“Water is a huge problem, as you all know, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Tajikistan has one of the greatest water potentials in the world. . . we have got a water resources task force now set up in the Department to examine how we can additionally help the countries of the area, and particularly Pakistan with the water issue.”
Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Briefing on his Recent Trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Georgia and Germany, March 2, 2010.
A recent article in the February 20, 2010 National Journal, “The Bottled-Water Problem,” (subscription required) explores the logistical challenges that the U.S. military and NATO troops are experiencing with water, food and fuel supplies in Afghanistan. In particular, the author, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., focuses on the military’s reliance on importing supplies of bottled-water due, in part, to concerns that contaminated water from indigenous sources is making military personnel sick.
“When we drink local water – just stuff that a normal Iraqi wouldn’t think twice about or an Afghan wouldn’t think twice about drinking, because their [immune] system is used to dealing with all that bacteria and the germs – our systems aren’t used to that,” the author quotes Lt. Gen. Mitchell Stevenson, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, as saying.
Freedberg explores the question of purifying indigenous sources of water and indeed points out that the U.S. military and NATO are working towards buying local water with potential investments in water purification and bottling plants. But purifying water locally might not be the most cost-effective approach to solving the military’s water supply issue in Afghanistan, at least so suggests a Dutch Air Force officer who coordinates logistics for the International Stability Assistance Force.
The “bottled water we import is cheaper than when we get it here,” the Dutch officer told Freedberg. And that might be true if one were calculating the cost of water using the initial purchase value of water by volume compared to what it would cost to get water locally through investments in water purification and bottling plants. But when it comes to military supplies that are shipped to and within a combat theatre, the value of those supplies is much greater than the price the military originally purchases it for.
A war machine, like any mechanism, needs fuel in order to run. When that war machine is operating in an environment where the necessary fuels are sparse, a person has two options: 1) Get it there somehow, or 2) Give up. The current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, as their architects have elected to go with option one, are fed by often-long convoys transporting supplies (fuel and water) for both man and machine.
Convoy, released by C.W. McCall in 1975, follows the journey of truck driver Rubber Duck, within an ever growing convoy on the way to its destination. Due to the high value of its cargo, the convoy is convinced that “Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way,” despite the fact that they come under fire from, “armored cars, and tanks, and jeeps, and rigs of every size. . . And choppers filled the skies.”
Unlike at the finale of this country classic, however, sometimes the most protected convoy can end in ambushed disaster, resulting in astronomical costs for the operation (in time, dollars and blood). The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) states that resupply casualties historically account for 10-12 percent of total Army casualties, the majority being water and fuel related, making this, quite literally, a deadly issue.
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:
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.
Last Thursday, a somewhat motley crew gathered at the State Department to discuss the U.S. government’s agricultural efforts in Afghanistan. The panel featured Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard C. Holbrooke and newly confirmed USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah (who had been sworn in earlier that very day).
If you have been listening to what many in the Obama administration have been saying recently about U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, the first five minutes of the panel’s discussion may be just as confusing to you as it was to me. Each speaker took their turn pointing to agricultural efforts executed by the United States:
President Obama announced on Tuesday that he is deploying 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, beginning in early 2010. For troops already deployed and in theater, the onset of winter will exacerbate logistical challenges in Afghanistan as many of the main supply routes are narrow, dangerous roads that are easy for insurgents to target, and even more difficult to maneuver during the winter.
Photo: U.S. Marines conduct a convoy patrol on December 31, 2004 along the Khost-Gardez pass in Afghanistan in order to disrupt insurgent activity along the supply route. Courtesy of U.S. Marine Corps Cpl James L. Yarboro and the U.S Department of Defense.
Two weeks ago I wrote about the debate around what role the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could play in analyzing climate change. As I noted in that post, the CIA has already been playing a role since the mid-1990s. That got me thinking about the debate back when the CIA first stood up its Environment Center and started using its satellites to collect climate data. For this week’s Reading Old Magazines I took a look at an October 17, 1995 op-ed in The Washington Times, “Is the CIA being led astray?” While this is a newspaper article and not our usual old magazine, author Bruce Fein, a lawyer and free-lance writer with The Washington Times, offers some interesting points that help one understand the debate back when the CIA firsts began integrating climate change into its work.
During that time opponents seemed to bemoan looking beyond traditional security threats to include environmental concerns and climate change into intelligence assessments. “The national security of the United States is ill-served…by an agency without personnel made of sterner and less starry-eyed stuff,” Fein wrote. His suggestion that incorporating these concerns might pacify national security experts and intelligence analysts is indicative of the attitude at this time that including threats other than war was a luxury that could undermine hard security priorities.
Yesterday the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program hosted the Army Environmental Policy Institute’s 31st sustainability lecture on the Department of Defense’s (DoD) strategic energy opportunities and challenges. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Environment, Safety, and Occupational Health Tad Davis introduced keynote speaker Dr. Amory Lovins who sits on the Defense Science Board’s Task Force on DoD Energy Strategy and helped advise the 2008 DSB report, More Fight – Less Fuel.
According to Lovins, DoD’s long energy logistics tail is putting the Department’s core mission at risk and it is paying for it in “blood, treasure, and lost combat effectiveness.” Fuel and fuel logistics are what has become largely understood as the “soft underbelly” of the Department of Defense. As Lovins pointed out, 1/2 of DoD personnel and 1/3 of its budget are dedicated to logistics. When the Defense Science Board was conducting its study several years ago it concluded that 1/2 of in-theater causalities were associated with convoys as well (though Lovins noted that this number does not reflect today’s total). Lovins also pointed out that of the military’s top 10 most fuel-intensive platforms, 8 are noncombat systems. “It’s an odd way to fight a war when the water heater uses more fuel than a helicopter,” Lovins said.
