Military Greenwashing

Bridget Algiere
small starry night.jpg

Twenty billion dollars of Obama's $787 billion stimulus package is going toward greening the military.  With this new influx of funds, the Navy has already installed solar panels in housing units at a base in Hawaii and the Army has turned their Baghdad waste into usable energy. Future projects include a 500MW solar thermal power plant at Fort Irwin and better fuel cells for soldiers on extended patrols. Does the military have a genuine interest in green economics, or are these projects fodder for a new propaganda machine of “Green Saviors?” The answer may be both.

Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, much of the technology that now infiltrates our daily lives was pioneered with military applications in mind. Video games are the grandchildren of early missile simulators, and even the Internet itself started its life as a military research network. Often the military is the only entity rich enough (thanks to national budget spending) to invest in the infrastructure needed to test many scientific theories and designs. If a new technology is not applied here, it's unlikely that it will be tested for many years, if ever.

Do these efforts mean the military is starting to care about the environment? Probably not. By nature, green technology is extremely energy efficient and has the potential to advance current effectiveness in operational strategy and other fighting. However, the future benefits of such technology aiding our personal portability and independence may just outweigh this temporary greenwashing. 

 

Image: "starry night" by army.mil on flickr courtesy of Creative Commons liscensing.

Comments

Was bound to happen..

Submitted by DavidCain on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 12:08.
...green is the new black. Sounds like political posturing, but maybe I'm being cynical. I wonder if they'll ditch the Humvees and begin to manufacture Battle-Priuses. www.raptitude.com -- The gentle art of sanity amidst civilization

Military Industrial Complex

Submitted by DeusExLibrus on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 12:33.
Personally I see this as a good thing. Environmentally it doesn't matter what their actual intention or reason for doing it is. However, I am kind of tired of our focus on the military. Why do we as Americans have such an obsession with war? If we reduced the military budget and put that money into education we could still have an effective military and overhaul the horrid excuse for a public education system we have in the states. It just seems like our priorities are backwards when we're putting more money into an organization whose job it is to kill people than the education of the next generation.

Nah

Submitted by Brad on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 15:46.
I helped greenwash a military training facility. It was more efficient and crap, but it in no way pioneers green technology. Certifications like LEED do nothing for technological innovation. No more than the USDA certification pioneers sustainable farming techniques. www.tri-freedom.com

Greenwashing?

Submitted by BenC on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 16:19.
Is this serious, how can you possible "greenwash" spending on instalations that are designed to assist the killing of people. You got to clean things up from the roots.

Rape

Submitted by Joan of Art on Tue, 04/14/2009 - 23:14.
nah, they're just trying to keep the Earth alive so they can rape her and its citizens a little longer.

Not for one millisecond

Submitted by Anteros on Wed, 04/22/2009 - 01:05.

do I believe it. The purpose of the military is primarily global domination and control of resources - particularly oil - and secondarily maintenance of territorial boundaries. A little nip-and-tuck in its own use of certain resources is nothing more than a minor alteration in the product line of the corporations that supply the military. Sure, they may use soldiers as guinea pigs for products they'll subsequently unload on the public. But will a few solar panels make the radioactivity resulting from use of nuclear weapons less deadly, or the consequences of chemical and bacteriological warfare less lethal? What about Agent Orange and the defoliants that the US has dumped on Columbia and Viet Nam? How green are those? Militarism is the purveyance of death, and no amount of window dressing will alter this.