Center for a New American Security

The U.S. and NATO military mission in Libya offers an important lesson for the Department of Defense as the U.S. military continues its development, testing, evaluation and implementation of alternative energy fuels: DOD needs to engage U.S. allies on setting fuel standards that guarantee interoperability.

Last week, Sweden’s English news outlet The Local reported that Swedish JAS Gripen aircraft were grounded in Sicily and unable to participate in the U.N. No-Fly mission in Libya because the aircraft did not have access to the necessary fuel. According to the report, “The eight fighter jets are located in the US part of the Sigonella airbase on Sicily and the only fuel available it that which [sic] is used for US navy aircraft.”

The fuel used by U.S. Navy aircraft – Jet Propellant 5 (JP5) – has different technical specifications from the Jet A1 fuel that the Swedish Gripen requires. “Certain additives and some equipment are needed to change JP5 to Jet A1 in a controlled manner,” Lieutenant Colonel Mats Brindsjö, head of the Swedish Air Operation Center, told The Local. “This equipment is not as yet in place down there and in the time being we are trying to buy the fuel from a place off the base.”

The lack of interoperable fuel is an additional challenge to military fuel logistics. But as the Libya mission demonstrates, it is a challenge that already exists and could become more acute as the U.S. military moves away from reliance on traditional petroleum fuels and adopts new renewable biofuels. The U.S. military is continually testing and evaluating new biofuels with hydrocarbon equivalents to JP5 and JP8 (the fuel used in most U.S. Air Force aircraft) that it can safely mix and blend into existing jet fuel and be used by its aircraft fleet. Meanwhile, the National Laboratories and other biotechnicians continue to make great leaps in renewable fuel production that could perhaps eventually replace fossil fuels in U.S. military aircraft.  The challenge, as the incident in Sicily portends, is developing fuel that can be accessed through the global supply chain that the U.S. military relies on. (The U.S. military refuels at different locations around the world and would need access to these renewable fuels in these locations if DOD’s long-term energy strategy is going to be successful on the scale that it needs it to be.) The solution is to develop an international plan of action that engages our allies on alternative energy development.

In their September 2010 report, Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a Post-Petroleum Era, Christine Parthemore and John Nagl offer a framework for this type of international engagement. “At a minimum, this should include information sharing on alternative energy research and development,” they wrote. “It should also include cooperation with international partners on fuel testing and evaluation and setting fuel standards that guarantee interoperability.” They argue that standardization should be a process familiar to DOD, “which already sets joint standards with allies by, for example, standardizing the use of 9mm NATO cartridges by all member countries.”    In the long term, working with U.S. allies on energy technology sharing could have the “positive effect of signaling to international suppliers (both countries and private companies) that DOD will favor procurement of non-petroleum fuels when possible.”

The bottom line is that the Department of Defense needs to incorporate into its long-term energy plan a strategy for standardizing fuel with U.S. allies. In an era of fiscal austerity in which the United States is likely to increasingly leverage its relationships with U.S. allies to have them play a more prominent role in international military missions, interoperability in combined missions will be critical, and we cannot wait. If Libya is any lesson, it is a challenge that already exists and could become more pressing as the U.S. military leaps ahead in development and implementation of non-petroleum fuels.

Photo: Swedish JAS-39 Gripen. Courtesy of Flickr user Nathan150.