How the US Armed Forces show us what the future looks like

If you’ve used the internet today, you can thank the U.S. military. The same goes for GPS, Google Street View, your kitchen microwave, and the 747 jet.

Flying under the radar (also invented by the Department of Defense), DoD-sponsored scientists and engineers have in the last few decades developed cutting-edge green technologies to enhance national security efforts.

In Southern California, such efforts shifted into overdrive after the electrical grid went down in 2011. The blackout cut power to millions of customers, including the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar near San Diego.

To ensure energy security and the full-throttle execution of its mission, after the blackout, Miramar teamed up with the City of San Diego to capture emissions from a landfill on base. It then constructed a visionary renewable-energy microgrid with battery storage to harness that landfill gas.

Now, in addition to offsetting day-to-day energy requirements, Miramar can continue critical operations independently in case of a natural disaster or cyber-attack affecting U.S. energy infrastructure (high on the intelligence community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment list).

Importantly, the Miramar Energy Project is also set to power a cutting-edge water treatment facility that, when fully operational in 2023, will provide one-third of metro San Diego’s drinking water. In a world that is increasingly water-constrained due to drought, that’s a game changer.

At the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake in California, scientists have created a biofuel in the lab that achieves a reduction of greenhouse gasses by up to 70 percent against conventional jet and diesel fuels. It also improves performance. The Navy is currently working with a private company to commercialize the technology, China Lake organometallic chemist Ben Harvey said in an interview with the author in 2017.

China Lake, the army’s Fort Irwin, and the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms have all installed significant solar capacity to offset onsite electricity demands and want to do more. In California alone, the military’s potential to lead on solar-power generation is jaw-dropping.

According to the DoD, just seven military bases in Southern California could collectively generate 7,000 megawatts of solar power. That’s more power than is currently produced by all the residential solar panels in California put together.

Just as the revolutionary act to integrate the military in the 20th century had little to do with civil rights, DoD action related to climate change does not have a strictly environmental genesis. Both represent the result of rigorous analysis, threat forecasting, and strategic thinking about how to make the U.S. military and its national security mission more effective.

Regardless, the adoption and deployment of the military’s green innovations for civilian use could alter the course of the nation, for the better, just as President Truman’s 1948 executive order did.

Four years after Truman’s edict, the civil rights issue was proving to be an important debate in the 1952 presidential election. In the public interest, the New Republic surveyed the integrated military landscape. Here’s what it found:

“Today the entire atmosphere has undergone a startling and refreshing change. Not one top military official will fundamentally question the policy of integration. Everyone will tell you that it has immeasurably bolstered the morale of our fighting forces, increased their efficiency and has been successful. Even Southern Congressmen have no desire to make an issue of it, and General Eisenhower now accepts it.”

Eisenhower, who initially opposed military integration, won the 1952 election.

From integration to innovation, the military has been in the vanguard. Today, its green technologies and deployment show us what sustainable 21st-century infrastructure looks like. And it is replicable on a massive scale.

There’s still hope for contemporary politicians to see where the future is headed: Toward a world where national security and what I call natural security are distinctions without a difference.

Whether they like it or not, that integration has already occurred.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Marilyn Berlin Snell is the author of Unlikely Ally: How the Military Fights Climate Change and Protects the Environment.