No Such Thing as a Green War or a Bad Peace

• Date: 01 August 2015

45 ELR 10770 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 8-2015

C O M M E N T

No Such Thing as a Green

War or a Bad Peace

by Sharon E. Burke

e Honorable Sharon E. Burke is a senior advisor to the New America Foundation’s International Security Program.

Never had so many cit ies been taken and laid d esolate . . .

never was there so much banishing and blood- shedding, now

on the eld of bat tle, now in the strife of faction . . . there

were earthquakes of unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses

of the sun occur red with a frequency unrecorded in previous

history; ther e were great drou ghts in sundry place s and con -

sequent famines, and that most cal amitous and awfully fatal

visitation, the plague.

—ucydides, History of the

Peloponnesian War, Book I

While U.S. military operations in the 21st century have

largely been spared t he nefarious results of “eclipses of t he

sun,” the central point of ucydides’ account of a war that

happened more than 2,0 00 years ago still holds: war is a

calamity. War consumes money and natural resources and

it destroys lives and land. ere is nothing environmentally

friendly about combat.

at core truth is largely absent from Sarah Light’s oth-

erwise thoughtful article e Military-Environmental Com-

plex. It is not “the military” t hat disregards environmental

law, nor the Department of Defense (DoD) leadership that

considers itself “exceptional” when it comes to such restric-

tions. It is war itself that has such contempt for life, liveli-

hood, and the land. e fact that the U.S. Congress and

the National Command Authority general ly exempt warf-

ighting activities from domestic environmental policy and

law is not so much a case of “military exceptionalism” as it

is a practical acknowledgment of the nature of war.

Indeed, it is worth noting that U.S. armed forces are

not exempt from relevant international laws of war, such as

the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on “long-term, wide-

spread, and severe damage to the natural environment.”1

e United States has ratied other relevant agreements

as well, such as the Environmental Modication Conven-

tion that bans weather war fare.2 Generally, though, envi-

ronmental laws of war tend to be ambiguous (what exactly

1. Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 Aug. 1949, and Re-

lating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conict art.

35, June 8, 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 3, available at https://www.icrc.org/ihl/

WebART/470-750044?OpenDocument.

2. United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other

Hostile Use of Environmental Modication Techniques, Dec. 10, 1976,

counts as long-term, widespread, and severe dama ge, after

all?) and d icult to enforce for the same basic rea son the

U.S. government exempts warghting activities: it is tough

to get around the fact that war is inherently destructive of

the natural world.

So, this is the bottom line when it comes to the so-

called military-env ironmental complex: any environmen-

tal benet or eects U.S. armed forces might generate are

dwarfed by the environmental da mage war inicts. More-

over, the benets are largely incidental to the military’s

defense mission.

To be fair, what Ms. Light is rea lly highlighting in her

article is the business of war, or rather the second-order

eects of resourcing national defense, rather tha n war

itself. Indeed, neither Congress nor the National C om-

mand Authority exempts the troops from complying with

domestic laws when it comes to routine support activities,

such as U.S. basing. Quite the opposite: as Ms. Light notes,

there is a web of legislation, executive orders, and inter-

nal DoD policy that specically ta rgets environmental

performance in circumstances other than military opera-

tions (and even operational equipment, in some cases). For

xed installations, these targets include energy intensity,

renewable energy use, water use, greenhouse gas emissions,

endangered species, hazardous materials cleanup, and

other considerations.

By using the term “military-environmental complex,”

however, Ms. Light implies there is something unsavory,

immutable, or at least economically distorting about the

scale of the DoD’s spending on environmental goods and

services. at seems unjustied.

President Eisenhower originally used the term “mil-

itary-industrial complex” to refer to the “unwarra nted

inuence” in politics, the economy, and even “the very

structure of our society” that could result from the conu-

ence of an “immense military establishment and large arms

industry.”3 And while national defense spending is lower as

1108 U.N.T.S. 151, available at https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.

aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVI-1&chapter=26&lang=en.

3. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (Jan. 17, 1961) (tran-

script available at http://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_docu-

ments/farewell_address.html).

Copyright © 2015 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.