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War is an environmental disaster and the damage goes way beyond the obvious physical destruction on the battlefields. The Pentagon is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world.

Our massive, worldwide military establishment is a major producer of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. All military bases produce ground water contamination and other environmental damage.

The mining and manufacturing required by the military industrial complex adds to the degradation. The computerization of modern war and the constant upgrades and planned obsolescence of weapons systems produces huge amounts of solid and e-waste.

Recently the documentary film Earth’s Greatest Enemy was shown in Duluth. It highlighted  the many environmental problems and the ineffectiveness of public oversight of the military. The movie says the total environmental impact of the U.S. military is too big, and too varied, to accurately estimate. The Pentagon doesn’t bother with accurate records or numbers.

As the Earth’s Greatest Enemy documents (and Internet sources confirm) the U.S. military consumes 270,000 barrels of oil per day, or more than 100 million barrels annually, to power ships, aircraft, tanks and vehicles.

It has been estimated that every $10 price increase in a barrel of oil adds a billion dollars to the defense budget. The Pentagon’s roughly 850 worldwide military bases and facilities require a lot of resources to maintain and supply. This is why the Pentagon accounts for over half the discretionary federal budget every year.

For many decades our foreign policy has been dominated by controlling access to oil. There has been a symbiotic relationship between big oil, which supplies the fuel, and the Pentagon which ensures access to the petroleum. This was the purpose of the 1980 Carter Doctrine which stated the U.S. would use military force to protect access to Persian Gulf oil. Two wars in Iraq were about oil. So is the recent military action against Venezuela.

Technically the Pentagon must comply with environmental laws. But, in fact, they are either exempt or allowed to ignore them for “national security” reasons. The Pentagon gives only lip service to environmental regulations in peacetime and on U.S. military bases. In foreign war zones environmental degradation is never even considered.

Obviously war produces massive amounts of physical destruction but there are many other forms of pollution generated by military activities. Air and water contamination results from munition  explosions which release toxic chemicals, heavy metals and particulate matter. Even peacetime training activities can produce long lasting air, water and soil contamination and toxic runoff. The Navy pollutes the oceans with live fire exercises that blow up and sink ships as targets. They dump garbage at sea and contribute to ocean noise pollution that harms marine mammals.

All wars produce large amounts of unexploded ordinance (bombs, shells, grenades, cluster bombs and landmines) that continue to endanger people and pollute the environment for decades after the wars have ended.

According to Wikipedia, this is currently a problem for 78 countries resulting in 15,000 to 20,000 people – mostly children – being killed or maimed every year.

One example is the Zone Rouge, a 460 square mile area in France that is still unusable from WW1. The contamination includes unexploded ordinance (including poison gas shells), rusting ammunition and equipment and human and animal remains. The soil and ground water have been contaminated with lead, mercury, chlorine, arsenic and various acids.

The movie discussed several cases of U.S. military bases that were poisoning military service members and their families. The Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune North Carolina is considered among the worst.

From 1952 to 1987 one million military personnel, civilian employees and military families unknowingly drank and used contaminated water.

In 2009 the federal government began investigating the problems that had been ignored by military officials. It took years to get any action on the problems.

In 2012 a new law provided medical care to victims and in 2022 the Camp Lejeune Justice Act authorized compensation for military families and civilian employees for illnesses from toxic exposure.

Another public health and environmental disaster was fuel leaks and ground water contamination at Joint Base Pearl Harbor – Hickam in Hawaii. According to Wikipedia, the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage facility (built in 1943) has 20 underground tanks with a total capacity of 250 million gallons. It is located 100 feet directly above the freshwater aquifer that supplies the base, Honolulu and much of the island of Oahu.

In 2014 a 27,000-gallon leak leached into the aquifer. After a clean up effort a Navy admiral said “People can rest assured that what happened...could not happen again with the procedures we have in place now.”

On May 6, 2021, another leak of 20,000 gallons happened. People living in base housing began suffering from unusual medical problems. Six months later a third spill occurred.

The Navy initially declared the base water safe but on Dec. 2, 2021, had to acknowledge that their water system was seriously contaminated. Now the Navy claims the water is safe but residents continue to report medical problems.

There is an interesting vignette to this story. In 2017, the Sierra Club sued the Hawaii Department of Health for exempting the Red Hill facility from a state law that required the replacement of aging underground storage tanks. The Sierra Club won the case and the state agency was found guilty of violating state law.

As these and many other examples demonstrate – nuclear testing, agent orange, Gulf War Illness – the Pentagon and the U.S. government don’t care about war’s impact on people. “National interests” and “national security” have always been defined in terms of what was good for foreign trade, big businesses, big banks and arms manufacturers.

What was good for the health, safety or well being of people was never a consideration in the geopolitical quest for global dominance.
Is any of this justified?

Must “national security” override all other concerns?

Looking honestly at the failure of our many “wars of choice” to produce anything positive, it is is easy to conclude that our militarism has not been worth the costs. All the people killed, maimed, orphaned and morally degraded, the money and resources wasted, the countries destabilized and impoverished and the environmental damage have been unnecessary.

It would have been better – and much cheaper – to buy the oil or minerals, negotiate the differences and support the international laws and institutions needed to ensure global security for all nations.