater power equip­ment more efficiently.

UPDATE 01/10/07 11:38 AM: Last week, Defense News had an even deeper look at the military’s alt-fuel and alt-power conundrum.

With fuel prices esca­lat­ing, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is urg­ing the Navy to go all-nuclear.
For now, only sub­marines and air­craft car­ri­ers are pro­pelled by nuclear power. Thats about 80 of the Navys 286 ships. But Bartlett, who chaired the House Armed Services pro­jec­tion forces sub­com­mit­tee, says its time for the nuclear Navy to grow. The line has already been crossed for big-deck amphibi­ous ships, Bartlett said.
When oil hit $60 a bar­rel, it became more expen­sive to oper­ate amphibs on oil than it would be on nuclear power, he said.
And we will shortly cross the line for cruis­ers, Bartlett said.
The Navy cal­cu­lates that nuclear power becomes eco­nom­i­cal for cruis­ers after oil costs $80 a bar­rel, and for destroy­ers when oil costs about $205 a bar­rel.
But…cost is a major road­block for nuclear-powered ships… Nuclear propul­sion sys­tems would add sev­eral hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars to each ship. The tim­ing is not good. Congress is already dis­tressed about esca­lat­ing ship­build­ing costs. Once they see the num­bers, it will be very hard to con­vince them to go all-nuclear, he said…
[In the mean­time,] the Navy also tak­ing [smaller] steps to reduce energy con­sump­tion. It has installed bul­bous bows and stern flaps on some of its ships. Each of these increases fuel effi­ciency by a few per­cent­age points, accord­ing to John Young, the Pentagons direc­tor of research and engi­neer­ing.
The Navy also is con­sid­er­ing apply­ing coat­ings to ship pro­pellers to poten­tially get 4 or 5 per­cent sav­ings in fuel effi­ciency and pos­si­bly some reduc­tions in main­te­nance, Young told the House Armed Services Committee in September. It looks like it pays for itself in no more than about a year.

No Blood for… Solar Power?

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

Last Thursday, the Christian Science Monitor reported on an unusual memo from the staff of Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, the highest-ranking Marine offi­cer in Iraqs trou­bled Anbar Province. According to the Monitor, and to more com­pre­hen­sive treat­ments in Inside Defense and Defense Industry Daily, Zilmer asked the Pentagon to find a way to get “solar pan­els and wind tur­bines” into the hands of his troops. Without access to renew­able energy solu­tions, Zilmer expects to see “con­tin­ued casu­alty accu­mu­la­tion [which] exhibits poten­tial to jeop­ar­dize mis­sion suc­cess.”
Say what?
Solar.JPGThe arti­cle in the Monitor sug­gests two dif­fer­ent ways in which solar– and wind-powered gen­er­a­tors for iso­lated out­posts would reduce U.S. casu­al­ties. The first is that “despite desert tem­per­a­tures, the hot ‘ther­mal sig­na­ture’ of a diesel gen­er­a­tor can call enemy atten­tion to U.S. out­posts.” How, exactly, an array of solar pan­els and wind tur­bines would make U.S. troops less con­spic­u­ous in a coun­try bristling with diesel gen­er­a­tors is left unclear.
The sec­ond argu­ment holds more water. As hard as it is to believe, diesel and other refined petro­leum prod­ucts are actu­ally imported into Iraq by truck, largely from Turkey. And fuel con­voys not to men­tion the U.S. troops rid­ing in them are some of the most tempt­ing tar­gets to insur­gents: in August 2005, for exam­ple, the Army 1st Corps Support Command alone was report­ing 30 IED attacks a week.
All that fuel con­voyin’ costs not only lives, but money, too. Military esti­mates for the cost of one gal­lon of gen­er­a­tor fuel deliv­ered to a unit at a for­ward posi­tion range from $100 to $400. This is a prob­lem.
(If youre curi­ous to know how they get those types of num­bers for a sin­gle gal­lon of fuel, take a gan­der at this LMI pre­sen­ta­tion, from 2004, which cranks out an esti­mate of $3 per kilowatt-frickin’-hour or about $120 per gal­lon of fuel con­sumed on the bat­tle­field, com­pared to $0.40/kWh ($16/gallon) to run those same gen­er­a­tors state­side. If this state­side num­ber seems high, too, remem­ber that the num­ber rep­re­sents all costs asso­ci­ated with turn­ing that gal­lon of fuel into use­ful energy, includ­ing per­son­nel costs, equip­ment depre­ci­a­tion, and so on.)
So, what can be done?
Right now, theres no easy answer. Arlington, Va.-based SkyBuilt Power offers a con­tainer­ized, deploy­able solar-/wind-powered gen­er­at­ing sta­tion which has got­ten a lot of press, but the sys­tem, which pro­duces “0.5 kW to 150 kW or more,” is reported by the Monitor to go for a neat $100,000.
Still, that price tag looks a lot less scary when you keep in mind the absurd cost of run­ning a diesel gen­er­a­tor on the bat­tle­field. According to the Monitor, Zilmers memo esti­mated that a sys­tem like SkyBuilts would pay for itself in three to five years.
That, of course, is prob­a­bly why In-Q-Tel, the CIAs own venture-cap firm, is one of SkyBuilts big back­ers.
Part of the logis­tics crunch which is feed­ing those con­voy casu­alty rates has more to do with inept plan­ning than with a lack of avail­able tech­nol­ogy. In February 2006, the engi­neer­ing jour­nal IEEE Spectrum pub­lished a must-read arti­cle describ­ing how diesel fuel is trucked in from Turkey to power Baghdads main power sta­tion, even while the nat­ural gas which could power the same tur­bines, if the appro­pri­ate equip­ment were installed, is flared off as waste at an oil­field across the street.
Obviously, renew­able energy isn’t going to solve prob­lems on the scale of Iraq’s FUBARed power grid, nor will it solve prob­lems that are really about plan­ning, and not tech­nol­ogy. And just as obvi­ously, there’s no mature tech­nol­ogy out there ready to take the place of every diesel gen­er­a­tor and inter­nal com­bus­tion engine in the U.S. armory.
But as I wrote almost a year ago, the Department of Defense can’t afford to sit around and wait for some­one else to mature those tech­nolo­gies: “the mature renewable-energy and fuel-efficient tech­nol­ogy of the future may never appear in real­ity until it appears among DARPA’s ‘Areas of Interest.’
Since I wrote those words, I’m glad to say that there’s been all sorts of move­ment on this front. And the pub­lic­ity gar­nered by Zilmers memo can only help mat­ters along.
So next time you hear about a com­pany thats devel­op­ing bet­ter solar cells, or more effi­cient wind tur­bines, pay atten­tion. Theyre not just Mother Natures best friends they may well be a jarhead’s best friend.
Haninah Levine

Military Hybrids Stall

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

For a long time, now, the Pentagon has been look­ing to land diesel-electric hybrid vehi­cles to improve fuel econ­omy, reduce logis­tics and allow power export. But after a decade of research and devel­op­ment, mil­i­tary hybrids are still years away from pro­duc­tion, as I describe in detail in the cur­rent National Defense Magazine:
p30_TechnologyLimitations.jpg

Right now, we do not have a cur­rent hybrid pro­gram that tar­gets field­ing, says Gus Khalil, team leader of hybrid-electric research at the Armys Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, or TARDEC.
TARDEC, a divi­sion of the Research, Development and Engineering Command, in Warren, Mich., is the mil­i­tarys main research cen­ter for vehi­cle tech­nolo­gies.
Khalil and other TARDEC engi­neers have been devel­op­ing hybrid-electric engines and test­ing vehi­cle demon­stra­tors since 1992.
Across the Defense Department, there are around 30 hybrid-electric demon­stra­tor vehi­cles in some form of test­ing. These demon­stra­tors range from hybrid mod­els of exist­ing vehi­cles, such as Humvees, M-113 armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers and M-2 Bradley infantry fight­ing sys­tems, to new designs such as the Marine Corps recon­nais­sance, sur­veil­lance and tar­get­ing vehi­cle, or RST-V.
Some of these demon­stra­tors are more promis­ing than oth­ers. Some even offer new niche capa­bil­i­ties. But all have failed to achieve the com­bi­na­tion of per­for­mance, tough­ness, price and util­ity that the mil­i­tary demands of its vehicles.

Motor Trend explains:

Though hybrid tech­nol­ogy has been around for sev­eral years in pas­sen­ger vehi­cles, adapt­ing it for larger vehi­cles isn’t as easy, [Oshkosh VP Gary] Schmiedel said. Military vehi­cles must often carry thou­sands of pounds of cargo — 13 tons for the HEMTT — and endure hills, lit­tle pave­ment and angles that few stan­dard vehi­cles can han­dle. That all means engines and axles must be con­fig­ured just so.

Even more daunt­ing is the bat­tery prob­lem. National Defense edi­tor Sandra Erwin reported on this as far back as 2001:

The Achilles heel of hybrid sys­tems today, how­ever, is the bat­tery, [engi­neer William] Haris added. You need to have a source of energy to pro­pel the elec­tric motors. Traditionally that has been bat­ter­ies. The most com­monly used bat­ter­ies today are lead-acid, which are the least expen­sive. But they also are heav­ier and less effi­cient than more advanced chem­istry bat­ter­ies.
A more desir­able alter­na­tive would be nickel-metal-hydride bat­ter­ies, which have twice the energy den­sity of lead-acid. Energy den­sity is the amount of energy that can be stored per pound of mate­r­ial. In the long-term, experts are look­ing at lithium-ion bat­ter­ies, which have four times the energy den­sity of lead-acid.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way — tech­ni­cal chal­lenges notwith­stand­ing. There are chal­lenges, and there are issues, but they dont seem insur­mount­able, Khalil told me. If some­one from a pro­gram office told us they wanted some­thing in pro­duc­tion in two years, we would have it into pro­duc­tion.
But despite the promise of a reduced logis­tics bur­dened result­ing from great fuel effi­ciency, the military’s enthu­si­asm for hybrids is cool. If not for their power export capa­bil­ity, the mil­i­tary might not be inter­ested at all.
The bot­tom line is … the tech isn’t ready, and the mil­i­tary isn’t ready to make the tech ready. So be skep­ti­cal when some hack reports that mil­i­tary hybrids are just around the cor­ner.
David Axe

Pentagon Wants Jet Fuel Substitute

Wednesday, June 7th, 2006

The Defense Department buys more jet fuel than any other orga­ni­za­tion in the world. So the Pentagon’s higher-ups are just as sick as the rest of us — more so — about sky-high fuel prices. Small won­der that the brass is ask­ing for pro­pos­als to sup­ply 200 mil­lion gal­lons of syn­thetic jet fuel, as part of big-league field tests in 2008 and 2009.
f22_engine.jpg
The request, notes Inside Green Business, comes from the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which over­sees the Pentagons fuel pur­chases. It’s part of a larger mil­i­tary inves­ti­ga­tion into an eighty year-old process for con­vert­ing coal or nat­ural gas into liq­uid fuel called Fischer-Tropsch. It’s what helped the German Army make 124,000 bar­rels of fuel per day dur­ing World War II.

The pos­si­ble pur­chase would send 100 mil­lion gal­lons each to the Air Force and Navy for test­ing on ships, air­planes and other oper­a­tional units, accord­ing to a DESC source. The alter­na­tive fuels would likely be blended with exist­ing DOD fuel types, such as the Air Forces JP-8 and the Navys F-76, in a 50/50 mix­ture or sim­i­lar ratio, accord­ing to the source. There wont be enough alter­na­tive fuels to do a one hun­dred per­cent [alter­na­tive] blend for at least a decade, the source says, but even reduc­ing petro­leum fifty per­cent in this coun­try is huge. What DESC is say­ing is we dont want [car­bon diox­ide] green­house gases emit­ted into the atmos­phere.
The source says each of the mil­i­tary ser­vices wants to main­tain its cur­rent single-fuel pol­icy, under which all vehi­cles are run with as sim­i­lar a fuel type as pos­si­ble. DOD offi­cials want to use 50/50 blends widely for the ser­vice tests at first, with an eye to poten­tially retool­ing the ratio for opti­mum effi­ciency later on…
There may… be prob­lems find­ing a sup­plier, or even a com­bi­na­tion of sup­pli­ers, that can sat­isfy the request for alter­na­tive fuels. No domes­tic infra­struc­ture can [cur­rently] han­dle that much demand, says the DESC source, adding that the pur­chase would likely be from a com­bi­na­tion of coal-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel and fuel derived from tar sands and oil shale, which have been eyed by gov­ern­ment and indus­try plan­ners as poten­tial sources of syn­thetic petro­leum. There cur­rently is no wide­spread mar­ket in the U.S. for such petro­leum alter­na­tives, although the source says hope­fully this will be an impe­tus for pri­vate indus­try to use syn­thetic fuels as well. Because the pri­vate sec­tor doesnt have the research and devel­op­ment bud­get we do, theyre wait­ing to see how our projects go so they can adopt what­ever we develop.

Army Engineers’ Green Agenda

Monday, June 5th, 2006

Not that long ago, the idea of the Sierra Club and the Army Corps of Engineers work­ing on the same side of an issue might’ve seemed silly. But these days, the Army sees depen­dence on for­eign oil as a major national secu­rity risk. And so the engi­neers are call­ing on DC to make a bunch of changes straight out of the envi­ron­men­tal­ists’ play­book — like man­dat­ing bet­ter gas mileage and giv­ing out tax cred­its for green energy. (Although the bit about “open[ing] up Federal lands for oil and nat­ural gas” might not exactly be met with huz­zahs at Sierra HQ.)
p2005b.jpgTo sus­tain its mis­sion and ensure its capa­bil­ity to project and sup­port the forces, the Army must insu­late itself from the eco­nomic and logis­ti­cal energy-related prob­lems com­ing in the near to mid future. This requires a tran­si­tion to mod­ern, secure, and effi­cient energy sys­tems, and to build­ing tech­nolo­gies that are safe and envi­ron­men­tal friendly
Many of the issues in the energy arena are out­side the con­trol of the Army. Several actions are in the purview of the national gov­ern­ment to fos­ter the abil­ity of all groups, includ­ing the Army, to opti­mize their nat­ural resource man­age­ment. The Army needs to present its per­spec­tive to higher author­i­ties and be pre­pared to pro­ceed regard­less of the national mea­sures that are taken. The fol­low­ing steps by the national gov­ern­ment would help the Army with its energy challenges:

Increase sup­plies
- Pull renew­able tech­nol­ogy mar­kets to pro­duce more cost effec­tive solu­tions with tax incen­tives and large Federal appli­ca­tions.
- Provide incen­tives for green power pro­duc­tion through con­tin­ued and expanded tax cred­its.
- Open up Federal lands for oil and nat­ural gas har­vest­ing where envi­ron­men­tally appro­pri­ate.
- Encourage the devel­op­ment of LNG ter­mi­nals and infra­struc­ture by stream­lin­ing approvals and assist­ing with local approvals.
Modernize infra­struc­ture.
- Support mod­ern­iz­ing and expand­ing the elec­tric­ity grid.
- Support the con­struc­tion of a nat­ural gas pipeline from AK and Canada.
- Enhance the expan­sion of LNG ter­mi­nals and nat­ural gas infra­struc­ture.
Diversify sources.
- Invest in research and devel­op­ment (R&D) in clean coal tech­nolo­gies, renew­able tech­nolo­gies, car­bon seques­tra­tion, breeder reac­tor nuclear power.
- Invest in R&D in energy effi­ciency in the built envi­ron­ment.
Optimize end-use.
- Significantly increase Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) stan­dards and expand to all classes of motor vehi­cles.
- Expand rebate pro­grams for hybrid vehi­cles.
- Expand appli­ance and equip­ment effi­ciency stan­dards as many states are doing.

UPDATE 12:15 PM: This newslet­ter from the U.S. Army Environmental Center gives a good round-up of some of the service’s green projects — from Ethanol pumps at Ft. Benning to sus­tain­able con­struc­tion at Ft. Lewis.
(Big ups: RC)

Stop Funding America’s Enemies

Friday, May 26th, 2006

Imagine if, in the mid­dle of World War II, the U.S. gov­ern­ment and its peo­ple gave Hitler bil­lions of dol­lars, to train troops and build new weapons. Sounds impos­si­ble, right? But that’s more or less the sit­u­a­tion we find our­selves in today, for­mer CIA direc­tor Jim Woolsey recently told the Naval Postgraduate School.
2002146.jpgThe U.S. is in the open­ing stages of a “Long War” with Islamic extrem­ists. And these adver­saries — whether they’re found in madras­sas in Riyadh or the gov­ern­ment in Tehran — are funded, in so small part, by oil rev­enue. Petrodollars go, more or less directly, to train­ing rad­i­cals. Petrodollars get fun­neled to those who make and plant bombs.
“Except for our own Civil War,” Woolsey notes, “this is the only war that we have fought where we are pay­ing for both sides. We pay Saudi Arabia $160 bil­lion for its oil, and $3 or $4 bil­lion of that goes to the Wahhabis, who teach chil­dren to hate. We are pay­ing for these ter­ror­ists with our SUVs.”
And we are pay­ing for them with our tanks, our Bradleys, and our fighter jets, observes Defense Technology International, which has a spe­cial issue out on “The Military and the End of Oil.” In 2004, the U.S. mil­i­tary gob­bled up 400,000 bar­rel of fuel a day, at cost of $6.7 bil­lion. A year later, those costs had climbed to $8.8 bil­lion. In 2006, the price tag is expect to total $10 bil­lion.
“Meanwhile, advanced green tech­nolo­gies like hybrid drive vehi­cles [despite their lim­i­ta­tions] offer both fuel econ­omy and stealth ben­e­fits in com­bat, a sig­nif­i­cant plus in the urban war­fare sce­nar­ios that appear to be such a big part of future wars,” writes Joe Katzman, who’s been all over this issue.

The truth is that the mil­i­tary can’t live with­out fuel, but every gal­lon of it is both a logis­tics bur­den and a finan­cial bur­den… Now add the fact that diver­si­fied “green infra­struc­ture” low­ers vul­ner­a­bil­ity to the kind of “sys­tem dis­rup­tion” attacks one sees in Iraq, and the military/security ben­e­fits become compelling. 

It sure does. Throughout the mil­i­tary today, there are lots and lots of indi­vid­ual R&D efforts under­way to find alter­na­tives to fund­ing our ene­mies. But a col­lec­tion of engi­neer­ing projects is not enough. If we’re seri­ous about fight­ing this Long War, break­ing the military’s addic­tion to oil has to become a top priority.