Lean Green Fighting Machine

lader Buck points with pride to the beach where the Santa Marguerita River flows into the Pacific Ocean at Camp Pendleton, the 126,000-acre Marine Corps base in southern California. Here, 17 miles of undeveloped coastline halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego provide opportunities unavailable elsewhere on the West Coast to train troops in amphibious warfare.

But the sandy shore also offers prime habitat for western snowy plovers and California least terns. These endangered birds feed and nest along Camp Pendleton beaches from March to September. To protect them and their habitat, the Marines adopted new rules in 1995 requiring amphibious vehicles to travel up and down the beach with at least one tread in the water or wet sand.

"It shows that we can train and protect the species," says Buck, a civilian employee who is Pendleton's chief of natural resources management. "We can do what we have to do to get ready [for war] and still follow environmental laws."

"It's not a problem," adds Col. Homer Jones, the Marines' assistant chief of staff at Pendleton for operations and training. "It's the law. We will do what we have to do. No one here is opposed to taking care of the environment. That's part of our duty."

Once criticized for slowness in complying with environmental laws and regulations, the Defense Department in the last decade has adopted new policies, new programs and new attitudes that have helped turn the U.S. military into a lean, green environmental machine. In the process, the Pentagon has incorporated an environmental ethic into the military mission at its 425 facilities nationwide. Those facilities encompass 25 million acres of land, most of it wild. Among government agencies, DoD is second only to the Interior Department in the amount of land it manages.

DoD has instituted recycling and pollution prevention programs, replaced leaking chemical storage tanks, installed new water, sewage and air treatment systems, and adopted innovative land management and wildlife protection policies. Environmental programs have become a major DoD budget item. In fiscal 1998 alone, the department spent $4.8 billion on environmental and wildlife conservation programs.

DoD officials insist they have taken on the new role in ways that both protect the environment and allow the military to train troops, maintain readiness, modernize forces, manufacture munitions and test weapons and other military equipment. "The environment does not stop us from fulfilling our mission," says Gary Vest, assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense for environmental security. "Protecting the environment is public policy in this country. We do what the public wants us to do.

"When the military wants to do something well, it will do it well," Vest adds. "And we have committed to doing the environment well."

Green Priorities

Other federal officials who oversee DoD's environmental efforts agree. The military "has done a good job," says John Bardwell, liaison for DoD environmental programs at the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service. "They've cleaned up their act."

"The military has improved dramatically," adds James Edwards, deputy director of the Environmental Protection Agency's office of federal facilities enforcement. "They seem to take [the environment] seriously now." That was not always the case. At one time, Edwards says, many military officers and DoD civilians seemed to believe national security excused the military from complying with environmental laws. As a result, some 125 military facilities made EPA's national priority list as Superfund sites. Timber sales and cattle grazing leases once dominated the natural resource plans of many bases. And thousands of waterfowl died due to years of firing phosphorous-based munitions at places like Fort Richardson in Alaska.

While environmental laws applied to DoD and other federal facilities as well as private polluters, the laws had no teeth. "We couldn't order [DoD] to do anything," EPA's Edwards recalls. "We couldn't take enforcement actions or assess penalties. All we could do was send warning letters."

DoD has had to deal with environmental issues for several decades. In 1960, the Sikes Act authorized the department to use fees collected for hunting and fishing on military bases to fund natural resource programs at the facilities. It also required DoD to cooperate with FWS and state wildlife agencies. But momentum on environmental issues didn't pick up until 1989, when President Bush waived the military's right of sovereign immunity, allowing federal and state regulatory agencies and private citizens to sue DoD for environmental violations. "It opened the door to fines, but it hasn't been the end of the world," Vest says.

Then Congress began putting teeth into environmental laws for military bases. The 1992 Federal Facilities Compliance Act gave EPA power under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act to fine federal agencies for illegally disposing of or handling hazardous wastes. Since 1992, EPA and state agencies have fined some 120 military facilities $16 million for violations. "It forced them to pay attention to us," Edwards says.

Individual bases now have an incentive to comply with environmental regulations because while the cleanup of past spills, polluted landfills and leaking storage tanks is paid for by a DoD-wide restoration fund, the Pentagon requires that current violations come out of the bases' budgets. "I don't pay fines," says Col. James Dries, the Army's director of environmental programs.

In 1989, the potential cost of violating environmental laws was brought home to the military when three civilian employees at Aberdeen Proving Ground near Baltimore were found guilty of violating RCRA for dumping more than 200 chemicals, many of them toxic, into a storm drain on the base, over a period of years.

"We take notice of criminal prosecutions," says Vest. "It really shook us up." More than that, it "heightened our awareness and sensitivity to the environment," Dries adds. "It led us to do what we had to do."

Elsewhere, the commander and another officer at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., were officially reprimanded in 1994 for ordering base workers to destroy yellow-crowned night heron nests. Such reprimands "can end a career, especially during downsizing," says Junior Kearns, a wildlife biologist at the Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and a former head of the National Military Fish and Wildlife Association.

Changing View

More important than laws, perhaps, is the military's changed view of the environment. "There is a different attitude among officers and the young kids we're getting," says Theodore Reid, a retired Army colonel and brigade commander during the Persian Gulf War. "They are more environmentally aware than we were."

"We understand and accept the need to follow environmental rules," adds Reid, now a research associate at Colorado State University and an environmental consultant to Army Forces Command at Fort McPherson in Atlanta. "If we don't protect the land, we won't have realistic conditions for training."

Protecting land for training--and for wildlife--is a big part of Gary Belew's job at Fort Carson and Pinon Canyon Maneuver Area, two key Army training sites in Colorado that are managed together. Every year, more than 40,000 Army and National Guard troops train at Carson and Pinon Canyon. In the process, they dig up the land, contribute to erosion, trample plants and endanger wildlife habitats. Belew, the post's chief of natural resources, points to a prairie and broken woodlands area at Carson called Sullivan Park. Gullies have formed in some places where tanks destroyed vegetation, allowing soil to erode. Also, due to the West's dry climate, dust often blows from the denuded land, threatening Carson's air quality and annoying residents of Colorado Springs to the north.

To reduce dust and restore the land to its natural state, Belew and his staff plant wheat, alfalfa, bunch grass, and other native prairie species on about 6,000 acres at Carson and Pinon Canyon each year. As a result, plant cover on reseeded land rose 26 percent from 1988 to 1996, Belew says. Further, Belew can limit troop use of sensitive areas, such as wetlands and critical habitats for wildlife, or remove land from training to allow time for recovery from past exercises. He can also bring in bulldozers to fill the gullies and recontour the land. He can even fine individual Army units $300 for every tree they destroy. "We're part of more than one solution," Belew says.

Not only do land restoration efforts protect wildlife habitat, they improve training efforts, DoD officials argue. If gullies become too deep or long, tanks are forced to mass at a few points to get around them. There, they become easy targets for "enemy" forces. And if tanks knock trees down, troops lose their cover. "If you can be seen, you can be shot," Dries notes. Besides, says Col. Christopher Baggott, a regimental commander in the 3rd Armored Brigade at Fort Carson, meeting environmental requirements "gives commanders more to manage and forces them to improvise. From a war perspective, anything you can do to add friction and stress the better."

Protecting Species

Land restoration at Fort Carson and Pinon Canyon is part of the Army's Integrated Training Area Management (ITAM) program. Launched in 1989, ITAM was merged with the Army's training commands in 1994. The program adds land and wildlife conservation to the service's preparedness efforts. "We have made the environment part and parcel of operations," Dries says.

Perhaps no environmental requirement more directly affects military training and readiness than the need to protect endangered species and other wildlife. At Camp Pendleton, for example, the Marines recently shifted the location of part of the "crucible," a 72-hour field exercise held at the end of basic training, to avoid disturbing the endangered Pacific pocket mouse. Similarly, at Fort Hood, Texas, troops are allowed to pass through woodland habitats of the black-capped vireo, another endangered species. But they may not camp, dig anti-tank ditches or otherwise alter the land, says John Cornelius, a wildlife biologist at the Army's premier tank facility.

Going a step further, the Marines have built a fence around the nesting site of the California least tern at Camp Pendleton. A sign warns people to keep out "by order of the base commander." And the sign is obeyed. "Marines are used to following orders," Buck explains. At Fort Carson, resource managers in the 1970s created an artificial pond as a captive breeding spot for cutthroat trout, an endangered fish. At the time, only one known population of the trout existed. State hatcheries had been unsuccessful at breeding. Since then, millions of cutthroats hatched at Fort Carson have been released into Colorado streams.

In addition to protecting species, military commanders must deal with other environmental issues, such as military aircraft noise. "One plane flying over a national park will get a reaction," says Col. Larry Hagenauer, vice commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. "Those folks are really sensitive."

"Twenty or 30 years ago we could fly low or at supersonic speed almost anywhere," Hagenauer adds. "Now a pilot has to know exactly where he or she is." Indeed, supersonic speed is limited to a half dozen air corridors above Edwards, the Air Force's main test facility in the Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles, and some surrounding areas. Edwards has also set a 3,000-foot altitude limit planes must stay above when flying over most parts of nearby Kings Canyon, Sequoia and Death Valley national parks.

Pollution Prevention

The military also has to deal with environmental problems caused by decades of mismanaging hazardous and toxic materials, and by allowing air and water quality to deteriorate. Edwards Air Force Base landed on EPA's national priority list for Superfund sites in 1990. Soils around landfills and underground storage tanks had been contaminated by leaking fuel oil and other pollutants, threatening the base's water supply, says Richard Wood, director of environmental management at Edwards.

"There are some benefits to being designated a Superfund site," Wood says. "It helped clarify our priorities and gave us a higher priority in getting funding [for cleanup] within DoD." Wood's staff began removing Edwards' 350 underground storage tanks in 1992. The tanks, which contained gasoline and jet and diesel fuel, have been replaced with new double-walled, above-ground tanks. Fortunately, the cost of finishing the job dropped from an estimate of $500 million to $200 million.

Edwards currently has a $35 million annual environmental budget, three-fourths of which goes to complying with RCRA and the clean air and water acts, including cleaning up longstanding pollution. Most of the money comes from funds specifically designated by Congress for the environment. Environmental programs are "a fenced-off budget," Hagenauer says. "I cannot spend any of it on new F-22s." The F-22 is the Air Force's newest fighter, now being tested at Edwards.

Overall, DoD spent nearly $1.3 billion in fiscal 1998 cleaning up polluted sites, down from more than $1.9 billion in 1994. The numbers are falling because most cleanups have been completed or are nearly finished and because DoD's pollution prevention programs are cutting both purchasing and environmental costs, said Sherri Goodman, deputy undersecretary of Defense for environmental security, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. Pollution prevention "continues to be the core of DoD's environmental programs," Goodman said. "Prevention reduces or eliminates hazardous materials and those processes that generate hazardous materials. It is a smart business practice resulting in lower overall compliance and cleanup costs."

Fort Carson, which won the Army's 1997 environmental award for its pollution prevention programs, has adopted a computerized system to track all hazardous materials from purchase to disposal. The list includes everything from oil, grease and battery acid for vehicles to paints, paint thinners and industrial solvents. "We have things you would normally find in an industrial facility," says David Sealander, Carson's chief of environmental compliance. The installation's goal, he says, is to reduce the amount used or lost to spoilage and leaking by not overstocking and by using recyclable materials.

Sealander and his staff manage a hazardous material control center nicknamed "The Pharmacy," where they check orders against a unit's past history of use, ensure that EPA and state rules are followed, and encourage the use of reusable solvents for cleaning tanks and other military vehicles. "We are integrating pollution prevention into installation logistics," Sealander says.

Such efforts are working across the Army, says Dries. Nationally, the service has reduced the hazardous and solid wastes generated at its facilities by half since 1993. The Army's annual toxic release inventory, which lists toxic chemicals its facilities have released into the air, water or land, is likewise down 50 percent since 1994. "These are clear indicators we have made a dent," Dries adds.

The other services are also focusing on pollution prevention. When the Air Force built a $12 million hangar for painting airplanes at Edwards in 1994, it installed banks of air filters to ensure that the quality of the air going out of the facility is almost as good as that coming in. "We want to be judged by our contribution to Mojave air quality," Wood says. At Camp Pendleton, the Marines have launched a $70 million project to replace sewage treatment plants, some of which were built in the 1940s and 1950s. The new treatment plants will raise water quality to meet EPA standards. At the same time, the base will spend $3 million over the next three to four years to place liners around its landfills to meet new EPA requirements. The liners help prevent pollution from leaking from the landfills into water supplies. "Those are big checks to write," says Lupe Armas, Pendleton's assistant chief of staff for environmental security.

From Arsenal to Refuge

A cleanup effort involving even bigger checks is under way at the Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver. The arsenal is being transformed into the Rocky Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. For more than four decades, the arsenal made and stored some of the deadliest chemical weapons, including napalm, mustard gas and nerve agents. Even after chemical weapons were no longer made at Rocky Mountain, Shell Oil Co., which ran the base for the Army, made dieldrin, DDT and other toxic pesticides. As a result, the arsenal is one of the most highly contaminated Superfund sites in the country.

But the arsenal is also a haven for wildlife, as are many other DoD facilities. Even during the height of chemical weapons production, only about 15 percent of the base's 17,000 acres were affected. The rest served as buffer and safety areas. Whitetail and mule deer abound, as do pronghorns, prairie dogs, burrowing owls, bald eagles and hawks.

To make the site safe for animals, and for the 40,000 humans who will visit the wildlife refuge each year, the Army will spend more than $2 billion over the next 14 years on cleanup. The project, which officially began in 1996 although some work started earlier, involves removing contaminated soils, building debris and toxic wastes, and burying the material in two huge specially designed landfills. Contaminated ground water will also be treated.

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal Remediation Venture Office, a joint project of the Army, the Fish and Wildlife Service and Shell Oil, is managing the project. EPA oversees the effort and must certify the contamination is cleaned up before Rocky Mountain officially becomes a national wildlife refuge. A Restoration Advisory Board gives local environmental and community groups and state and county agencies a say in the cleanup.

Efforts like those at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal show that the military has learned to protect the environment and carry out its mission at the same time, argues the Army's Dries. "The rules have changed over the years," he says, "but if you start with the environment as part of the plan or process, it is not a problem."

Jeffrey P. Cohn is a Washington-area journalist who writes frequently for Government Executive.