Military renewables

Jan. 2, 2012
The US Department of Defense is pursuing a strategy, defined by the phrase "operational energy," that holds potential as well as hazard.

The US Department of Defense is pursuing a strategy, defined by the phrase "operational energy," that holds potential as well as hazard. The military can incubate technology. It also can waste money.

Operational energy receives thoughtful treatment in an article published last month in the Journal of Energy Security by Editor Kevin Rosner, senior fellow at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. Rosner quotes a definition of DOD's operational energy strategy that extends well beyond support of current operations. Asserting the obvious duty to ensure future security, to which energy is crucial, the department claims the need to "work with other federal agencies and the private sector to diversify and secure fuel supplies." Beyond that, operational energy represents "an important tool for strengthening US alliances and partnerships with other nations."

Defense priority

There's little to dispute here. Because fuel supply is integral to military strategy and tactics, future energy supply must be a priority of defense planning. Still, it's not the business of the military to set energy policy, a function inevitably political and therefore reserved for civilians.

Taken together, two examples from Rosner's article should raise concern. One of them relates to operational energy's embrace of alliances and partnerships. Prominent in any such discussion is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. "For some NATO members," Rosner writes, "renewable energy is of particular interest as it reflects a nation's public consensus in lowering [greenhouse gas] emissions, in this case by ‘greening the military.'" The other example is the US Army's Energy Initiative Task Force, described by Rosner as "a one-stop shop for the development of cost-effective large-scale Army renewable energy sources."

Worry about global warming is a political question to which nations vary in their responses. Defense alliances shouldn't have to arbitrate the differences. It's one thing for a military department of a single country, such as the US Army, to pursue strategic advantage through development of cost-effective renewable energy. It's something quite different for such a department to be co-opted into geopolitical competition for economically unsustainable—and militarily questionable—greenness.

Properly focused, however, development of renewable energy sources by the military for military purposes is an intriguing idea. Technical innovation doesn't confine itself to civilian endeavor. Military work on renewable energy might be more orderly than the civilian government's helter-skelter mandates and subsidies.

In either realm, military or civilian, the goal must be to help renewable energy overcome form disadvantages relative to traditional fuels. With fossil and nuclear energy, nature packs a lot of potentially useful energy into small spaces. With most renewable sources, the available energy is diffuse; it requires work to become dense enough for use at economic scale. The work requires energy and imposes cost. So far, technology hasn't lowered cost enough to make renewable energy generally competitive. Mandates and subsidies help but create dependencies from which beneficiary energy forms have trouble escaping.

Work directed at defense objectives might hasten the commercialization of renewable energy technologies with genuine promise. It has done so for other technologies useful in the civilian world, including petroleum refining. But the work must make economic sense.

The economic imperative applies with equal force in military and civilian arenas. Because the folly of too much public money spent on too little commercial energy becomes too easily camouflaged by civilian politics, military efforts in this area can be instructive. The constraints of defense budgets are easier to see than those of national budgets and complex economies. The ramifications of unwarranted cost are, too.

Clarifying cost

In defense, money spent on energy is money not spent on weapons and warriors. Extra money spent on extra-costly energy means fewer weapons and fewer warriors. Runaway "greening" thus can weaken a military force, annulling benefits from enhanced security of supply. It does analogous harm to civilian budgets and national economies.

Governmental support for renewable energy is appropriate but so far lacks economic discipline. A military approach, sensibly applied, might help.

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