Center for a New American Security

• The Associated Press reports that China plans to explore natural gas and oil reserves in Thailand.
• According to Reuters, adverse weather conditions in Vietnam may cause real food issues amidst a rising demand for rice.
• Water issues worry Jordanian Prince Hassan, reports Green Prophet.
• The Conference of Arab Leaders resulted in a call for agricultural investments in southern Sudan, according to Brunei News.
• Reuters reports that conflicts in northern Yemen may be affected by dwindling water and food resources.

• Newsweek reports on the effects of lower energy demand and prices on Russia.
• Israel will be pressuring China to join sanctions against Iran despite its importance as an oil supplier, according to Reuters.
• Military forces in Afghanistan focus on the growth of poppy in a move to fight terrorism, according to The Washington Times [edit per Will’s comment]
• According to Green Inc., with some minerals, technology and "magic dust," a small company developed a fuel cell that is being hyped as key to changing our energy future.
• Reuters details how criminals, including mineral smugglers and pirates, are feeding off regional instability to gain power.
  

Last week Stratfor issued a cool piece, “Niger: The Coup and Uranium.” This is straight up natural security reading for you, dear readers. You can get the full article in exchange for your email address, which I’d suggest is worth the price for the map and chart they provide. A few brief highlights:

Niger contains one of the largest deposits of uranium in the world and was the world’s sixth-largest producer in 2008...France maintained a monopoly on Niger’s uranium production for more than three decades following the beginning of commercial production in 1971. But Niamey has begun to open its doors to other countries — most notably China, which has been increasingly active on the African continent in recent years.

 

...While uranium does not form as high of a percentage of Niger’s gross domestic product as might be expected (roughly 7 percent in 2008), the junta nonetheless has a financial incentive to keep these operations running smoothly. Uranium constitutes roughly half of Niger’s exports and the lion’s share of foreign direct investment — meaning that whoever controls the purse strings of the government has access to big money.

A tip of the hat to our Senior Military Fellow from the Marine Corps for this one!

Whether it’s to save money at the gas pump, reduce the impact on the environment, or get the solo ticket in the HOV lane inside the Beltway, people today are buying a lot of hybrid vehicles.

If you knew you would spend billions of dollars on fuel each year, saving money with hybrid vehicles would have an even bigger impact on the bottom line.  That’s one reason why the Navy is investing in hybrid power plants for its ships.

For more reasons that just fuel savings, the Navy has a long-term goal of building completely integrated electric drives for new ships.  But for ships in service today, the Navy is looking to hybrid-electric power plants on ships to save fuel costs.  The USS Makin Island is the first Navy surface ship to be equipped with such a system.

Makin Island uses gas turbine engines and an auxiliary propulsion system (APS). The APS uses induction-type electric motors to power the ship’s shaft and drive the ship for roughly 75 percent of the time underway.

The demonstration does not stop with just one ship.  Last summer, the Navy signed a contract with General Atomics and DRS Technologies to demonstrate the use of hybrid propulsion in the DDG-51 class destroyer in FY 2011.  The Navy estimates it will cost $10 million to retrofit this system into each ship. Installing the hybrid electric drive system onto a DDG-51 class destroyer may reduce steaming costs by an estimated 16 percent and save approximately $2.5 million per year.

Makin Island is already saving us money.  When she made her trip from Mississippi around South America to San Diego last fall, she consumed 900,000 less gallons of fuel than what another ship of her class would have consumed on the same journey.  That translated into about $2 million saved just in the transit to homeport.

The benefits of hybrid drive propulsion on board Navy ships extend beyond the business case for saving money on fuel.  It’s also about the mission.  The operational impact of using less fuel at sea translates into more steaming days between underway replenishment.  The added endurance allows ships to sail independently for longer periods of time and adds greater flexibility to expeditionary operations.

I’m going to reach back into last week on this one, as President Obama teed up the topic last Tuesday with his announcement of over $8 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants. Perhaps the best back-and-forth outlining the pluses and minuses of guaranteeing loans for new nuclear plants was in an exchange between Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Christine Todd Whitman on CNN last Wednesday.

• Jordan commits to a more fuel efficient military by 2020, according to Reuters.
• The New York Times reports on a video released by Pew Charitable Trusts on the links between climate change and national security.
• As China and India look to gain influence on the global stage, questions of gas, oil, minerals and agriculture arise, according to UPI Asia.
• Illegal mineral trade fuels violence and instability in Congo and Rwanda, reports Toward Freedom.
• CBS details the vital roll of rare earth elements in defense technologies.

At the risk of having this new feature labeled a complete cliché, I will save you the overly used George Santayana quote, and simply state that sometimes it is pertinent to look back, in order to better assess the present. Though “natural security” as a study, like your four-year-old niece, can still count its age on one hand, in practice it has been a timeless and vital key to the success of empires, war machines, revolutions and development—for those that understood its pivotal role. In this new blog feature, I’ll be sifting through the pages of the great war “how-tos”—from Sun Tzu's The Art of War to today’s feature, U.S. Army FM 3-24, a.k.a., “The Counterinsurgency Manual”— looking back to see what role natural security held in conflicts contemporary to the manual, and what its words of natural security wisdom hold in current engagements.

The COIN Manual was drafted at a time that the U.S. military had found itself in a war it had not entirely planned for, and whose outlook seemed to grow more grim every day. The United States had not exactly come with a knife to a gun fight, but in a sense had walked into a swarm of bees after gearing up to slay a dragon. The U.S. armed forces were prepared to fight a conventional war, but found that the game had changed since they last took a stroll through Baghdad’s front gate. It was time for a reassessment, the Army dug into working on it, and thus in 2006, U.S. Army FM 3-24 was born.

The manual gave a new hope for success in Iraq, as it won hearts and minds within DOD with its heightened focus on the Iraqi people and the cancerous roots of insurgency. Though penned years before the launch of natural security here at CNAS, the manual included important natural security-relevant mentions:

• “In Iraq, for example, an issue that motivated fighters in some Baghdad neighborhoods in 2004 was lack of adequate sewer, water, electricity, and trash services.”
• “The stability a nation enjoys is often related to its people’s economic situation and its adherence to the rule of law. . . In a rural society, land ownership and the availability of agricultural equipment, seed, and fertilizer may be the chief parts of any economic development plan.” 
• “. . .failed and failing states with rich natural resources like oil or poppies (which provide the basis for heroin) are particularly lucrative areas for criminal activity.”

Currently, the Obama administration’s 2010 3D Afghanistan strategy boasts a COIN approach which prominently features coordinated agricultural efforts between the military and USAID, water and energy projects, and additional natural security-esque initiatives supported by the COIN Manual's guidance. Having risen from the ashes of earlier failures only to help guide the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, the COIN Manual was as much a product of its environment, as it has now made the environment a product of itself.

• The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office notes that climate change could act as a threat multiplier for British and U.S. national security interests.
• The Iowa National Guard prepares to deploy to Afghanistan with a specialized agricultural unit for long-term stability projects, reports The Chicago Tribune.
• Russia is set to begin laying a natural gas pipeline directly into Western Europe to provide for European energy needs, according to The Copenhagen Post.
• Al Jazeera's The Americas Blog reports that President Obama announced nuclear power funding to support future U.S. energy security.
• The U.S. military is only months away from access to affordable algae-biofuels through DARPA research, according to Domestic Fuel.

• The U.S. military begins to withdraw from Haitian relief efforts, reports Air Force Times.
• A Huffington Post blog names energy security in Europe and the United States as one of the most important issues today.
• The African Union hosts the final day of the joint Afro-Arab meeting on agricultural development and food security, reports People's Daily Online.
• China's refusal to export rare earth minerals could thwart efforts to bolster U.S. energy security utilizing green technology, according to Live Science.
• The Wall Street Journal reports a Franco-Russian arms deal that could given Russia an advantage in the Arctic.

After back-to-back storms pounded the Washington metropolitan region and most of the Northeast this week, shutting down the federal government for a record-breaking four consecutive days, life is slowly returning to normal. The storm left thousands without power for parts of the week, crippled public transportation and shutdown the region’s three major airports. The Washington Post reports that “Snowmageddon” helped to shatter the seasonal snowfall record, with totals reaching “55.9 inches at Reagan National Airport, 72.8 inches at Dulles International Airport and 79.9 inches at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport.”

The photos above show a snow covered Iwo Jima Marine Corps Memorial, just one the many dramatic scenes left in the wake of the historic winter weather. 

Some climate change skeptics have used the week’s events as evidence against climate change. But some scientists have responded, with recent stories populating the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times (to name a few). The bottom line message can best be summed up by John Broder at The New York Times:

A federal government report issued last year, intended to be the authoritative statement of known climate trends in the United States, pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming. In other words, if the government scientists are correct, look for more snow. (emphasis mine)

Photos courtesy of Christine Parthemore/CNAS.

I got this book for my brother Chris, a lover of diving and travel humor, for Christmas after a friend recommended it on Facebook. Having not read it and purchased it for title and cover alone, I decided to read a bit of it myself to make sure that it wasn’t a completely crappy Xmas present. No up-front intention of trying to tie it to natural security.

Try as I might to escape thinking about work, it turned out that To Hellholes and Back: Bribes, Lies, and the Art of Extreme Tourism by writer and editor Chuck Thompson had a few relevant passages.

Our colleagues in the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars recently released a comprehensive report, Land Grab? The Race for the World’s Farmlands, that looks at the increasing frequency of food-importing developed nations and private companies investing in huge tracts of arable farmland in less developed countries.

This is an area that, while we haven’t explored deeply, we are beginning to study more and more here in the Natural Security program. We’re particularly interested in the ways that these emerging economic trends are engaging other socioeconomic and political trends in developing countries, which could lead to instability in countries of geostrategic importance to the United States (e.g. Pakistan).

According to the report’s authors:

Large-scale land acquisitions may have a negative effect on the wider sociopolitical and economic context of the host country. There are documented cases, such as the Daewoo Logistics Corporation’s (ultimately unsuccessful) plan to lease 1.3 million hectares of land in Madagascar, where negotiations over deals have contributed to political instability and internal social conflict. These deals touch on the already politically contentious issue of land allocation and land rights, so they carry a possibility of exacerbating existing tensions.
…
Granted, to this point Madagascar is the only case where a land deal has contributed to widespread political instability. However, the factors at play in most host countries—land, food insecurity, and poverty—make up a combustible mix that could easily explode. In countries—such as Pakistan—where violent, extremist anti-government movements have mastered the ability to exploit land- based class divisions, the political risks are particularly high.

The report is intended for a much broader (global) audience and, rightly so, is not explicit about how these trends might engage U.S. national security interests. But for researchers like us who study natural resources and economic trends and analyze their engagement with national security, the report is robust and offers useful case studies in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe that are a great jumping off point for our further research. You should read this now!