The U.S. Army is Going Green

Friedman makes some good points here.

The Power of Green [Excerpt]

The notion that conserving energy is a geostrategic imperative has also moved into the Pentagon, for slightly different reasons. Generals are realizing that the more energy they save in the heat of battle, the more power they can project. The Pentagon has been looking to improve its energy efficiency for several years now to save money. But the Iraq war has given birth to a new movement in the U.S. military: the ''Green Hawks.''

As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who has been working with the Pentagon, put it to me: The Iraq war forced the U.S. military to think much more seriously about how to ''eat its tail'' -- to shorten its energy supply lines by becoming more energy efficient. According to Dan Nolan, who oversees energy projects for the U.S. Army's Rapid Equipping Force, it started last year when a Marine major general in Anbar Province told the Pentagon he wanted better-insulated, more energy-efficient tents in the Iraqi desert. Why? His air-conditioners were being run off mobile generators, and the generators ran on diesel, and the diesel had to be trucked in, and the insurgents were blowing up the trucks.

''When we began the analysis of his request, it was really about the fact that his soldiers were being attacked on the roads bringing fuel and water,'' Nolan said. So eating their tail meant ''taking those things that are brought into the unit and trying to generate them on-site.'' To that end Nolan's team is now experimenting with everything from new kinds of tents that need 40 percent less air-conditioning to new kinds of fuel cells that produce water as a byproduct. Pay attention: When the U.S. Army desegregated, the country really desegregated; when the Army goes green, the country could really go green.

''Energy independence is a national security issue,'' Nolan said. ''It's the right business for us to be in. ... We are not trying to change the whole Army. Our job is to focus on that battalion out there and give those commanders the technological innovations they need to deal with today's mission. But when they start coming home, they are going to bring those things with them.''

Let's take the oil money out of the hands of terrorists, and put it back into our own pockets.