Little Green Men: the Growth of Sustainable Warfare in the United States of America Submitted Sept. 11, 2017
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Little Green Men: The Growth of Sustainable Warfare in the United States of America by Todd Coyne A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Journalism School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Submitted Sept. 11, 2017 © Todd Coyne 2017 Abstract Since the first days of President Barack Obama’s administration, the U.S military has embarked on an ambitious plan to change the way its fighting forces—Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force—fight and fuel wars. Since 2009, the U.S. Department of Defense has taken great strides to incorporate renewable energy technology into its infrastructure and operations. It has also made significant gains in improving the efficiency with which fossil fuels are still used. As the most technologically advanced military in the world, the armed forces of the United States are well ahead of all other nations when it comes to adopting and advancing renewable energy in warfare. War has always driven the most important technological advances in human history. From agriculture to industry, medicine to commerce, through to the modern artificial intelligence and automation industries, technological breakthroughs are often hatched inside military research laboratories, tested on the battlefield and are later adopted for broad civilian use. Whether these technologies are developed first for the military—as in the harnessing of atomic energy, the development of the Internet, drone technology, digital photography and GPS mapping—or first in the civilian marketplace before military absorption and amplification, is not a central question of this study. That is to say that whether the military spearheads a technology’s creation or is the thrust behind the spear matters little. The considerable capital, research and development, manpower and infrastructural investments that the U.S. Department of Defense affords technologies deemed useful to warfare is here the key difference-maker in a technology’s ii development. From successful military research and implementation follows the near certainty of wider adoption in civilian form. And so, as the furthest along of the world’s militaries in the adoption of renewable power—from using solar photovoltaic cells to electrify domestic military installations to using plant-based biofuels in stealth fighter jets and naval carrier groups—the U.S. military, the world’s largest consumer of oil, is entering the throes of a renewable energy revolution that will forever change how, why and where wars are fought in the future. iii Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ ii Table of Contents......................................................................................................................... iv Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: A Brief History of the Role of Fuel in Military Conflict ....................................... 3 Chapter 2: The Great Green Fleet ........................................................................................... 18 Chapter 3: Post-Second World War: The Rise of Early Synthetic Fuels and the U.S. Strategy for Petroleum Disarmament .......................................................... 32 Chapter 4: The “Net Zero” Army ............................................................................................ 44 Chapter 5: The Military-Energy Industrial Complex ............................................................ 60 Chapter 6: Air Force: Solar, Biofuels and Wind Beneath Their Wings ............................... 69 Chapter 7: Strategic Impetus .................................................................................................... 85 Chapter 8: War in the Valley: Enlisting the U.S. Tech Industry .......................................... 98 Chapter 9: The Canadian Context ......................................................................................... 111 Conclusion: Future Tense ....................................................................................................... 126 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................. 138 iv v Introduction This is not a study on how green energy will save the world. It is quite the opposite. It is not a study on how the United States military, the most advanced fighting force in human history, is rededicating itself to the protection of the environment over the exertion of American influence over all parts of the globe. Nor is it, finally, a study on “green-washing,” the process by which an institution—public, corporate or otherwise—will don a mask of social responsibility for the public relations benefit of perceived environmental stewardship. It is, rather, a study on the changing habits of fuel consumption in the United States military, away from petroleum fuels towards renewable energy sources, not for altruistic or even perceived altruistic motives, but purely for the gain of strategic and technological advantage. As all branches of the U.S. military are fond of saying, “using energy efficiently enables us to go farther, stay longer and deliver more firepower” (Cragg, 2016). That is not to say, however, that the U.S. military does not concern itself with climate change. Indeed, a wealth of Pentagon-funded studies on the global effects of climate change have been generated over the past decade, illustrating that those in the highest ranks of U.S. military command are deeply concerned with understanding how a rise in global temperatures and sea levels increases the likelihood of military conflict worldwide. But, again, this concern is also purely strategic; it is born from the desire to develop long- term operational scenarios in order to preserve and extend American power, and not from 1 motivations commonly associated with the environmental or “green” movement. This is also a study of how the changing energy consumption habits and renewable energy innovations of the U.S. military are leading a renewable energy revolution within the civilian United States as a whole. 2 Chapter One: A Brief History of the Role of Fuel in Military Conflict The use of oil made it possible in every type of vessel to have more gun- power and more speed for less size or less cost. It alone made it possible to realize the high speeds in certain types which were vital to their tactical purpose. All these advantages were obtained simply by burning oil instead of coal under the boilers… But oil was not found in appreciable quantities in our islands. If we required it, we must carry it by sea in peace or war from distant countries…To commit the Navy irrevocably to oil was indeed ‘to take up arms against a sea of troubles’…Yet beyond the breakers was a great hope. If we overcame the difficulties and surmounted the risks, we should be able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the Navy to a definitely higher level; better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war power—in a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture. —Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (1923) Early History While the history of using crude oil as a weapon of warfare can be traced back through the 8th century B.C., as documented in Homer’s The Iliad, through to the reign of Persian King Cyrus during a sixth-century B.C. attack on Babylon (south of modern-day Baghdad), and into the seventh-century Byzantine Empire, where it was known as oleum incendiarum, or “Greek fire,” this chapter focuses solely on the use of petroleum as a fuel for the engines of modern war machines of the past century (Yergin, Prize, p. 8). In fact, oil and its usefulness in combustion were largely lost on the Roman Empire and Middle Ages Europe, only to surface in the West in the mid-1800s after its simultaneous discovery in parts of Europe, Ontario and Pennsylvania, where kerosene, oil’s first distillate, would soon replace whale oil as the chief source of 3 manmade light. It was here, in the U.S. northeast of the late-1850s, that the burgeoning oil industry grew so quickly that, by the time the secessionist southern states fired the first shots of the Civil War on Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861, kerosene was already well-placed to supersede the turpentine-based lamp fuels still found in the South. Those shipments of turpentine, it’s worth noting, would be cut off by the North during the war, thereby vastly expanding kerosene’s market in the continental U.S. (Yergin, Prize, p. 30). But it was only much later with the advent of the combustion engine that the chief market for oil production and refining would be found not in kerosene but in gasoline and diesel fuel— two previously worthless byproducts that, before the engine, were routinely dumped into rivers and streams during the kerosene refining process. It was these new petroleum fuels that would, at the beginning of the 20th century, allow not only the rapid mechanization of warfare but of the industrial societies of North America and Europe, as a whole. In 1912, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, established the Royal Commission on Oil Supplies, becoming the first among the world’s high-ranking military leaders to see the strategic potential