The Pentagon will shortly unveil a militarywide program aimed at conserving energy that is expected to address what President George W. Bush termed America’s “addiction to oil” during his State of the Union address in January.
“We expect a guidance to come out in a week to deal with the energy situation and what steps we can take to address the issue,” Gordon England, deputy defense secretary, said March 14, responding to a question on the military’s energy use by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).
Though the QDR did not explicitly deal with the military’s use of oil, “toward the end of the QDR, these concerns became an issue for all of us,” England said.
The militarywide energy discussion was likely set off by a Dec. 14 memo by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which called on the Pentagon to create a “centralized point in the Department” to work on energy conservation.
“We have talked before about what DoD can do to conserve energy, particularly hydrocarbon fuels. It seems to me we should be doing all we can to pursue energy initiatives through fuel-efficient vehicles, advanced battery technology, or hybrid power trains,” Rumsfeld wrote in the memo addressed to England, Ken Krieg, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, and Ryan Henry, one of the principal architects of the QDR. “It really is a national security issue, and we are an enormous part of government consumption.”
Rumsfeld’s memo also asked, “Who in the Department is in charge? My guess is that the Services are each doing things, but perhaps we should have a centralized point in the Department to work on these kinds of things.”
The Pentagon is the single largest buyer of fuel in the United States, accounting for 1.7 percent of the national consumption.
The Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation and the acquisition office led by Krieg will hold a series of conferences on energy conservation and what role the U.S. military can play. The first of the series, “Oil: A Conversation About our National Addiction,” on March 27 will feature Jim Woolsey, the former CIA director. The invitation for the event says the Pentagon can play a key role in energy revolution.
“Just as the Defense Department played a critical role in forging the information revolution in the past decades, so can the Department play a similar critical role in fueling the energy revolution in coming decades,” the invitation says.
