Center for a New American Security

In today’s post, I’m going to highlight a tension in the critiques that we as authors had to deal with. Not surprisingly, it was in regard to how to treat climate change in this predominantly energy-focused report.

Two reviewers suggested that we excise some of the already limited number of mentions of climate change, greenhouse gases and environmental concerns. This was distinctively not out of climate change denialism or a lack of interest in the security challenges that climate change may bring from these reviewers. Rather, the suggestion was geared toward ensuring that we do not lose any report readers in that roughly 33 (and oddly growing) percent of Americans who do not believe the scientific consensus surrounding changing trends in the global climate. The merits of the direction we outline in the report are solid enough just on the energy side – why bring in an additional variable that is unnecessary for effectively arguing your case?

Another reviewer raised a counter-critique: that we should be sure to set boundaries that ensure that DOD meets the standards that the rest of the country will likely embrace for deciding its post-petroleum future. Specifically, if the public is wary of second-order effects of fuel switching on water strains, food prices, greenhouse gas emissions and the employment of arable land, then DOD should embrace the same standards. Yet another early-draft reviewer suggested that we teed up that DOD should indeed consider climate effects of its energy choices, but that we didn’t adequately explain why climate change is a security issue.

Of course, climate change is a major security concern for us, and I can’t speak for everyone here at CNAS but I do not believe it wise to ignore the knock-on effects of energy decisions any more than it’s wise to delay switching to a diversified range of fuels. But we can’t explain every challenge in every report we write. I hope the balance we struck is adequate, and does not repel readers more focused on energy security than climate change.

Finally, we received comments from many CNAS and non-CNAS reviewers on our suggestion that DOD use scenarios for thinking through what new fueling needs will be required (if any) as it moves toward consuming a more diverse range of fuels. One wise scholar suggested that we seriously consider the energy needs in various anti-access/area denial scenarios, which would obviously include a very different fuel footprint from the war in Iraq, for example. We couldn’t in the end accommodate long descriptions of specific scenarios, but many readers did want more detail on what types of scenarios could actually get us thinking about how to fuel military missions without petroleum.

I suggest that the broad U.S. government – not just DOD – should include scenarios for what securing the nation might look like if we are forced to turn hard toward threats in the Americas. Specifically, a new report by our colleagues Bob and Jen outline the slimming divide between organized crime issues and national security issues for the United States. One could imagine endless scenarios for what types of action “crime wars” might require, and DOD and the USG would have dramatically different fueling options on our local and neighboring continent than we’ve had in the current wars.

Our main point, though, was that whatever scenarios are used for planning, it will be critical during DOD’s long-term energy transition that they represent very, very diverse fuel requirements. That’s the only way to ensure that DOD gets adequate alternative fuel supplies when and where it needs. And really, that’s the only want to ensure that DOD can adequately operate. And that’s exactly what the report is about.

We’ll begin today with a critique of our new energy report that a guest raised to me at the dinner discussion on DOD energy that CNAS held on Monday night. In short, this person commented that we did not sufficiently consider what would happen if the petroleum market grows tight to the point that availability is in jeopardy – and that the country has not yet effectively ramped up alternative fuels. In other words, what if the 2040 timeline we propose is too long?

In the report, we tilt toward this, though I admit we are guilty of not extensively considering this scenario. Our recommendation of a 30-year timeline was a result of many factors, including the following:

• Current reserve-to-production ratios for the world and for friendly countries that we don’t believe are likely to exert leverage over the U.S. government using their petroleum reserves;
• Discussions with energy producers, including biofuel producers, and with those conducting related basic science, research and development in alternative fuels – all to be sure of the feasibility of providing enough fuel to meet DOD’s energy demands within the timeline we set; and
• The lifespans of current DOD assets, and its pace of change.

In our “Plan for the Worst” section, we do suggest that DOD prepare for different scenarios in which its transition is too slow, or it misses breakthrough technologies that could enable its energy goals, or takes other wrong turns – but that’s about as far as we went in this particular report. This comment did get me thinking though: this scenario should surely include the negative public reaction to the military getting first access to fuel reserves and supplies.

Moving to another suggestion, this one by Jim Morin (whose words made an appearance here yesterday):

Another part of making this paper a bit more tangible across the range of your audience is to provide more anecdotes and examples. So much of the DOD energy transformation problem is that it cuts across so many different communities, each of whom doesn't fully understand the priorities, constraints and processes. Clean energy developers don't always understand the demands of operational logisticians, base commanders and installation energy managers don't understand the handicap that fossil fuel dependence presents for national energy security and so on. I think anecdotes help these various communities understand and then empathize with each other, making workable solutions a bit easier to find.

We weaved in a few additional examples, as Jim suggested, but not nearly as many as I would have liked. Here I think we fell a bit short of sufficiently explaining the full range of concerns to the broad community of interested parties.

I will keep this in mind for future blogging though, and will make a note of looking for and posting any anecdotes that I think really paint the picture we hoped to convey with the report. In the meantime, I think it’s equally important that these various communities communicate better – and convey the military’s needs adequately to the rest of the government. The GSA, Congress and other agencies have a direct impact on the energy investments DOD makes, and therefore how it operates. Conveying the military implications of their energy choices is critical today, and will grow even more important through an energy transition. 

As promised yesterday, today and through the week I’m going to highlight some of the comments and critiques we received from CNAS and non-CNAS reviewers of our new report, “Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a Post-Petroleum Era.”

I’m going to begin with a very smart suggestion by a trailblazer in considering DOD’s energy future, Jim Morin, an Associate at Hogan Lovells and retired Army infantry officer. In May 2010, he authored one of the first major blueprints for DOD’s energy future to emerge in the think tank world: “Cutting the Tether: Enhancing the U.S. Military’s Energy Performance.”

Here’s what Jim suggested to us for “Fueling the Future Force”:

Among many “sustains,” the first suggested “improve” that strikes me is the 2040 target date.  While wholly reasonable in light of major system acquisition timelines, it just sounds very distant to much of the wide-ranging audience. Just as a few examples, 2040 is past the retirement date for almost all currently serving military officers, 25 years past the most distant exit event for a typical venture capital fund and at least 26 years past the re-election date for any member of Congress.

This was an excellent point. Over the past few years we’ve seen several rounds of personnel turnover in energy and resource positions. It is an important consideration. He continued:

A clearer way to express the same imperative to this goal is to argue that the DOD needs to stop purchasing non-flex fuel – or petroleum-only – equipment within the next 5 years.  That will get some attention because that means internal corporate R&D budgets for next year ought to include some fuel or fuel consumption related research. A five year horizon means that federal managers had better fit this new paradigm into the next POM and the JROC will have even more urgency in their work on fuel efficiency KPPs.  Substantively, this tack would state your same conclusion, but instead of starting with 2040 and working backwards, start with 2015 and work forwards, concluding with the same timeline with a full transition in 2040.

 
This made us really pause to reconsider the goal we had established in this paper: ensuring that DOD can fully operate without petroleum by 2040. Jim went further than any reviewer in questioning the goal we suggested and offering a viable alternative. In the end, I thought that a 5-year goal was too easy to dismiss for political reasons, so we held our paper to a long-term goal.

However, as Jim states, the two are not incompatible. It does raise the question of which DOD assets absolutely need petroleum-based fuels and for which drop-in chemically-equivalent fuels would not work. Do any of our DOD readers know of any examples? Beyond fuels, I’d bet some petroleum-based lubricants fall into this category. I can tell you a lot more about nukes and missiles than tanks and ships, so I’m sure there is an array of applications that I’m not thinking of that would be affected by the standard Jim proposes.

Jim’s suggestion would create a useful exercise in identifying which assets are going to be the most difficult to manage through an energy transition – a key step in ensuring that DOD can operate in a post-petroleum era. It’s a great idea, and I’d suggest that DOD decision makers strongly consider his recommendation.

For the post today we’re taking a brief hiatus from assessing the weekend’s natural security news for you. Will collected some news stories for you and has posted them as we do normally Tuesdays through Fridays, so we hope that keeps you all up to speed.

But we spent our weekend preparing for today’s release of the natural security team’s new report, “Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a Post-Petroleum Era.”

I’ll cut to the chase: We are calling for DOD to ensure that it can meet all of its fuel needs without petroleum by 2040. The overarching energy goal we therefore recommend is for DOD to manage a smooth transition beyond petroleum over the next 30 years.

Interesting note: Not one of our internal or external reviewers – which included DOD representatives and non-governmental experts – questioned whether this transition was feasible or necessary. One suggested a shorter-term timeline for a DOD goal for moving off of petroleum, and a few people asked us to clarify better why we chose 30 years, rather than 20 or 40. (You can read our reasoning – a combination of feasibility, opportunity and necessity – in the report.) I fully expected reactions to include many variations on “WTF, we’ll be able to produce more oil for at least another century, right?” It was heartening to see a growing acceptance that DOD’s dependence on a single fuel, petroleum, for 77% of its energy consumption is an incredible vulnerability.

I’d like to also give a special shout out to CNAS President, Dr. John Nagl, for becoming a de facto member of the natural security team for part of this year. This report was my first time co-authoring with him, and it was a great experience. And I’m really glad I did not have to write about COIN to do it. If you see John on the street, feel free now to pepper him with energy questions.

I’m also very, very grateful for the internal CNAS red-teaming that helped sculpt this report, and to external reviewers who read early drafts of the report and did not hold back in their critiques and suggestions. Our process for rigorous review here at CNAS always feels like you’re getting kicked repeatedly in the gut, but it makes our work stronger and more implementable. More than a dozen brilliant minds helped us to refine our thinking for this report.

In fact, many of the suggestions we received were so smart – and so important to sparking a good debate over DOD’s energy future – that I asked several of our reviewers to let me post their critiques and ideas on the blog this week. Several accepted, though not all wish to be named. For the rest of this week, you can read on this blog excerpts from those who reviewed drafts of this report as they told us the ways in which we were wrong.

The report we’re releasing today is not the final word, but an opening bid. We hope that by airing alternative ideas we can generate a healthy debate on how DOD can best move into its post-petroleum future.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva was seeking to prohibit U.S. contractors from supplying fuel to the U.S. military base at Manas, Kyrgyzstan – a base critical to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, including serving as a fuel hub for refueling American warplanes there.  The report is another reminder that the U.S. military needs to consider a new strategy that helps to diversify its fuel supplies in order to hedge against becoming tethered to vulnerable sources of fuel.

Photo: An Airman with the 376th Logistics Readiness Squadron prepares to fuel a Boeing 767 before it departs. There are approximately 40 Airmen who pump more than 320,000 gallons of fuel a day at the Transit Center at Manas in Kyrgyzstan. Courtesy of Staff Sgt. Nathan Bevier and the U.S. Air Force.

Yesterday, coverage from The Washington Post and The New York Times on the soon-to-be-released Obama’ s Wars, Bob Woodward’s latest opus, generated a media storm by reporting on the internal debate within the Obama administration over what the country’s exit plan should be for Afghanistan. With all the attention on Woodward’s new book, you may have missed this other report on Afghanistan from The Washington Post which pointed to a serious challenge that could compromise our war effort there.

The Post reported that Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva is exploring options that would prohibit U.S. contractors from supplying fuel to the U.S. military base in Kyrgyzstan – a base critical to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. “In an interview, Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbayeva said private companies handling supplies should be replaced by a joint venture between a Kyrgyz state company and Russia's state-controlled Gazpromneft, a major source of jet fuel in the region,” the Post reported on Wednesday. 

Northern fuel supply routes have become a more attractive option to Defense Department officials in recent months due to the fact that they are relatively more secure than shipping fuel in from Pakistan. In order to diversify its fuel supply sources and reduce the vulnerability of fuel convoys traveling in from Pakistan to insurgent attacks, the Department of Defense began “asking contractors to bring in more fuel supplies by northern routes,” according to a Washington Post report back in December 2009. 

The U.S. air base at Manas, Kyrgyzstan has played a crucial role in the recent surge of troops to Afghanistan. But, as the Post pointed out, “The base also houses a fleet of air-tankers that are used for in-flight refueling of American warplanes over Afghanistan.”

On Monday, CNAS Commander-in-Chief John Nagl and my officemate Travis “Charlie” Sharp released their thought-provoking report on the state of the National Guard and Reserves, An Indispensable Force: Investing in America’s National Guard and Reserves. The biggest takeaway for me (and the report is worth reading in full), is that the Department of Defense has not adequately defined the future roles and missions of the Guard and Reserves, which it was legally required to assess in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) but failed to do.

But what do the National Guard and Reserves have to do with Natural Security? Well, considering that the future security environment is likely to be complex and shaped by nontraditional security challenges, such as from failing or failed states, humanitarian and natural disasters, resource competition and climate change, it is very important to understand what role the National Guard and Reserves, which constitute 43 percent of the total U.S. military manpower, will play in the future security environment. According to Sharp and Nagl:

Because the QDR establishes DOD’s future strategic and budgetary priorities, the omission minimized the relevance of the Guard and Reserves beyond the current conflicts and perpetuated DOD’s historical reluctance to think presciently about their role in U.S. national security strategy.

I almost forgot to flag this for you all. You need to check out the current (soon to be last month's) edition of Scientific American for this: "How Much Is Left? The Limits of Earth's Resources: A graphical accounting of the limits to what one planet can provide."

Does it have energy? Check. Does it mention minerals? You betcha. Does it - dare I say it - raise the troubles of biodiversity loss? You can count on it.

It's not a long piece, but a good overview of relevant info, cool graphs, and an interesting piece to SciAm's annual single-concept edition, this year on "The End."

• The President’s Science Advisor, John Holdren, called “global warming” a “dangerous misnomer,” and emphasized a more appropriate term to capture the severe, rapid implications of climate change: “global climate disruption,” according to The New York Times Green blog.
• ClimateWire reports that energy experts are considering extending the lives of nuclear power plants to 80 years.  
• Growing like China, Brazil looks to be a regional player in Latin America, leveraging its agricultural sector, food and investing in its petro companies, The Washington Post reports.
• UPI reports that a new study will assess the environmental implications of in-water renewable energy projects.
• More than a half million people are displaced in northern India due to “unusually heavy” monsoon rains, according to Reuters

Hey Readers,

If you work within the natural resources and national security/foreign policy world, you may want to join us on the Hill next Wednesday at noon for a lunch discussion on that exact topic. This will be a great conversation - everything from Yemen's water woes, to Pakistan's water woes, to China's water woes...

• While greenhouse gas emissions from coal are expected to decline in Europe, they could more than double in China and India, according to The New York Time’s Green blog.
• ClimateWire (via NYT) reports that a new study found that the United Kingdom is unprepared to handle the impacts of climate change.
• Proposition 23, a ballot initiative to suspend California’s landmark climate change law, is drawing contributions from out-of-state oil companies, The New York Times reports.
• UPI reports that a new study from U.S. and UK climate scientists concluded that the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
• Also from UPI: a new study from MIT explores the global growth of nuclear energy use.  

• The U.S. Navy purchased 20,000 gallons of algae fuel, according to CNET News.
• The New York Times Green blog reports that the California Public Utilities Commission has awarded a grant to research the feasibility of storing energy generated by solar panels in batteries.
• Also from the Time’s Green blog, the EPA will rule later this month on a decision to allow gasoline retailers to sell a 15 percent ethanol mixture at gas stations, an increase from the maximum 10 percent ethanol mixture.
• Russia and Norway have reached an agreement to resolve a longstanding boundary dispute in the Arctic Ocean, according to The New York Times.  
• While climate change is expected to make weather events such as hurricanes and tropical storms more frequent and more severe, researchers at the University of Reading have found that “polar storms” may actually decrease, UPI reports.