Battling Fuel Waste in the Military

by Amory B. Lovins

Most Americans are only too aware that their tax dollars support a massive military machine. The Department of Defense’s annual budget is over $291 billion and rising. DOD has three million people, 36 million acres, over 250 major installations, 40,000 additional properties, 550 public utility systems, over 150,000 land vehicles, 22,000 aircraft, and over 300 ocean-going vessels.

But most of us don’t realize that despite a 36 percent drop in total DOD energy use during 1990–99, chiefly due to force reduction, around $5+ billion of the military budget buys energy. Most of DOD’s five billion gallons of annual petroleum use fuels weapons platforms – land, sea, and air -that are manifestly inefficient. To add a little irony, much of the fuel used by the military is exhausted moving fuel around. Of the gross tonnage moved when the Army deploys, 70 percent is fuel.

Rocky Mountain Institute’s (RMI) pioneering work in the 1980s on nuclear nonproliferation, domestic energy vulnerability, and “least-cost security,” attracted much attention in military circles. In 1995, my brief to Naval leadership launched a series of collaborations, which between 1995 and 1998 saw RMI’s Green Development Services helping the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) overhaul how the Navy designs buildings. Nowadays, all bidders for NAVFAC contracts must be good at integrative design. RMI has also supported similar efforts for the Army in Texas and Illinois, the Marine Corps in North Carolina, and the Air Force in Colorado.

All of the Armed Services are adopting green design – not just to save money, but also to improve the quality of service life, which is critical to recruitment, retention, and operational effectiveness. And efficient buildings slow the conversion of tax dollars into climate change – perhaps the gravest threat to global security.

In 1999, our technical work with the military moved beyond buildings when I was invited to serve on an unclassified Defense Science Board Task Force. It sought to ascertain why the Defense Department is the nation’s largest energy user (using one percent of all energy in the United States) and probably the world’s largest oil buyer. Clearly, the Task Force would like to change that ranking.

Most of the things we looked at were not, as the saying goes, rocket science. It wasn’t hard to decide that 0.56-mpg tanks and 17-feet-per-gallon aircraft carriers are just as unnecessarily wasteful as civilian gas-guzzlers. Through a hundred-odd briefings in a year and a half, the Task Force found more than a hundred effective fuel-saving technologies. None would impair and most would improve what the Defense Department is there for – warfighting capability. Much, perhaps most, of DOD’s fuel could be cost-effectively saved. That technology assessment was the easy part. The harder question was why a capable meritocracy with more wants than funds hadn’t achieved all the savings already.

The institutional reasons that trapped good people inside a dysfunctional system were complex, but they were rooted in false price signals due to a lack of activity-based costing. When weapons platforms are designed and bought, their fuel is assumed to cost what the DOD-wide supplier, the Defense Energy Supply Center, charges as its average wholesale price, fluctuating around a dollar per gallon (currently $1.34).

However, the cost of delivering that fuel to the platform is assumed to be zero. Logistics – moving stuff around – takes roughly a third of DOD’s budget and half its personnel. But when designing and buying platforms, logistics is considered free to the platform that consumes the fuel. This practice understates delivered fuel cost by a factor that I estimate to average at least three for DOD as a whole, and tens or hundreds in some particular cases.

The venerable B-52 bombers now being flown by the children of their original pilots have inefficient, low-bypass engines from the 1960s. Those could be refitted to modern ones using a third less fuel to achieve up to half again as much range. But they haven’t been, because the fuel is thought to be cheap. And so it is, when delivered in peacetime to a U.S. airbase, where delivery to the plane adds only about 20 cents a gallon. But when the plane is on the long-distance mission for which it was built, it typically needs midair refueling. That adds $17.50 a gallon, not counting the $9-billion cost of at least 55 tankers the Air Force would need to replace. Thus the Air Force in FY1999 paid $1.8 billion for two billion gallons of fuel, but delivering that fuel into the aircraft added another $2.6 billion, so the actual delivered fuel bill was $4.4 billion: the Air Force spent 84 percent of its fuel-delivery cost on the 6 percent of its gallons that were delivered in midair. If you count that delivery cost, re-engining the B-52s has a quick payback – all the more so because it typically makes midair refueling unnecessary!

The Army’s formidable half-mile-a-gallon M1A2 tanks are powered by inefficient 1960s-design gas turbines that yield 1500 horsepower to make 68 tons dash around a battlefield at 30 mph (42 on the road). They do that pretty well. But 60- to 80-odd percent of the time, that huge turbine is idling at one percent efficiency to run a 5-kilowatt “hotel load,” mostly air conditioning and electronics. Most civilian vehicles would use a small auxiliary power unit to serve such tiny, steady loads efficiently. Tanks don’t, because their fuel was assumed to cost about a buck a gallon. But to keep up with a rapidly advancing armored unit on the battlefield, cargo helicopters may have to leapfrog big bladders of fuel hundreds of kilometers into theater, using much of the fuel to do so. The delivery cost can then rise to $400–600 a gallon – yet it was assumed to be zero. If the designers had known the real delivery cost, they’d have designed the tanks very differently.

Fuel-wasting design doesn’t just cost money; it inhibits warfighting. Each tank is trailed by lumbering fuel tankers. An armored division may use as much as 20, perhaps even 40, times as many daily tons of fuel as it does of munitions – around 600,000 gallons a day. Of the unit’s top ten battlefield fuel guzzlers, only Abrams tanks (#5) and Apache helicopters (#10) are combat vehicles. Several of the rest carry fuel. This takes a lot of equipment and people. The Army directly uses about $0.2 billion dollars’ worth of fuel a year, but pays about 16 times as much, $3.2 billion a year, just to maintain 20,000 active and 40,000 reserve personnel to move that fuel. And unarmored fuel carriers are vulnerable. Attacks on rear logistics assets can make a fuel-hungry combat system grind to a halt. Yet the warfighting benefits of fuel economy—in deployability, agility, range, speed, reliability, and maneuverability – are as invisible as the fuel delivery cost.

Today’s armored forces were designed to face Russian T-72s across the North German plain. Nowadays, however, their missions demand mobility. Only one 68-ton tank fits into the heaviest U.S. lift aircraft, so deployment is painfully slow, and when the tank arrives in, say, the Balkans, it breaks bridges and gets stuck in the mud. Army Research has a better idea – an innovative 7–10-ton version that uses about 87 percent less fuel, yet is said to be as lethal as current models and no more vulnerable. (The Army figures such redesi
gn could save about 20,000 personnel – plus their equipment and their own logistical pyramid – needed to deliver fuel in theater and nearby, plus more to get it there: in sum, billions of dollars a year.)

A little-known 1982 Army experiment suggests the potential value of even more radical lightweighting, possibly to a 0.7-ton version. When 30 tanks were set against 30 Baja dunebuggies armed with precision-guided munitions, the prompt result was 27 dead tanks (21 completely immobilized) and three dead dunebuggies. That exercise was done in desert, not forest or city, and not under chemical warfare conditions, but it’s still enlightening. With different tactics, light and even ultralight forces may be more militarily effective than familiar heavy ones.

Recent tactical experience, from Iraq to Somalia, suggests that the Joint Chiefs’ new doctrine emphasizing light, mobile, agile, flexible, and easily-sustained forces is vital to modern warfighting. Yet it’s very far from most of the forces now fielded. Heavy-metal tradition dies hard, and porkbarrel politics impedes fundamental military reform.

Other policies inhibit capability as well. When I visited the Navy’s newest nuclear aircraft carrier, I was startled to find that its design had been frozen 23 years earlier due to the cumbersome procurement process. That’s a disadvantage of over 40,000-fold against electronic equipment that’s subject to Moore’s Law and bought at Radio Shack. Wargames suggest that an adversary with a few billion dollars’ worth of up-to-date over-the-counter hardware could even beat the United States, which has excellent warriors but often outmoded equipment.

A sweeping revolution in military affairs is underway. The Defense Department is trying to jettison or bypass its antiquated procurement methods and buy commercial off-the-shelf equipment wherever possible – it’s usually far more modern and capable, but much cheaper and often durable enough. Similarly, DOD is asking why it takes six months to plan a divisional deployment when global companies can deliver a spare part pretty much anywhere on earth in 24 hours. The result: a commendable effort to redesign a creaky old logistics system from scratch.

These innovations will all save prodigious amounts of energy, pollution, and money. From data in the DSB report, I estimate that comprehensive military fuel efficiency could probably save upwards of ten billion dollars a year, because the few billion dollars of direct annual fuel savings can trigger far larger avoided fuel delivery costs. Fuel efficiency could displace – or redeploy from tail to tooth -at least a division’s worth of fuel-delivery personnel and their equipment and support pyramids.

As for whether such innovations also make the world more secure, that depends on how well citizens exercise their responsibility to use military power wisely – and to create the sort of world in which its use or threatened use becomes less necessary.

If we get that right, we can all be safe and feel safe in ways that work better and cost less than present arrangements, and fewer of the men and women in the Armed Forces need go in harm’s way.
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Further Reading:
• Lovins, Amory B. and L. Hunter. Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security. Foreword by President Reagan’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Carter’s Undersecretary of the Navy. Andover, Mass.: Brick House, 1982. Out of print; to be reposted at www.rmi.org. Summarized in “The Fragility of Domestic Energy,” Atlantic, November 1983.

• “Nuclear Power and Nuclear Bombs,” Foreign Affairs, 58:1136 (Summer 1980), 59:172 (Fall 1980).

• Shuman, Mike, and Hal Harvey. Security Without War. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993. A book credited with contributing to Gorbachev’s revolution in Soviet policy.

• The Defense Science Board’s report, More Capable Warfighting Through Reduced Fuel Burden was released in May 2001 by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, Washington, D.C. 20301-3140. It was summarized in Business Week, 3 September 2001.

This article is reprinted from our Content Partner, Rocky Mountain Institute Newsletter, Fall/Winter 2001.
http://www.rmi.org