This month we talk about the US military, F-35 fuel-efficiency, and Russia.
We also discuss the Pentagon, the pointillist empire, and intelligence budgets.
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Transcript
Building and maintaining a military is expensive.
The United States, which has the world's best-funded military by a fair margin, has about 1.3 million personnel and wields a baseline budget of $773 billion for 2023, which is $30 billion more than in 2022.
For context, because at this scale numbers kind of lose their intuitive meaning, that increase of $30 billion is, all by itself, three times the discretionary budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, and more than three times all the money allocated to the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
Out of all the money spent for all purposes as decided by the US Congress and okayed by the President—which is generally called discretionary spending—which is distinct from mandatory spending, as that's mostly payments to individuals, businesses, and governments, and includes things like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, alongside unemployment program payments—the automatic payouts—but out of all of the money spent by the US government other than those compulsory, automatic outlays, nearly half of what the government spends is for defense purposes.
And that $773 billion adds up to more than the total funding for the next ten biggest national militaries, combined, and it's just under three-times what China spends on theirs; the numbers are a bit fuzzy based on what information is made available to which international institutions that keep tabs on such things, and which funds you consider military in nature, but China commits something like $200-300 billion on their military, and in third place, India commits in the neighborhood of $65-75 billion.
Most wealthy European nations have a defense budget of around $50-60 billion, and Russia has a defense budget of something like $60-65 billion.
The rough cost, per capita in the United States to fund a military of this scale and expense, is about $2,000 per person per year.
More than half of that total amount is funneled into large contractors that make our missiles and fighter jets, and smaller weapons firms that make things like assault rifles, body armor, and night vision goggles, and much of the rest is paid out for fuel and humans—paychecks for employees and former employees.
Quite a lot of the US Department of Energy's resources are oriented toward defense purposes, as well.
More than 40% of the DOE's budget in 2023 will be spent supporting the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA's efforts, which primarily involve maintaining our existing, and developing new, nuclear weapons; that adds another not-quite $30 billion to the overall military expenditure tally for the US.
There are also intelligence-related costs, like those that fund the FBI and CIA and their projects, but also other agencies—the US has 18 of them in total, including many you don't tend to hear much about, like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Department of Justice's Federal Bureau of Investigation—which in aggregate have a budget of $67.1 billion for 2023, which is up $5 billion from 2022.
If we were to also include things like veterans affairs costs, defense-related diplomacy costs, and Department of Homeland Security-related budgetary items, alongside the myriad debts associated with all of the aforementioned price tags, we end up with an overall defense budget of just over $1.4 trillion. And a trillion is a thousand billion or a million million...so that's quite a lot of money.
What I'd like to talk about today is another, less-discussed cost of militaries in general, and the utilization of militaries, of armed conflict, in particular.
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The article I'd like to start with today comes from The Wall Street Journal and it's entitled:
Russia’s War in Ukraine Could Have Environmental Impact That Lasts Decades
This piece centers on analysis about Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing, as of the day I'm recording this, conflict that is in several meaningful ways poisoning local ecosystems with all sorts of dangerous chemicals that may stick around for a very long time, and in some cases will remain permanently until and unless they're removed at great expense.
We see a lot of substances like insulation from buildings, concrete, lead paint, and other such chemicals aerosolized when they're blown up or burnt, and then inhaled by civilians.
These substances are injected into local soil and water resources, which can kill off a lot of local flora and fauna, while also making food grown in such regions a hazardous proposition for a long time into the future; you just really don't want to convert all these amenities of the modern world, made from so many different materials, into inhalable, ingestible, spreadable particulates; it's bad on every level, and in some cases, like with asbestos, a common insulation material, it doesn't even wash away in rain, much less decompose; so this is a very long-term issue that results in any military conflict in inhabited areas.
On top of those concerns, which can lead to heightened risks of cancers, autoimmune disorders, developmental issues in children, and exposure to things like heavy metals which can have lifelong negative health outcomes for everyone in the region, there are also concerns that the conflict itself—and all the heavy machines being used to fight it—may contribute significantly to global carbon emissions.
One analysis suggests that, depending on how long the war lasts, emissions from just the military hardware involved in the conflict in Ukraine could surpass the emissions a small or medium-sized country emits for all purposes over the course of a year.
Tanks, military aircraft, and heavy-duty trucks have not been iterated into more energy-sipping permutations the way civilian transportation has, and many of them burn fuel that's a lot more dense and polluting than consumer-grade petroleum; so the fuel they use is worse, emissions and particulates-wise when consumed, but they also consume a lot more of it than everyday cars and buses and trucks and such.
Alongside use-related emissions, fuel depots and other fossil fuel-related infrastructure are frequently targeted during these sorts of conflicts to deny the enemy fuel for their hardware, and many pollutants, including but not limited to CO2, are released into the atmosphere, en masse, every time such infrastructure is blown up or burnt.
It's estimated that in the early 1990s, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and set fire to their oil wells, about 2% of total global CO2 emissions that year were the result of those burning oil wells alone; you can actually see evidence of that burning in ice core samples collected in Tibetan glaciers, because their telltale soot traveled that far around the world.
By some estimates, including one from a study published by the Royal Geography Society in 2019, the US military is itself a bigger polluter than about 140 countries, and all of those nations' pollution for all purposes.
There are 195 officially-recognized nations in the world, today, so that 140 of them pollute less than the US military is a somewhat staggering revelation; the US military is, by far, the biggest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons of all sorts in the world.
To add some more specific numbers to that comparison, as of 2019 the US military emitted the equivalent to something like the annual emissions of 257 million cars, each year.
And that number goes up when militaries are actually fighting each other; real numbers are hard to get, as many of these figures are buried in other figures or classified, but from what we know based primarily on leaks and Freedom of Information requests, that baseline number ticks up and up and up the longer a military conflict goes on.
And that's partly because of the aforementioned destruction associated with war, but also consider that military Humvees get somewhere between 4 and 8 miles per gallon, and an F-35 fighter jet burns 2.37 gallons of fuel per nautical mile traveled; not 2.37 miles per gallon, 2.37 gallons burned per nautical mile.
So the more war there is, the more these vehicles and other hardware are used, and the more those expenditures add up.
This unfortunate reality is part of why Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been so badly timed, in addition to just being horrific on many levels, and in defiance of so many international norms; it's tragic beyond even the immediate costs because the world has been shifting toward all sorts of climate-preserving actions, only to find itself in a position where it has to build more tanks, fire more missiles, and throw seemingly unlimited quantities of fossil fuels at a million different problems at once.
There's the war itself that must be fought, but there are also factories that need to be powered and civilians who need to be protected and heated and cooled and fed and watered—and all of that requires energy, which is increasingly scarce in some parts of the world both because of supply chain and production disruptions from the conflict, and because of how energy, like oil and coal and natural gas, are being leveraged as weapons, diplomatic and otherwise, by the Russian government.
Some analysts have speculated that part of why Russian President Putin decided to attack Ukraine when he did was that, Russia, being essentially a petro-state that's reliant on gas and oil for about 50% of its total income, may have seen the writing on the wall, all the commitments being made by the world, including their then-biggest customer, the European Union, to transition over to clean energy in a relatively short period of time, and they thought, well, we'd better sell what we can and maybe stir the pot, get everyone investing in defense stuff, because that stuff can't be converted to run on windmills and sunshine, at least not as easily and at not soon.
Some militaries are doing what they can to switch parts of their infrastructure over to renewable energy sources.
The US military has tweaked some of its bases to run primarily on solar and wind, and several other nations are making the same adjustments, not wanting to rely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on, but also aware that they'll have to be totally switched over to renewables by 2050 anyway, so they might as well start sooner rather than later.
But there are a LOT of such bases to power—an estimated 585,000 facilities operated by the US Defense Department, alone, spread over 27 million acres in 160 countries, as of 2018; and the US military is unusual in this regard because it's so big and operates what's been called a pointillist empire, sprawling around the world but holding territory via blips of military bases, rather than trying to conquer swathes of entire countries, but it's not unusual at different scales for pretty much everyone.
Military infrastructure is just cumbersome in a different way that civilian infrastructure, and the latter is tricky to convert, while the former is incredibly expensive and tedious, even when it's an option.
The Pentagon, the actual building, emitted more than 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions in 2013, and all of those installations run by the Defense Department, in aggregate reportedly account for around a third of the Defense Department's total energy consumption—though that number has reportedly ticked downward as aspects of running such buildings have become more efficient; we just don't know by how much, because such information is concealed from the public for presumably security reasons.
So while it's almost certainly becoming more efficient to run even defense-related buildings due to innovations in refrigerator efficiencies and better insulation and things like that, we don't know to what degree such innovations have been deployed, and we don't know what other variables aren't included in public numbers, when they're available; so there's a nonzero chance that those numbers are still pretty grim, and will require a whole lot of time and resources to convert into something less-grim.
So in general, right now, the only real option for most governments is to keep the oil and gas flowing, and both resources can be used as leverage in a military or diplomatic standoff, as we've seen with Russia turning on and off the tap of gas they typically send to Europe these past handful of months; they are threatening to hamstring EU nations' manufacturing apparatuses, while also massively increasing the price of everything from heating one's home to fueling up one's car, and that's not good in nations that have democratic governments, because it can lead to the person in power being booted from power because of how pissed off everyone is about inflation related to fundamental things like energy.
There have been, recently, some murmurings from folks in charge of the US Defense Department that they're making plans to align their various sub-agencies with the government's commitment to hit carbon neutrality by 2050, and NATO, back in 2021, announced that it was creating frameworks for member-nations to keep tabs on and calculate their military-related emissions; though like many plans that were considered to be very important and were thus prioritized leading up to February of 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, this one has also likely been sidelined for the duration of what's arguably rightly being seen as a real emergency for the continent—the rightness of that assessment, doesn't change the emission-related reality of this conflict, however, and that prioritization may worsen our global climate outlook, and potentially quite substantially—which, again, may not have played any role in the calculus the Russian government did when they decided to attack Ukraine now rather than at some point in the future, but it's worth noting that not only do they benefit when everyone's scrambling to get as many fossil fuels as they can, they're also one of the few countries in the world that, on balance, gets a little better as the world warms up. So this whole situation is pretty good, overall, for them and their goals.
Some organizations operating in the climate-space have said that the only real way to reduce these sorts of emissions, those stemming from militaries, in the short-term, is to reduce the scale of global militaries, and the US military in particular.
The trouble with that assessment, of course, is that there will always be another emergency and another reason to justify bulking up one's perceived ability to defend oneself, even if one truly does intend to shift to cleaner energy and a smaller emissions footprint.
Right now, today, it's Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it could be something else once that ends.
There's a term in the climate world for mostly oil and gas companies that are doing all they can to slow down progress toward rolling out cleaner energy: predatory delay.
The idea is that some people in this conflict between those who want to transition to renewables and those who want to milk the fossil fuel generation for as much as it's worth are dragging their feet and doing anything they can think of to get another few years, another few decades maybe, during which they can get more money out of their existing assets—otherwise, all those oil wells and mines become worthless, and perhaps even weights around their neck, things they have to pay for to handle, rather than paying out for them.
There's a chance, too, that the US government, and some other governments around the world, like Russia and France in particular, might be engaging in something akin to predatory delay when it comes to changing up how militaries operate, whether that means scaling them down or transitioning them over to something cleaner.
The US, France, and Russia are the three biggest arms dealers in the world, and while that may not play any role in the decisions being made by the folks behind such conflicts, there's always a chance that someone in charge of such things will justify slowing down movement toward some new paradigm, so they can wring the final drops of resources from their previous and existing investments before the world changes around them.
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Show Notes
https://tomdispatch.com/fueling-the-warfare-state/
https://www.cbo.gov/content/what-difference-between-mandatory-and-discretionary-spending
https://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/security-spending/pentagon-budget/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-spending-by-country
https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.12319
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/ClimateChangeandCostofWar
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629816302001
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_185174.htm
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18012022/military-carbon-emissions/
https://time.com/6148778/us-military-climate-change/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/science/war-environmental-impact-ukraine.html
