From: | Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@igc.org> |
Date: | Thu, 10 Nov 1994 11:46:07 -0800 (PST) |
Reply: | cpeo-military |
Subject: | Readiness |
READY FOR WHAT? by Lenny Siegel Is Pentagon environmental spending a drag on its mission, or does it support readiness? Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal (May 24.1994) warned that military cleanup obligations were getting out of hand, and the Pentagon's top environmental official and the vice-chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff retorted, in a July 8, 1994 letter to the Journal, that environmental programs were an integral part of combat readiness. Both sides miss the point. In the post-Cold War era, readiness means much more than being prepared to deliver bombs and bullets. More likely than not, the dispatch of American forces in the foreseeable future will require the capability to influence or adapt to the natural environment. This summer, while the Army Corps of Engineers pumped water to Rwandan refugees in Zaire, two battalions of Marines were helping fight fires in the Pacific Northwest. Seamen were picking up Haitians and Cubans - many requiring food, water, or health care - in the Caribbean and transporting them to Guantanamo, where a crash building program included environmental tasks such as supplying drinking water and constructing sanitary disposal systems. Even the anti-submarine Cold Warriors of the U.S. Navy are looking for new, environmental missions - such as measuring global warning - for their secret underwater listening systems. Thus, to advance the domestic and foreign missions of the U.S. military, in 1994, the military must develop and strengthen environmental expertise among all its forces. Even cleanup, an unfortunate obligation left over from decades of environmental ignorance, negligence, and malevolence, has taken on new importance as the military attempts to cushion the impact of base closures on the people who made the military work until they were no longer needed. Should the U.S. ever need to re- mobilize, it will find the task easier if it treats former employees and neighbors well. It may be argued that the civic missions of the Defense Department belong in other agencies. The non-combat goals of military spending are necessarily undermined by its principal focus on warfare. But at this point the Pentagon has assumed responsibility for the cleanup and protection of the environment. Moreover, no other agency has the resources, expertise, and discipline to meet all those missions. In the long run, maybe the federal responsibility for environmental restoration should be changed. But for now the world is a better place when the military comes to restore, not destroy. |
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