An escalating dispute between the Pentagon and environmental advocacy groups
is not about to be settled any time soon.
The Defense Department—which brags about being a responsible environmental
steward that complies with the laws—has been under fire in recent months
from critics who accuse the Pentagon of unfairly trying to circumvent the rules.
Specifically, the Pentagon submitted to Congress a package of legislative reform
proposals that would make it more difficult to keep military trainees out of
certain ranges when those ranges are deemed “critical habitats”
for endangered species.
The changes sought, however, should not be viewed as an attempt by the Defense
Department to receive “blanket exemptions” from environmental laws,
said John P. Woodley, assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for installations
and environment. He recently was nominated to become assistant secretary of
the Army for civil works.
“We want to be able to manage the military lands in ways that allow us
to continue realistic military training,” he said in an interview. Repeated
entreaties for regulatory relief have been “mischaracterized” as
a desire to overturn laws, which is not the case, said Woodley. The Pentagon
primarily is concerned about environmental laws being “interpreted in
ways that are making it increasingly difficult to conduct realistic training
in some of our installations.” A number of judicial rulings, Woodley said,
“are having a disproportionate impact on our ability to use our facilities
for what they were intended.”
Courts throughout the United States, he said, “have been encouraged to
adopt interpretations that make it more difficult to manage our property.”
He cited an ongoing lawsuit involving Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine bases,
in California. The Pentagon argued that a ruling under the Endangered Species
Act was unduly restricting the Marines’ ability to conduct amphibious
landings along the coast.
The plaintiff, the Natural Resources Defense Council, is seeking to have more
than half of the land on both bases designated as “critical habitats,”
which would curtail the training severely, said Woodley. The NRDC claims that
training activities are imperiling endangered species such as the California
gnatcatcher, a local songbird.
“Critical habitat designation is the most restrictive form of remedy
under the Endangered Species Act,” said Woodley.
The Pentagon would like to work out a compromise that would address conservation
needs without hampering training, he said. Last year’s proposals were
defeated in the Senate, which was then under Democratic control. This year,
with Republicans in charge, things could change, Woodley said.
Separately, Defense officials are working on internal reforms designed to satisfy
training requirements vis-à-vis environmental restrictions. A January
2003 directive from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz instructs the deputy
undersecretary of defense for installations and environment, Raymond DuBois,
and the undersecretary for training and readiness, David Chu, to collaborate
on a plan to improve the quality of U.S. military training ranges, and determine
to what extent environmental regulations and “encroachment” undermine
training priorities. Encroachment is a Pentagon buzzword used to describe the
trend of urban growth around military bases.
“Environmental encroachment is not just the Endangered Species Act and
critical habitat management issues that we face every day,” said DuBois.
“It’s also urban sprawl ... airspace management. It’s also
spectrum competition.”
Wolfowitz’ directive also asks Defense Department environmental professionals
who typically have operated in relative isolation to work more closely with
military training and testing organizations. The mandate aims to satisfy complaints
from uniformed commanders that the Pentagon’s environmental office is
not always in tune with their needs.
“We’ve been criticized that our environmental professionals are
in a stovepipe,” said Woodley. In the future, “they will be closely
tied to the operators and the trainers, the test and evaluation community.”
The Defense Department manages more than 620,000 facilities, valued at around
$600 billion, and more than 46,000 square miles of real estate. These lands
are home to a number of threatened and endangered species and historical resources,
including 68 registered National Historic Landmarks and 14,000 properties listed
or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
During a recent hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, DuBois sought
to make a case for regulatory relief. “The impacts on readiness must be
considered when applying environmental regulations to military-unique training
and testing activities,” he said. “We are addressing the effects
that encroachment poses to our ability to ‘train as we fight.’”
The reform package proposed by the Pentagon is called “Readiness and
Range Preservation Initiative.” Last year, Congress approved two provisions.
One allowed the Defense Department to request permanent legislative authority
to enter agreements with non-federal entities to manage lands adjacent to military
installations. Congress also granted the Pentagon a temporary exemption from
the Migratory Bird Treaty Act for the incidental taking of migratory birds during
military readiness activities.
Additional reforms are needed, however, said DuBois. “Today, we are developing
a long-term process to address encroachment by creating a multi-year, comprehensive
program to sustain training and testing.”
The administration, he explained, “will seek legislative clarification
where laws are being applied beyond their original legislative intent.
“We believe that modest legislative reforms are needed to ensure the
preparedness of this nation’s armed forces, and we will continue to work
with Congress to seek enactment of legislation to address these concerns.”
Critics of the Pentagon’s efforts to reform environmental regulations,
meanwhile, accuse the Defense Department of exaggerating the problem.
“Environmental laws in no way prevent the military from training for
combat,” said Robert Perks, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense
Council. “The Pentagon tried, last fall, to exploit the war on terrorism
and building tensions with Iraq to get full-scale exemptions from environmental
laws,” said Perks. “Now, they are about to drop new legislation,
indicating they are looking to expand those exemptions.”
Perks said all this is unnecessary, because there are articles in the laws
that accommodate military training needs. “All our environmental laws
have provisions in them that waive those requirements for national security,”
he said. “If the Defense Department really needs a waiver to train, they
can invoke an exemption and get a waiver.”
In his opinion, said Perks, “They are cataloguing any grievance they
have against environmental laws and saying this justifies waiving wholesale
environmental protection. ... They are trying to blow this out of proportion.
It’s unfortunate they are doing that.”
When the nation is on a war footing, it is difficult to convince people that
environmental conservation matters, said Perks. “They can wave the flag,
say our troops need this and can get whatever they can. They are exploiting
the situation, because of the perilous times we live in.
The Defense Department historically has “always wanted to be less constrained
by environmental laws,” he added, because it is the “largest polluter
in the country,” with hundreds of toxic waste sites, where fuels and materials
seep into the ground water. Military bases, however, have some of the best-maintained
habitat, because they have not been developed.
As it turns out, “the Defense Department has proven itself to be a good
steward, because of the laws,” said Perks. “In many cases, when
they are forced to do these things, they do a good job. And they like to brag
about it.”
According to Perks, “they are trying to have it both ways. They [complain
about] environmental laws, but at the same time, they say, ‘trust us.
We do such a good job abiding by environmental laws.’”
He cited a June 2002 General Accounting Office Report that concluded the Pentagon
has not made a compelling case that the laws undermine military readiness.
The Pentagon, in fact, oversees many of the toxic waste and polluted properties
of the United States. Most of the contaminated sites date back to World War
I and World War II. They are ammunition storage facilities, testing and bombing
ranges, and ordnance depots. There are about 9,000 such sites, 2,000 of which
need environmental restoration, said Woodley.
Cleaning those 2,000 sites will cost about $19 billion. Further environmental
cleanup needed on active bases adds another $10 billion to the projected price
tag. Bases closed under previous BRAC rounds will cost about $4 billion to decontaminate.
The $33 billion liability does not even include removal of unexploded ordnance
from training ranges. A plan to begin to tackle the UXO program will get under
way next year, under a so-called “military munitions response program,”
said Woodley. A top priority is to prevent chemicals from contaminating the
groundwater near the ranges.
The Pentagon’s mammoth cleanup job could be completed during the next
two decades, said Woodley. BRAC properties will be cleaned up by 2005, he said.
The others will have to wait until 2014 and beyond.
In fiscal year 2004, the Pentagon requested $3.8 billion for environmental
programs, compared to $4.2 billion in 2003. The 2004 budget includes $1.3 billion
for cleanup, $412 million for BRAC facility restoration, $1.6 billion for compliance,
$173 million for pollution prevention, $153 million for conservation and $191
million for new technology.