Military mop-up.

THE U.S. MILITARY DOESN'T WANT ANY MORE ROCKY FLATS OR CORNHUSKER COVERUPS. IT' CLEANING HOUSE, AND CLAIMS TO HAVE UNDERGONE A "CULTURE CHANGE."

At a community hearing in the mid-1980s, when civilian neighbors of a U.S. military base in Virginia complained that toxic waste from the facility was contaminating their groundwater, the base commander quickly set them straight about his priorities.

"We are in the business of protecting the nation, not the environment," he told them.

His comment may have been well-meaning, and he probably had little inkling that within the next few years such statements would begin to sound sadly--perhaps recklessly--naive. Today, there is growing recognition that one of the best way to protect a nation is to protect its environment--not only because certain kinds of environmental threats can cause offending military bases to be shut down, but because pervasive environmental degradation can weaken society as surely as foreign aggression can.

As a researcher with some experience in military issues, however, I know how easy it is to underestimate the tenacity of military officers; if their trainin is never to give up ground, how readily will they give up old beliefs? Last spring, along with representatives of several environmental organizations, I visited three military bases to find out how well today's armed forces are attuned to the changing meaning of "security" in a world where the greatest threats may no longer be weapons, but crippling shortages of food, water, or protections against disease.

My foray might have been impossible in the Cold War 80s, but by 1994, prioritie had clearly begun to shift. Three years earlier, the U.S. Congress had established a new body, the Legacy Resource Management Program, to support innovative projects that protect natural, cultural, and historic resources unde the Department of Defense's management. That body, in turn, had made it possibl for several interested civilian groups--including World Watch--to visit various Navy, Army, and Air Force bases and observe the changes taking place in the military's stewardship of the land. In the United States, the military occupies about 200,000 square kilometers--a territory larger than the states of New York New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts combined. As a World Watch representative, I visited three bases, and made the following observations.

First, the mere fact that such an endeavor was even initiated signals that change is afoot at the Department of Defense. Virtually every U.S. military bas harbors soil or groundwater contamination, and for many years the Pentagon trie to hide these problems behind a smokescreen of "national security." The government applied the doctrine of "sovereign immunity" to exempt military facilities from compliance with environmental laws, and to prevent any effectiv public oversight. Throughout the country, communities in the shadows of nearby bases grew increasingly nervous about soil and water contamination believed to be emanating from behind--or beneath--the fenced-off facilities. Community activists and state regulators often found themselves at an impasse with base officials.

Change has been slow in coming. As far back as 1978, President Carter signed an Executive Order demanding that all U.S. federal facilities comply with environmental laws. But the Reagan administration, giving unquestioned priority to its military buildup, effectively blocked the Environmental Protection Agenc (EPA) from enforcing the law.

A more serious effort was begun under President Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney. In late 1989, Cheney launched a "Defense and the Environment Initiative," and directed the Pentagon to "be the Federal leader in agency environmental compliance and protection." Arguing that this was "the surest way to maintain our access to the air, land, and water we need to maintain and improve our mission capability," Cheney was no doubt thinking of the fate that had befallen Rocky Flats and other nuclear weapons plants under the Department of Energy's purview, that had been shut down due to massive environmental abuses.

The Clinton Administration took further steps in 1993, establishing formal procedures for cleaning up arms production facilities and military bases throughout the country.

However, important as goal-setting is at the top, it does not automatically change the ways of an organization as bureaucratically stolid and huge as the Department of Defense. Although one might expect that the military's basic operating principle--passing orders down the chain of command--should make the implementation of environmental policies a fairly straightforward affair, the reality is otherwise. In the end, what happens at each base is as important as what happens in the Pentagon.

The U.S. brass are not alone in their dawning realization that it is not just enemy guns that they need to worry about. All over the world, generals are boun to awaken--sooner or later--to the realization that they are sitting atop time bombs of one kind or another. The dangers are greatest in countries with extensive maintenance facilities, where hazardous materials are used in such routine activities as fueling and defueling vehicles, degreasing engines, stripping paint off tanks, jets, and warships, and firing off ammunition in maneuvers. Toxic substances are therefore ubiquitous.

In Czechoslovakia, for example, Environment Minister Jaroslav Vlcek complained in 1990 that Soviet troops near Frenstat in northern Moravia had so polluted th groundwater that "you could practically drill for diesel there." As in the United States, large swaths of territory in the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Western Europe have suffered massive abuse after decades of relentless war preparation. How the United States deals with its military toxics--what techniques it adopts for cleanup and to what extent it succeeds in dispelling the smokescreen that might inhibit an effective cleanup--is therefore of great interest to other parts of the world.

On the evening of March 13, five of us "environmentalists" touched down at the Jacksonville, Florida airport and proceeded to Naval Air Station (NAS) Jacksonville our first stop. Conscious of all the secrecy and distrust that had marked civilian-military relations ever since the Vietnam War, I was prepared for a contentious encounter. But Kevin Gartland, director of the Environmental Division at the base, was disarmingly frank. He emphasized that not only the NA environmental staff, but the base commander, was eager to have the meeting, discuss the facility's environmental situation, and entertain suggestions for improvements. It was an experience that was to be repeated at Kings Bay, the nuclear missile submarine base in southern Georgia and--to a lesser extent at Naval Station Mayport near Jacksonville.

I had little doubt that we had been invited to some of the more "progressive" bases, and I wondered how differently we might be received if we could make similar tours of such facilities as the Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Center in New Jersey, Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant in Nebraska, or Beale Air Force Base in California--places where base personnel knew about groundwater contamination but for years failed to warn nearby residents or take remedial measures. I suspected that officials there might not have been so welcoming. We got a sense of the dislike and even hostility that at least some base officials harbor towards environmentalists during our visit to Naval Station Mayport. Whe the issue of on-base incineration came up, turning a courteous conversation int a confrontational one, the base Environmental Engineer's pent-up disdain spille over. "I don't call myself an environmentalist, I am an environmental professional!" he told us, his voice trembling. We found out that the base's incinerator is opposed--because of concerns about possible carcinogens in the smoke--not only by the entire surrounding community, but also by the Navy's own Public Works Center.

During our trip, we were repeatedly told that the U.S. Navy is in the middle of a "major culture change"--a phenomenon likely to be observable at the other branches of the armed services as well. What brought about such change? I put the question to a number of base officials. Civilian base personnel, engineers employed by private contractors, and military officers alike were virtually unanimous in their answer: what moves them is laws, in particular the 1992 Federal Facilities Compliance Act--legislation that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War or without the persistent efforts of grassroots groups.

The Act requires military facilities to comply with existing laws like any entity in the private sector; the EPA and state regulators are now able to levy fines against military violators. In addition to establishing the military's institutional liability, the courts have affirmed that base commanders can be held personally liable--thus potentially facing the prospect of going to jail i cases of severe violations. In 1989, for the first time, three employees at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland were held personally liable for violating federal environmental laws. The "Aberdeen Three" were found guilty of such violations as improper and incompatible storage of hazardous chemicals and storage of unknown waste--problems about which they had been repeatedly notifie by the Army's own inspectors. The defendents received suspended sentences, but the case sent shock waves through the military. Federal employees could no longer assume they had automatic immunity from criminal prosecution. Policy is apparently reaching the point where a bad environmental record, even short of criminal misconduct, can now damage a military career.

But laws are not always the only factor. They provide a framework, and military facilities can now be expected to work, if only reluctantly, toward meeting the requirements of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Superfund laws (CERCLA/SARA), the Clean Air and Water acts, and the Endangered Species Act. However, if the individuals charged with carrying out environmental mandates ar motivated and committed, the results can be fundamentally different: the catchphrase at the bases we visited was "moving beyond compliance."

Based on a grant from the Legacy Resource Management program, the Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization Renew America organized three separate field trips to seven military installations in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Washington state. The facilities were selected by the U.S. Department of Defense. The Legacy Resource Management program was established by Congress in 1991 to support innovative projects that protect natural, cultural, and histori resources under the Defense Department's control. Taking place during March through May 1994, the trips were designed to give senior representatives of national environmental organizations a first-hand look at the programs.

Most of the staff we talked to were either already on their way to adopting practices and processes that would, in effect, insulate them from the impact of future environmental regulation (as one briefing put it), or they were attentiv to our arguments that they would do well to anticipate future tightening of standards and regulation of substances not currently subject to any controls.

I soon realized that there is another key factor determining individual bases' attitudes. While the armed forces as a whole are in the process of reducing the size and scope of their activities (since 1988, about 70 of 470 major installations have been selected for closure), all the bases we had been invite to visit actually stand to expand in the next few years, as operations are consolidated among the remaining facilities. At Mayport, the number of ships "homeported" may rise from the current 16 to as many as 35. Kings Bay's fleet o six Trident submarines is slated to grow to 10 as the Trident force reaches its planned strength. With their survival guaranteed, these bases seem to be more willing to take on other other challenges, including those of an environmental nature. This is not to say that environmental issues are not major concerns for those bases that will be closed, since potential civilian reuse hinges on their decontamination. But the temptation to do only the minimum necessary to get signed off and shipped out may be greater--and given the vast quantities of toxics left lying about, that could prove disastrous.

In the late 1980s, the U.S. General Accounting Office estimated that the Department of Defense was generating some 500,000 tons of toxics annually, more than the top five U.S. chemical companies combined. In April 1993, the Department of Defense reported to the U.S. Congress that it had identified 18,795 sites at 1,800 military installations that showed varying levels of soil and groundwater pollution. Some 94 installations were sufficiently contaminated to merit a place on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List (NPL). As more abuses come to light, EPA officials expect the number of military NPL sites to double in the next few years.

Ten years ago, Congress established the Defense Environmental Restoration Account to finance the cleaning up of military bases. Spending has risen from $150 million in fiscal year 1984 to approximately $2 billion in 1994. (The Pentagon's total proposed environment-related spending in FY 1994 and 1995 come to about $5.6 billion, including programs on energy conservation, alternative energy technology development, wildlife and natural resource management, and others.)

To date, rather little cleanup progress has been made. In fact, 1994 will be th first year the Department of Defense has spent more money on remedial activitie than on investigations and studies. What to do once a site has been identified, however, is far from clear. Cleanup is to some extent a technological frontier. For example, a number of bases are exploring bioremediation. When we visited Kings Bay, contractors were preparing to start up a pilot plant that uses microbes to break down chlorinated compounds.

Some sites may be too contaminated to be safe ever again for human use. Many others could take generations, or at least years, just to stabilize. Scattered around the country are some 40,000 underground fuel tanks in need of replacement, many of them leaking. NAS Jacksonville, for example, is in the midst of an effort to dig up its tanks and pump out the plume of fuel oil now lodged in the local groundwater.

An equally daunting task is to prevent a repetition of the abuses now being stemmed--to devise safer ways of handling toxic substances and, wherever possible, to reduce or avoid their use altogether. The Department of Defense se itself the goal of reducing its hazardous waste by 50 percent between 1987 and 1992. A DOD report to the U.S. Congress claimed that that goal was achieved in 1991.

Military installations routinely use a plethora of hazardous materials. In the past, there was little control over the amounts of materials procured, stored, used, and disposed of by the base "shops." Often, 55-gallon drums of solvents were procured where a one-pint container would have sufficed.

The extent to which more efficient use of materials could reduce military pollution is suggested by what happened when the environmental staff at NAS Jacksonville declared an "amnesty day"--allowing workers to clear out hazardous materials they had hoarded, without facing any penalties. Several hundred drums plus assorted other containers of toxic materials were turned in, most of them long past the manufacturers' expiration dates. The Depot computerized a central tracking system so that the whereabouts and characteristics of hazardous materials are no longer a mystery, and the staff has been careful to build the shops' confidence that there's no need to hoard materials. As a result, the shops' stocks of hazardous materials have been reduced by 75 percent, cutting hazardous waste by an estimated 72,000 pounds per year.

The U.S. Navy still appears to be far from having a coordinated policy. Each of the three bases we visited had developed its own approach to hazardous material management, including how it tracks materials and how it uses amnesty days. Moreover, a single military base is often home to a variety of commands; instea of communicating directly with each other, key personnel report to different authorities, and are therefore caught up in their own webs of bureaucratic procedures. Finally, some bases are attacking the problem more fundamentally than others.

Whereas Naval Station Mayport seemed still focused on "managing" its hazardous materials and waste, the Depot at JacksonVille has taken steps to use less of such materials to begin with. For example, it has begun to replace vapor degreasing of airplane parts, a 1950s-vintage technology that employs highly toxic solvents such as trichloroethylene and trichloroethane, with a high-pressure heated spray washer that uses an aqueous detergent, reduces water consumption by 87 percent, and is much safer for the workers involved. Similarly, for removing old paint from airplanes, it has replaced solvents with plastic-bead blasting. It is replacing cadmium cyanide plating, a 1930s technology for providing corrosion protection on airplane surfaces, with an ion vapor deposition process that reduces toxic waste by some 13,000 pounds per yea and cuts water consumption to zero. It has also built a new closed-loop industrial hazardous wastewater treatment system to replace a facility of traditional design that drew large quantities of water from the Florida aquifer and generated substantial amounts of sludge.

Altogether, with an investment of $18.6 million since 1988, the Depot has achieved an annual waste reduction of about 1.5 million pounds. With avoided costs of about $4.4 million annually, these environmental investments will pay for themselves in about four years on average, though some measures have yielde a much quicker payoff.

As impressive as these changes are, in some cases it was asked why the bases ha not attempted to "leapfrog" to the cutting edge of technology. We noticed, for example, that trichloroethylene--a notoriously dangerous solvent--had been replaced by a more benign but still hazardous substance. It might have made mor sense to go all the way to a non-petroleum-based alternative.

The most striking aspect of the tour--perhaps because it was the least expected--was the openness with which base personnel were prepared to discuss environmental issues, past, current, and future. But openness still has its limits. At NAS Jacksonville, I knew that the base had been placed on the EPA's Superfund National Priority List in 1989--classifying it as one of the country' most polluted sites. But the background sheet that we received prior to the tri made no mention of it, even as it proudly announced that the NAS had been selected for the DOD/EPA "Environmental Showcase" program. In conversations wit us, the NAS environmental staff kept repeating that environmental improvements were being made "because it's the fight thing to do." However, we also learned--from other sources--that in 1988, before the current staff arrived, th base was threatened with the loss of operating permits that would effectively have shut it down unless substantial improvements were undertaken.

Even so, it's an encouraging sign that these visits were allowed at all Althoug groups like the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy have worked with the Pentagon to improve the stewardship of its huge land holdings, the relationship between the Department of Defense and environmental groups, especially local activists, has largely been one of confrontation. It has been a struggle to compel the armed forces to make information available and to move toward an urgently needed cleanup effort. The Legacy Program visits could be a sign that that relationship is beginning to change.

Many issues remain. How far does the environmental commitment extend, at the Pentagon itself and at the far reaches of its domain? To what extent, and how fast, can the accomplishments of the Navy's environmental pacesetters be replicated (and surpassed) at other military installations? Will improving environmental security win plaudits and advance careers the way that improving combat-readiness does?

One indicator of the Pentagon's commitment is the establishment of local Restoration Advisory Boards, which are intended to give community representatives a voice in the cleanup decision-making process, and to boost public oversight. The Defense Department has decided to set up such boards at all contaminated bases slated for closure, but it remains to be seen whether th military's critics will gain fair representation. A related question, to be decided in Congress, is whether community representatives will have access to public funding for hiring independent technical expertise.

Change has largely come due to pressure, some from the top but much of it from the grassroots. Improving the military's environmental record will be a long-ru affair, and further progress will require continued outside scrutiny. That scrutiny needs to come both on the national and the local levels. The best way to insure base compliance with environmental laws is for nearby residents to ge actively involved--forming watchdog groups and requesting meetings with elected representatives, base personnel, and officials at the federal and state environmental protection agencies. In the United States, concerned citizens can draw upon the experience and organizing skills of a national network of activists--the Military Toxics Project--devoted to holding the military accountable. Those bases that have embraced environmental goals and demonstrate openness toward the public can serve as models for others.

At the end of the tour, despite these encouraging signs, something troubled me. One of the facilities dominating the skyline at Kings Bay is its modern dry dock, at which the giant nuclear missile-beating Trident II submarines are overhauled between patrols at sea. At 560 feet, a Trident sub is long enough to stretch almost the length of two football fields. A death ship like none other, it is capable of carrying 192 nuclear warheads. Despite my own recognition that environmental protection is indeed a security issue, it seemed bizarre that a base essential to launching a nuclear war--the ultimate environmental catastrophe--was also taking pains to run an exemplary recycling program.

On reflection, the greening of the military is at best a mixed blessing. That became clear to me when I recalled what had not been on the agenda for this tour: there was no discussion of how adverse environmental impacts of war preparation could be avoided by downsizing the armed forces substantially beyon current plans, and by constructing an alternative, more cooperative international security system. If anything, Dick Cheney's 1989 admonition to th military brass to take environmental issues seriously in order to "maintain mission capability" points in the opposite direction.

The larger issues of the military-environmental relationship in the post-Cold War era are critical, and it would be a mistake to assume that environmental security is only important to the extent that it supports military objectives. Even with the adoption of more environmentally benign facilities, the military' resource consumption and environmental burden--from production to disposal of arms--remain enormous.

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that all wars are highly destructive to the environment. While the idea of a greener military may be a necessary oxymoron for the short term, it can only be an improvement if it is seen as a tactical move--a key part of the more strategic move to conversion of military to civilian industry. In the long run, the greatest security will be achieved b a society in which nations reduce pollution not only by running their military bases more cleanly, but by needing them much less.

Michael Renner is a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute. He was the autho of "Monitoring Arms Trade," in the May/June issue.