Oil pumps in southern Russia. Photo: Gennadiy Kolodkin/World Bank

By Miriam Pemberton
WASHINGTON, Dec 20 2014 (IPS)

After months of whispered warnings, Russia’s economic troubles made global headlines when its currency collapsed halfway through December. Amid the tumbling price of oil, the ruble has fallen to record lows, bringing the country to its most serious economic crisis since the late 1990s.

Topping most lists of reasons for the collapse is Russia’s failure to diversify its economy. At least some of the flaws in its strategy of putting all those eggs in that one oil-and-gas basket are now in full view.Moscow’s failure to move beyond economic structures dominated by first military production, and now by fossil fuels, can serve as a cautionary tale and call to action.

Once upon a time, Russia did actually try some diversification — back before the oil and gas “solution” came to seem like such a good idea. It was during those tumultuous years when history was pushing the Soviet Union into its grave. Central planners began scrambling to convert portions of the vast state enterprise of military production — the enterprise that had so bankrupted the empire — to produce the consumer goods that Soviet citizens had long gone without.

One day the managers of a Soviet tank plant, for example, received a directive to convert their production lines to produce shoes. The timetable was: do it today. They didn’t succeed.

Economic development experts agree that the time to diversify is not after an economic shock, but before it. Scrambling is no way to manage a transition to new economic activity. Since the bloodless end to the Cold War was foreseen by almost nobody, significant planning for an economic transition in advance wasn’t really in the cards.

But now, in the United States at least, it is. Currently the country is in the first stage of a modest defence downsizing. We’re about a third of the way through the 10-year framework of defence cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

Assuming Congress doesn’t scale back this plan or even dismantle it altogether, the resulting downsizing will still be the shallowest in U.S. history. It’s a downsizing of the post-9/11 surge, during which Pentagon spending nearly doubled. So the cuts will still leave a U.S. military budget higher, adjusting for inflation, than it was during nearly every year of the Cold War — back when we had an actual adversary, the aforementioned Soviet Union, that was trying to match us dollar for military dollar.

Now, no such adversary exists. Thinking of China? Not even close: The United States spends about six times as much on its military as Beijing.

Even so, the U.S. defence industry’s modest contraction is being felt in communities across the country. By the end of the 10-year cuts, many more communities will be affected. This is the time for those communities that are dependent on Pentagon contracts to work on strategies to reduce this vulnerability. To get ahead of the curve.

There is actually Pentagon money available for this purpose. Its Office of Economic Adjustment exists to give planning grants and technical assistance to communities recognising the need to diversify.

As we in the United States struggle to understand what’s going on in Russia and how to respond to it, at least one thing is clear: Moscow’s failure to move beyond economic structures dominated by first military production, and now by fossil fuels, can serve as a cautionary tale and call to action.

Diversified economies are stronger. They take time and planning. Wait to diversify until the bottom falls out of your existing economic base, and your chances for a smooth transition decline precipitously. Turning an economy based on making tanks into one that makes shoes can’t be done in a day.

This story originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

U.S. Soldiers assigned to the Iowa Army National Guard construct a 7-foot levee to protect an electrical generator from rising floodwaters in Hills, Iowa, June 14, 2008. Credit: DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Oscar M. Sanchez-Alvarez, U.S. Air Force.

By Eric Bonds
Fredericksburg, VIRGINIA, Nov 1 2014 (IPS)

The Pentagon recently released a new report sounding the alarm on the national security threats posed by climate change. Like previous reports on the subject, this one makes clear that Department of Defence (DoD) planners believe that global warming will seriously challenge our nation’s military forces.

The report finds that, “rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict.If the world’s 10 biggest military spenders cut 25 percent of their defence budgets, it would free up an additional 325 billion dollars to spend on green infrastructure every year.

They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”

Such outcomes will mean, according to the report, that U.S. troops will be increasingly deployed overseas. The report also warns that many U.S. naval bases are vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise and from more frequent and increasingly severe tropical storms.

At a time when climate denialism still exerts an influence over U.S. politics, it’s important that the DoD is raising awareness that global warming is real and is profoundly consequential. The Obama administration also seems to have timed the release of this report, which does not itself include much new information, to build broader domestic support for a new global climate treaty.

Nonetheless, the recent report also shows just how limited the Pentagon’s thinking is about the subject, and how militarism itself poses its own roadblocks to creating a more sustainable society that can exist within the bounds of our climate system.

 The missing piece

The clear consensus among climate scientists is that accelerating global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is the only way we can limit the severity of climate change. Yet amid all of its grave warnings about projected climate impacts on national security, the new DoD report leaves this point untouched.

On the contrary, the Pentagon seems instead to be planning for, rather than working to avoid, a warming and more dangerous world.

The report, for instance, describes how the DoD is “beginning work to address a projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years” at the Norfolk naval base. It also states that the DoD is “considering the impacts of climate change in our war games and defense planning scenarios,” and that plans are being made to deal with diminishing Arctic sea ice, which will create new shipping lanes and open up new areas for resource extraction.

The Pentagon’s efforts to promote climate adaptation are understandable in the sense that some warming has been “locked in” to our atmosphere, and that no matter what we do now we will be feeling the impacts of climate change.

But it’s also true that reports like this miss the larger point: the extent of global warming and the severity of its consequences has everything to do with whether or not we act now to aggressively cut emissions. But these cuts just aren’t possible right now without a massive public investment to create a low-carbon economy.

Think big, think green

Although it might go by many different names—a Big Green Buy, a New Green Deal, or a Marshall Plan for the Environment—a serious plan to address global warming would require serious investments into creating more light rails, bullet trains, and bus systems while reorienting our communities to bicycles and walking.

We will need to increase the energy efficiency of our homes and fund the creation of new power systems that do not rely on fossil fuels.

In her new book, Naomi Klein provides a number of possible sources of finance for these public investments—including the elimination of subsidies to fossil fuel companies, a carbon tax, small taxes on financial transactions, or a billionaire’s tax.

Additionally, she argues that if the world’s 10 biggest military spenders cut 25 percent of their defence budgets, it would free up an additional 325 billion dollars to spend on green infrastructure every year.

Similarly, when Miriam Pemberton and Ellen Powell compared climate spending to military spending in the United States, they found that the nation puts only a tiny fraction of money—four percent in comparison to the total DoD budget—into efforts that would cut carbon emissions.

Just by eliminating unneeded and dangerous weapons systems, the U.S. government would have significant new sources of funding for green projects. For example, the U.S. government could change its plans to purchase four more littoral combat ships—which the DoD itself doesn’t want—in order to double the Department of Energy’s funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy efforts.

Likewise, our government could continue paying for 11 aircraft carrier groups to patrol the globe until 2050, or it could retire two groups and put the savings into solar panels on 33 million American homes.

 No roadmap

 This sort of spending—and much more—is what will be required to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions. But the U.S. government currently has no such plans.

When pressed, officials typically mention a lack of funding and the importance of “fiscal restraint” to explain why this need goes unmet. Meanwhile our resources continue to be invested in militarism rather than sustainability.

The Pentagon’s new climate change report, then, demonstrates just how severely limiting it is to speak of global warming as a “national security threat,” rather than thinking about it as a planetary emergency or in terms of environmental and intergenerational justice.

Looking at climate change through a militarised lens of “national security” can only diminish our collective political imagination at the very time when we need all the innovation we can muster to meet one of the defining challenges of our time.

This story originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

As one of the Ebola epicentres, the district of Kailahun, in eastern Sierra Leone bordering Guinea, was put under quarantine at the beginning of August. Credit: ©EC/ECHO/Cyprien Fabre

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

The U.S. military over the weekend formally began to support the international response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Advocates of the move, including prominent voices in global health, are lauding the Pentagon’s particularly robust logistical capacities, which nearly all observers say are desperately needed as the epidemic expands at an increasing rate.On Monday, the United Nations warned of an “exponential increase” in cases in coming weeks.

Yet already multiple concerns have arisen over the scope of the mission – including whether it is strong enough at the outset as well as whether it could become too broad in future.

President Barack Obama made the first public announcement on the issue on Sunday, contextualising the outbreak as a danger to U.S. national security.

“We’re going to have to get U.S. military assets just to set up, for example, isolation units and equipment there to provide security for public health workers surging from around the world,” the president said during a televised interview. “If we don’t make that effort now … it could be a serious danger to the United States.”

While the United States has spent more than 20 million dollars in West Africa this year to combat the disease, Washington has come under increased criticism in recent months for not doing enough. Obama is now expected to request additional funding from Congress later this month.

The military’s response, however, has already begun – albeit apparently on a very small scale for now, and in just a single Ebola-hit country.

A Defence Department spokesperson told IPS that, over the weekend, Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel approved the deployment of a “25-bed deployable hospital facility, equipment, and the support necessary to establish the facility” in Liberia. For now, this is the extent of the approved response.

The spokesperson was quick to note that additional planning is underway, but emphasised that the Pentagon is responding only to requests made by other federal agencies and taking no lead role. Further, its commitment to the hospital in Liberia, the country most affected by the outbreak, is limited.

The Department of Defence “will not have a permanent presence at the facility and will not provide direct patient care, but will ensure that supplies are maintained at the hospital and provide periodic support required to keep the hospital facility functioning for up to 180 days,” the spokesperson said.

“This approach provides for the establishment of the hospital facility in the shortest possible period of time … Once the deployable hospital facility is established, it will be transferred to the Government of Liberia.”

On Monday, Liberia’s defence minister, Brownie Samukai, said his government was “extremely pleased” by the announcement.

“We had discussions at the Department of Defence on the issues of utilising and requesting the full skill of United States capabilities, both on the soft side and on the side of providing logistics and technical expertise,” Samukai, who is currently here in Washington, told the media. “We look forward to that cooperation as expeditiously as we can.”

No security needed

The current Ebola outbreak has now killed some 2,100 people and infected more than 3,500 in five countries. On Monday, the United Nations warned of an “exponential increase” in cases in coming weeks.

Yet thus far the epidemic has resulted in an international response that is almost universally seen as dangerously inadequate. Obama’s statement Sunday nonetheless raised questions even among those supportive of the announcement.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the French humanitarian group, remains the single most important international organisation in physically responding to the outbreak. While MSF has long opposed the use of military personnel in response to disease outbreaks, last week it broke with that tradition.

Warning that the global community is “failing” to address the epidemic, the group told a special U.N. briefing that countries with “civilian and military medical capability … must immediately dispatch assets and personnel to West Africa”.

Yet while MSF has welcomed Obama’s announcement, the group is also expressing strong concerns over the president’s reference to the U.S. military providing “security for public health workers”.

MSF “reiterates the need for this support to be of medical nature only,” Tim Shenk, a press officer with the group, told IPS. “Aid workers do not need additional security support in the affected region.”

Last week, MSF urged that any military personnel deployed to West Africa not be used for “quarantine, containment or crowd control measures”.

The Defence Department spokesperson told IPS that the U.S. military had not yet received a request to provide security for health workers.

Few guidelines

The United States is not the only country now turning to its military to bolster the flagging humanitarian response in West Africa.

The British government in recent days announced even more significant plans, aiming to set up 68 beds for Ebola patients at a centre, in Sierra Leone, that will be jointly operated by humanitarians and military personnel. The Canadian government had reportedly been contemplating a military plan as well, although this now appears to have been shelved.

Yet the concerns expressed by MSF over how the military deployment should go forward underscore the fact that there exists little formal guidance on the involvement of foreign military personnel in international health-related response.

The World Health Organisation (WHO), for instance, has no broad stance on the issue, a spokesperson told IPS. As the WHO is an intergovernmental agency, it is up to affected countries to make related decisions and request.

“Each country handles its own security situation,” Daniel Epstein, a WHO spokesperson, told IPS. “So if governments agree to military involvement from other countries, that’s their business.”

Another spokesperson with the agency, Margaret Harris, told IPS that the WHO appreciates “the skills that well-trained, disciplined and highly organised groups like the US military can bring to the campaign to end Ebola.”

Yet there is already concern that the U.S. military response could be shaping up to be far less robust than necessary.

MSF’s Shenk noted that any plan from the U.S. military would need to include both the construction and operation of Ebola centres. Thus far, the Pentagon says it will not be doing any operating.

While around 570 Ebola beds are currently available in West Africa, MSF estimates that at least 1,000 hospital spaces, capable of providing full isolation, are needed in the region.

In a series of tweets on Monday, Laurie Garrett, a prominent global health scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank, expressed alarm that the Defence Department’s Ebola response was shaping up to be “tiny” in comparison to what is needed.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Secretary of State John F. Kerry, left, confers with Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel during testimony on U.S. military intervention in Syria before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Credit: public domain

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Feb 25 2014 (IPS)

Signalling a somewhat more modest global U.S. military posture, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel Monday called for sharp reductions in the size of the U.S. Army, the service that has borne the brunt of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan over the past dozen years.

At the same time, however, he urged an increase in the size of the Special Operations Forces (SOF), the elite military personnel charged with training foreign counterparts and carrying out often-secret missions, including assassinations and raids such as the one that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.The cuts not only reflected the end of U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the aversion to the prolonged commitment of ground troops in foreign countries.

Speaking a week before President Barack Obama is due to unveil his 2015 budget request, Hagel said he will also ask Congress to phase out key weapons systems, including the fabled Cold War-era U-2 spy plane, which will be replaced by drone aircraft, and A-10 “Warthog” jets that have been used for several decades to provide close-air support for ground forces.

“This is a time for reality,” Hagel said told reporters during a press briefing in which he asked Congress to approve 496 billion dollars in military spending for the next fiscal year.

That does not include an additional 26 billion dollars approved for the Pentagon by Congress as part of an “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” budget deal late last year.

“This is a budget that recognises the reality of the magnitude of our fiscal challenges, the dangerous world we live in, and American military’s unique and indispensable role in the security of this country and in today’s volatile world.”

The proposed cuts to the Army captured the national media headlines. Under Hagel’s proposal, which has been endorsed by the chiefs of the four major services, the active-duty Army would be cut from the current 522,000 troops to between 440,000 and 450,000. That would bring the Army to its smallest size since the eve of Washington’s entry into World War II.

The implications of such a cut were not lost on observers who noted that they not only reflected the end of U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the aversion, apparently shared by the Obama administration and the general public alike, to the prolonged commitment of ground troops in foreign countries.

Washington withdrew all of its forces from Iraq in 2011 and plans to withdraw all but a few thousand from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

Just three weeks ago, a Pew Research Centre poll found that, for the first time, majorities (52 percent) of U.S. respondents have concluded that Washington had “mostly failed” to achieve its goals in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Fewer than four in 10 agreed with the notion that the U.S. had “mostly succeeded” in both countries.

“Since we are no longer sizing the force for prolonged stability operations,” Hagel, who served in the Army in the Vietnam War, said Wednesday, “an Army of (the current) size is larger than required to meet the demands of our defence strategy.…As we end our combat mission in Afghanistan, this will be the first budget to fully reflect the transition [the Defence Department] is making after 13 years of war – the longest conflict in our nation’s history.”

“In saying that, he was essentially acknowledging the fact that the American public won’t stand for that kind of intervention any time soon,” William Hartung, a veteran defence analyst at the dovish Centre for International Policy (CIP). “A majority of them understand that spending trillions of dollars and losing thousands of lives in those wars have not made anyone safer.”

“The real question is whether we can roll back the ‘go anywhere, fight any battle’ mentality of the Pentagon,” Hartung added in an email exchange. “Whether it’s drones, Special Forces, or precision bombs, war is war, and it’s time to take the United States off of a perpetual war footing and craft a truly defensive military force.”

Indeed, in his remarks, Hagel stressed that Washington’s SOF will continue to grow – from roughly 66,000 today to just shy of 70,000 in 2015 – an increase of almost 300 percent compared to just a decade ago.

Each of the military services and each of the regional commands (SouthCom for Latin America, Africom for Africa, CentCom for the Near East and parts of South and Central Asia, and PaCom for the Asia-Pacific) – have their own elite SOF units.

In addition, a North Carolina-based Special Operations Command (SOCOM), presided over by Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the bin Laden raid, can dispatch troops to virtually anywhere in the world. He also commands the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in carrying out highly classified operations against specific targets.

McRaven, whose efforts at easing human-rights restrictions on training foreign militaries and circumventing State Department oversight of some aid programmes have proved controversial, has nonetheless been effective in building his “empire” in major part  because of its compatibility with Obama’s desire to lighten the U.S. military’s “footprint” in conflicted regions without reducing its effectiveness and lethality.

“In his State of the Union address, the President declared that our nation must move off a permanent war footing, and Secretary Hagel’s speech today took one major step in that direction.” noted Miriam Pemberton, another defence analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies here. “But, while long-term occupations are off the table now, the expansion of Special Forces means that under-the-radar invasion are not.”

Ironically, Hagel’s budget proposal reflects in many ways the strategic vision of former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who strongly favoured the development of high-tech combat systems, heavy reliance on air power, and small, nimble ground forces who could strike from so-called “lily pads” (or temporary bases) anywhere on the globe within a short period of time. His so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs,” or RMA, however, was side-tracked enormous costs of the Iraq occupation.

The Obama administration has revived that vision, without explicitly admitting it, with the priority it has accorded to cyber-warfare capabilities, SOF, ever-more sophisticated drone technology, its intended retention of all 13 aircraft carriers, and its ongoing efforts to negotiate access agreements to foreign military facilities, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, East African, and Sahelian regions.

Hagel’s proposal will now be taken up by Congress, which is certain to resist a number of its components, including proposed base closures and the phase-out of weapons systems that provide jobs in key legislative districts around the country.

Hagel’s proposal also ignored the across-the-board budget-slashing cuts mandated by law under the so-called “sequester” that took effect in 2013 and continues in force pending further legislative action. They would require the Pentagon to cut an additional 115 billion dollars from its budget over the next five years.

At the height of the Iraq war in 2006, Washington accounted for about half of global military spending. Its budget has since fallen to just over 40 percent, according to Peter Singer of the Brooking Institution. Under the sequester’s limits, it would decline to about 38 percent.

If it remains in effect, the Pentagon would be forced to mothball one aircraft carrier, further reduce the Army’s size to 420,000, and cut into the Marine force as well, among other cost-saving measures.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The U.S. Department of Defence is announcing that reported cases of sexual assault in the U.S. military last year rose again to 3,374, a six percent increase over 2011 and a record high.

Yet the figure that is causing widespread anger here is the estimated number of unreported cases – some 26,000 incidents of rape or assault. That’s a significant rise even over last year’s estimated figure of 19,000, an astonishingly high number that constituted the first time that the U.S. military had released estimates for unreported incidents.“Unless Congress removes the institutional bias from the military judicial system, sexual predators will continue to wreak havoc on our Armed Forces." -- Former Marine Corps Captain Anu Bhagwati

In a new annual report released Tuesday, the Pentagon says some 70 sexual assaults may be taking place within the U.S. military every day, affecting more than six percent of all women in active service and around 1.2 percent of men over the past year. Other official figures suggest that one in five servicewomen could be experiencing such assaults.

“Sexual assault is a crime that undermines trust within military units and is an affront to the basic values our Service members defend,” the report, available here and here, states. “While the Department has taken a multifaceted approach to fundamentally change the way the Department confronts sexual assault, there is still much work to do.”

Such figures constitute an increase of more than a third during just the past half-decade, and have clearly exasperated the top military leadership.

“[S]exual assault is an outrage; it is a crime … And if it’s happening inside our military, then whoever carries it out is betraying the uniform that they’re wearing,” President Barack Obama told reporters Tuesday.

“So I don’t want just more speeches or awareness programmes or training but, ultimately, folks look the other way. If we find out somebody is engaging in this stuff, they’ve got to be held accountable – prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonourably discharged. Period.”

The Pentagon’s new report was given an inadvertent curtain-raiser on Monday, when the Air Force’s head officer in charge of sexual assault prevention was himself arrested on charges of sexual assault.

On Tuesday, President Obama noted that he had spoken with Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel earlier in the day and told him to “exponentially step up our game”. He also said that he wanted military members who have experienced sexual assault “to hear directly from their commander-in-chief that I’ve got their backs.”

Hours later, Secretary Hagel unveiled a new “prevention and response” plan aimed at increasing accountability, stepping up punishment and, ultimately, trying to end military sexual assault outright. The strategy includes the formation of a new nine-person panel, appointed by both the Pentagon and Congress, tasked with coming up with concrete recommendations within a year.

“This department may be nearing a stage where the frequency of this crime and the perception that there is tolerance of it could very well undermine our ability to effectively carry out the mission and to recruit and retain the good people we need,” Hagel told reporters Tuesday.

“We need cultural change where every service member is treated with dignity and respect, where all allegations of inappropriate behavior are treated with seriousness, where victims’ privacy is protected, where bystanders are motivated to intervene, and where offenders know that they will be held accountable by strong and effective systems of justice.”

62 percent retaliation

While the new Pentagon panel will be tasked with making recommendations on the full gamut of military sexual assault, one element that probably won’t be included is the possibility of removing responsibility for related investigation and punishment from the military structure itself.

This despite Secretary’s Hagel’s own contention on Tuesday that much of the problem has to do with the military’s “culture”. And despite critics’ contentions that assault victims are far less likely to report their experiences if they have to do so to a commanding officer.

Indeed, according to U.S. Senator Patty Murray, co-author of new legislation on the issue, some 62 percent of military personnel who have reported sexual abuse have experienced some form of retaliation.

“Every American should be outraged by the disturbing numbers from this year’s Defense Department sexual assault report, but no one should surprised,” Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine Corps Captain and the executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), an advocacy group, told IPS in an e-mail.

“Today we still have a military justice system in which commanding officers are granted the authority over the entire criminal justice process – instead of trained, impartial attorneys and judges.”

Although last month Hagel received plaudits for putting forth a policy recommendation that would weaken or do away with commanding officers’ abilities to overturn courts-martial decisions in cases of sexual assault, on Tuesday he nonetheless stated that he did not believe that the panel should look into taking this power outside of the military chain of command.

“It is my strong belief … that the ultimate authority has to remain within the command structure,” Hagel said. “We do have to go back and review every aspect of that chain of command, of that accountability … [but] taking the ultimate responsibility away from the military – I think that would just weaken the system.”

Yet according to SWAN’s Bhagwati, more may need to be done to regularise investigation and accountability procedures.

“Unless Congress removes the institutional bias from the military judicial system,” she says, “sexual predators will continue to wreak havoc on our Armed Forces, and our troops will continue to face a well-founded fear of reporting, institutional retaliation, and career jeopardy.”

In recent weeks, the U.S. Congress has focused increasingly on military sexual assault, and on Tuesday senators put forward a bill aimed at combating the issue. According to a release, the 380,000 members of the Military Officers Association of America have already “strongly endorsed” the bill, which is slated to be introduced in the House in coming weeks.

Among other elements, the legislation “would create a new category of legal advocates, called Special Victims’ Counsels, who would be responsible for advocating on behalf of the interests of the victim,” Senator Murray, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said on the Senate floor Tuesday.

“These SVCs would also advise the victim on the range of legal issues they may face. For example, when a young Private First Class is intimidated into not reporting a sexual assault by threatening her with unrelated legal charges – like underage drinking – this new advocate would be there to protect her and tell her the truth.”

The U.S. military is focusing almost exclusively on non-food items, including algae and oils made from non-food and agricultural wastes. Algae wallops its biofuel rivals, yielding 50 to 70 times more gallons of fuel per acre than corn ethanol. Credit: Jonathan Eng/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Dec 19 2012 (IPS)

Reversing attempts to eliminate the U.S. military’s advanced biofuels programme, both houses of Congress on Tuesday approved major legislation that now presents no obstacles to broad-reaching Defence Department plans to mainstream and spread the use of alternative fuels throughout its operations.

The move has received broad plaudits from environmentalists, industry advocates and high-level defence officials.

“We’re really happy that Congress decided to support the Depart of Defence’s ability to develop and purchase biofuels,” Lena Moffitt, a Washington representative with the Sierra Club, an environment advocacy group, told IPS. “We wholly support the Pentagon’s major role in advancing the industry more broadly, including leading the charge in sourcing materials that are not food based.”

As the largest fuel consumer in the United States – using some 90 percent of the energy used by the federal government – the military has been ramping up plans to diversify its fuel options in the name of both economics and security, particularly following a related announcement by President Barack Obama in 2010. A major part of this push has been a focus on research into new alternative fuels, particularly though investing and partnering with the private sector.

Proponents say such public-sector spending offers a nascent but burgeoning industry critical capital with which to prove its products’ feasibility. Yet in recent months, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives had moved to ban the military from purchasing or developing biofuels, citing high costs and uncertain returns.

While the Senate voted down a related Republican amendment in late November, committees for the House and Senate have since been forced to reconcile the differing versions of the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), an annual appropriations bill. That final version, approved Tuesday, adheres to the Senate rather than House bill, scuppering the attempt to block the biofuels programme.

The final version of the NDAA also does not include a Republican amendment that would have done away with earlier legislation that disallows all federal agencies from purchasing any alternative fuel found to be more polluting than standard fuels.

The NDAA, in total worth more than 633 billion dollars, is to be voted on by the full Congress and go to President Obama for approval by the end of this week.

Great green fleet

Since 2009, much of the military’s biofuels vision has been spearheaded by the U.S. Navy. In turn, this has been pushed particularly by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who recently wrote that “if the Navy can fully pursue its initiatives, (advanced biofuel) will reach cost-competitiveness in 2016.”

Together with the departments of energy and agriculture, the navy has entered into an agreement to develop cost-effective advanced biofuels, the high-quality type needed to replace jet fuel and other high-end energy sources. That agreement is worth some 510 million dollars, a critical part of which has been and will be used to build the costly refineries that can produce new alternative fuels to specification.

In July, the three departments announced 30 million dollars in matching funds for related research this year. That same month saw the start of a six-week test mission of non-retrofitted U.S. Navy fighters and cruisers, referred to as the Great Green Fleet, that sailed around the Pacific powered in part by biofuel, the largest such experiment ever undertaken. (The navy also considers nuclear power to be an alternative fuel.)

Within the next decade, the navy has pledged to increase its use of alternative fuels in its plane and ship fleets by at least 50 percent. The U.S. Marines, a branch of the navy, has also been ordered to cut its overall energy use by nearly a third by 2015.

Those and similar long-term plans offer critical incentive for the private-sector players working on the research and development of advanced biofuels. Significant initial work has already taken place in this regard, as has testing and certification to ensure new products would meet specifications.

The new NDAA authorisation “would help get the first commercial large-scale demonstration biorefineries built to fully validate the technology and ability to produce these fuels at large scale,” Paul Winters, the communications director for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group, told IPS.

“In the current economic climate, there’s been a reluctance among institutional investors and large commercial banks to invest or provide capital to build these biorefineries. So this public-private partnership is intended to help alleviate that situation, to encourage that investment.”

Winters characterises both the military and private airline industry as “eager” customers for these fuels. A major new push will now provide critical understanding of what the industry could be capable of down the road.

“The initial validation of the production of these fuels is necessary to encourage investment in large-scale production for those markets,” he says. “It’s further pushing the production of fuels that, from an environmental perspective, will be an improvement from the fuels that are currently used.”

The new authorisation should now lead to the construction of the first commercial-scale biorefineries in the United States, which the military is looking to have operational no later than 2020.

While concern has mounted around the world in recent years over Western countries’ new appetite for biofuels impacting negatively on world food prices and availability, the current U.S. military push is focusing almost exclusively on non-food items, including algae and oils made from non-food and agricultural wastes, with plans to use trash at some point.

Still, critics have pointed out that arable lands for biomass projects have supplanted food production in many places, including the United States, with industrial-sized “land-grabbing” for such use currently at an all-time high in Africa. The U.S. military programme does currently use a type of flax known as camelina for some of its biofuel mixes, and is planning to move more broadly into the use of other plant matter in the future.

In 1998, the Defence Department vetoed a delegation of prominent U.S. nuclear specialists to go to Iran to investigate its nuclear programme at the invitation of the government of newly-elected Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, according to the nuclear scientist who was organising the mission.

Then President Mohammad Khatami hoped to reduce tensions with Washington. Credit: World Economic Forum/cc by 2.0

The Pentagon objected to the delegation’s mission even though it was offered the option of including one or more scientists of its own choosing on the delegation, according to Dr. Behrad Nakhai, the nuclear scientist who was organising it.

The Pentagon veto of the nuclear scientists’ delegation eliminated the Khatami government’s most promising initiative to promote a thaw in U.S.-Iran relations by weakening a key U.S. argument for viewing Iran as a threat.

The Bill Clinton administration had been accusing Iran of wanting nuclear weapons, based not on intelligence on the nuclear programme but on the assumption that Iran would use enriched uranium for nuclear weapons rather than for civilian power.

In a series of interviews with IPS, Nakhai, an Iranian who had come to the United States after high school, got a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1979 and was a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, provided a detailed account of the episode.

Iran’s mission to the U.N. informed Nakhai in late February 1998 that President Khatami and the new head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Gholam-Reza Aghazadeh, wanted him to put together a group of nuclear scientists to visit Iran to study the Iranian nuclear programme, Nakhai recalled.

The Iranian invitation came in the wake of President Khatami’s January 1998 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour calling for a “crack in the wall of distrust” between the United States and Iran and his appeal to the U.S. people for “the exchange of professors, writers, scholars, artists, journalists and tourists”.

Although those appeals had been followed by a public rejection by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of official talks between Iran and the United States, Khatami appeared determined to reduce tensions with Washington.

Nakhai recalled that he asked Iranian officials at the U.N. mission how big the delegation could be and was told, “You decide and we will issue the visas.” Iran would also foot the bill for the trip, they said.

“Where can I take them?” asked Nakhai, and the Iranians responded, “You decide. No restrictions.” The Iranians said the U.S. scientists could meet with whomever they chose, according to Nakhai’s account.

On Mar. 5, Nakhai began to contact prominent nuclear scientists and engineers.

His first call was to Dr. Richard T. Lahey, chairman of the department of nuclear engineering at Renssellaer Polytechnic Institute and one of the world’s most eminent nuclear scientists. Lahey had headed a group of scientists who went to China after détente to study the Chinese nuclear programme.

After being assured by Nakhai that there would be no restrictions on what the scientists could see and where they could go, Lahey expressed interest in the proposed delegation, Nakhai recalled.

In an e-mail to Lahey that same day, which Nakhai has provided to IPS, Nakhai wrote, “The 7-10 days visit will entail sessions with government officials, discussions with University and Laboratory faculties, and tours of facilities.” Nakhai suggested late spring for the delegation trip.

At Nakhai’s request, Lahey offered to contact other prominent nuclear scientists, and in a Mar. 24 e-mail to Nakhai, also provided to IPS, Lahey said, “I have now heard from a number of top specialists in the field of Nuclear Energy and Safety who would be interested in going to Iran on a technology exchange visit.”

Lahey said Prof. Theo Theofanous of University of California Santa Barbara, Professor John J. Dorning of the University of Virginia and Dr. Rusi Taleyarkhan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory had expressed their willingness to join Lahey on such a delegation.

Leahy’s e-mail also said Nakhai would need to contact the State Department “to make sure that we have formal permission to go on this trip.” Most prominent nuclear scientists had security clearances from the Department of Energy, he noted, and could lose their clearances if they made the trip without official approval.

In mid-March, Nakhai recalls, he called the State Department’s Iran desk officer, J. Christopher Stevens. Stevens went on to become ambassador to Libya in 2012 but was killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sep. 11.

In their third conversation that same week, Stevens told the scientist that the trip was “a good idea”, according to Nakhai. But Stevens said Nakhai would have to “clear it with the Department of Defence”.

Stevens gave Nakhai the telephone number for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Near East and South Asia Alina Romanowski, the top adviser to the secretary of defence on Near East matters. But when Nakhai called Romanowski, he got a decidedly negative response to the proposed trip.

Romanowski was unequivocally opposed to the idea, according to Nakhai, arguing that the scientists wouldn’t be able to get the truth in Iran. “They will mislead you,” Nakhai recalled her saying. “They will not show you everything.”

“I told her these scientists could not be easily fooled,” Nakhai said. He pointed to Lahey’s experience in leading a mission to China during the Richard Nixon administration.

Nakhai then told Romanowski that the group would ask to go wherever the Defence Department wanted them to go.

Nakhai asked her to think it over, and said he would call back later.

When Nakhai called back a week later, Romanowski gave him the same answer and the same argument, Nakhai said.

In a later conversation with Romanowski, Nakhai recalled, he offered her assurances that he would include an expert on nuclear weapons on the delegation. He also referred to his contacts with the American Nuclear Society -the premier professional association of specialists on civilian nuclear power – and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

And in yet another phone conversation with Romanowski, Nakhai said, he invited the Pentagon to “send somebody of your own choosing as part of the delegation.” But Romanowski’s opposition remained unchanged.

Nearly two months after he had first contacted the Defence Department official, Nakhai pulled the plug on the project in May 1998.

Romanowski is now deputy assistant administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Middle East Bureau. Responding to a query from IPS Thursday, a spokesman for USAID, Ben Edwards, said, “Ms Romanowski cannot comment about the DoD in her current capacity at USAID.”

Robert Pelletreau, who had been assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asia in 1994-97 and had been deputy assistant secretary of defence for the same region in 1983-85, told IPS the decision to oppose the delegation trip would have been made at a higher level at DOD with input from the Joint Staff and others.

DOD’s reluctance to see a gesture toward Iran that the State Department was supporting might have been a factor, according to Pelletreau, along with distrust of an initiative coming from an Iranian scientist with no ties to the Pentagon.

The DOD’s rejection of the nuclear scientists’ mission came at a crucial turning point in Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran had begun testing centrifuges secretly and making plans for the construction of a uranium enrichment facility.

Although the delegation of scientists would not have uncovered those facts, it probably would have anticipated the construction of both uranium conversion and enrichment facilities, and could have analysed whether the profile of Iran’s nuclear programme indicated that it was indeed for civilian power or not.

Such a report might have challenged the Clinton administration’s line on the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.

Nakhai believes the Pentagon wanted to protect that line. “They had anticipated that the nuclear programme would be useful for pressure on Iran,” Nakhai said, “and they didn’t want any reduction in that pressure point.”