Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot-print of the US military

Abstract

This paper examines the US military's impact on climate by analysing the geopolitical ecology of its global logistical supply chains. Our geopolitical ecology framework interrogates the material‐ecological metabolic flows (hydrocarbon‐based fuels, water, sand, concrete) that shape geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations. We argue that to account for the US military as a major climate actor, one must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels possible. Our paper focuses on the US Defense Logistics Agency – Energy ( DLA ‐E), a large yet virtually unresearched sub‐agency within the US Department of Defense. The DLA ‐E is the primary purchase‐point for hydrocarbon‐based fuels for the US military, as well as a powerful actor in the global oil market. After outlining our geopolitical ecology approach, we detail the scope of the DLA ‐E's operations, its supply chain, bureaucratic practices, and the physical infrastructure that facilitates the US military's consumption of hydro‐based carbons on a global scale. We show several “path dependencies” – warfighting paradigms, weapons systems, bureaucratic requirements, and waste – that are put in place by military supply chains and undergird a heavy reliance on carbon‐based fuels by the US military for years to come. The paper, based on comprehensive records of bulk fuel purchases we have gathered from DLA ‐E through Freedom of Information Act requests, represents a partial yet robust picture of the geopolitical ecology of American imperialism.

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Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics,
geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US
military
Oliver Belcher
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Patrick Bigger
2
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Ben Neimark
2
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Cara Kennelly
2
1
Department of Geography, Durham
University, Durham, UK
2
Lancaster Environmental Centre,
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Correspondence
Oliver Belcher
Email: oliver.belcher@durham.ac.uk
This paper examines the US military's impact on climate by analysing the geopo-
litical ecology of its global logistical supply chains. Our geopolitical ecology
framework interrogates the material‐ecological metabolic flows (hydrocarbon‐
based fuels, water, sand, concrete) that shape geopolitical and geoeconomic power
relations. We argue that to account for the US military as a major climate actor,
one must understand the logistical supply chain that makes its acquisition and
consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels possible. Our paper focuses on the US
Defense Logistics Agency –Energy (DLA‐E), a large yet virtually unresearched
sub‐agency within the US Department of Defense. The DLA‐E is the primary pur-
chase‐point for hydrocarbon‐based fuels for the US military, as well as a powerful
actor in the global oil market. After outlining our geopolitical ecology approach,
we detail the scope of the DLA‐E's operations, its supply chain, bureaucratic prac-
tices, and the physical infrastructure that facilitates the US military's consumption
of hydro‐based carbons on a global scale. We show several “path dependencies”–
warfighting paradigms, weapons systems, bureaucratic requirements, and waste –
that are put in place by military supply chains and undergird a heavy reliance on
carbon‐based fuels by the US military for years to come. The paper, based on
comprehensive records of bulk fuel purchases we have gathered from DLA‐E
through Freedom of Information Act requests, represents a partial yet robust pic-
ture of the geopolitical ecology of American imperialism.
KEYWORDS
carbon, Defense Logistics Agency, geopolitical ecology, logistics, supply chains, US military
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INTRODUCTION
We exist to provide war fighters with what they need, where they need it, when they do it. (Defense Logistics
Agency, n.d.)
Fuel is the ‘blood of the military’…and is critical to the life of the theater of operation. (U.S. Army Petro-
leum and Water Department, Fort Lee
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)
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The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2019 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
Accepted: 3 May 2019
DOI: 10.1111/tran.12319
Trans Inst Br Geogr. 2019;1–16. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/tran
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As climate change gathers pace, it is critical to assess how the world's largest institutions contribute to global environ-
mental change. In this paper, we analyse the United States military's impact on the climate by exploring the hidden carbon
costs of the “everywhere war”(Gregory, 2011). Despite the Trump Administration's announcement to withdraw from the
2015 Paris Agreement,
2
the US military has long understood that it is not immune from the potential consequences of cli-
mate change (see US Department of Defense, 2014), nor has it completely ignored its own contribution to the problem.
The US military sees climate change as a “threat multiplier,”or a condition that will exacerbate other threats, and is fast
becoming one of the leading federal agencies in the United States to invest in research and adoption of renewable energy
(Gilbert, 2012). These investments include solar and biofuels,
3
as well as reinforcing base infrastructure to mitigate the
effects of sea‐level rise (Bigger & Neimark, 2017).
Nevertheless, the US military's climate policy remains fundamentally contradictory. While the military confronts the
effects of climate change, it remains the largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world (Nuttall et al.,
2017). In the near future, this dependence on fossil fuels is unlikely to change as the USA continues to pursue open‐ended
operations around the globe.
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The extraordinary energy requirements for these conflicts has engendered new investments in
fossil fuel delivery infrastructures. These energy demands are coupled with the life‐cycles of existing military aircraft and
warships, locking the US military into hydrocarbons for years to come (Unruh, 2000). Even the US military's own ambition
to support development and scale‐up production of less carbon‐intensive kit, from backpack‐borne solar panels to advanced
biofuels, is driven by the need for ever more energy. For example, new biofuels are meant to be used in extant planes and
ground vehicles without modification, which means that even if those fuels become available at scale, economic and politi-
cal conditions can always force a return to fossil fuelling (cf. Urry, 2014). Besides internal governmental audits, mainly
from the US Department of Defense (DoD), there are few independent, public‐derived studies of the US military's fuel con-
sumption, not to mention greenhouse gas emissions (see Liska & Perrin, 2010). This paper addresses this gap on the insti-
tutional practices and configurations that make US military fuel consumption possible, focusing on how a large institution
like the US military contributes to the climate emergency. We show how these practices are more‐or‐less hidden in plain
sight and develop a methodology and interpretive framework to explain them.
We argue that to account for the US military as a major climate actor, one must understand the logistical supply chain
that makes its acquisition and consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels possible. In our view, one cannot understand the
importance of the US military's supply chains without understanding its geopolitical ecology, and vice versa. Geopolitical
ecology is a theoretical framework that combines political ecology with critical geopolitics to gain deeper insight into the
impact of large geopolitical institutions on environmental change (Bigger & Neimark, 2017). For us, focusing on the
geopolitical ecology of military fuel consumption means paying particular attention to the material‐ecological metabolic
flows (e.g., hydrocarbon‐based fuels) enacted through US military supply chains. Building on this framework, we draw
novel links between critical logistics and supply studies (Chua et al., 2018; Cowen, 2014; Tsing, 2009), geopolitics, and
political ecology (Benjaminsen et al., 2017), with the purpose of setting a new geopolitical ecology research agenda. More-
over, in doing so, we bring together the insights of civilian energy geographies (Bouzarovski & Haarstad, 2018; Bridge et
al., 2018; Lyall & Valdivia, 2019; Mulvaney, 2019) and recent cutting‐edge geographical work on the infrastructure–na-
ture–finance nexus (Cantor & Knuth, 2019; Usher, 2018) with the massive hidden carbon costs of the US military.
Our examination of the US military's “carbon boot‐print”begins with the US Defense Logistics Agency –Energy
(DLA‐E), a powerful yet virtually unresearched sub‐agency within the larger Defense Logistics Agency.
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The Defense
Logistics Agency oversees the massive global supply chains of the US military –from energy, services, munitions and
parts, to maintenance distribution for military operations. The sub‐agency DLA‐E specifically works to deliver the energy
needs of all US federal agencies, as well as multinational corporations, private contractors, and countries allied with the
USA. The DLA‐E has a worldwide distribution infrastructure for hydrocarbon fuels delivery and provides logistical and
planning support to the military's geographic combat commands and warzones around the world. The DLA‐E is also the
primary purchase‐point for hydrocarbon‐based fuels for the US military, both domestically and internationally.
The DLA‐E maintains records of bulk fuel purchases by US military personnel, both domestically and internationally.
Through multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we compiled a database of DLA‐E records for all known
land, sea, and aircraft fuel purchases, as well as fuel contracts made with US operators in military posts, camps, stations,
and ship bunkers abroad from FY 2013 to 2017.
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We draw on this database to examine the DLA‐E and its bureaucratic
and infrastructural capacity to meet carbon‐intensive fuel requirements for US military operations.
This paper aims to answer two overarching questions. First, how is carbon‐intensive American imperialism made possi-
ble through the DLA‐E supply chains? Second, what are the physical and organisational path dependencies
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of that sprawl-
ing apparatus that make it likely that the “everywhere war”will become more, rather than less, carbon intensive? In the
“great acceleration”of economic growth after the Second World War (McNeill & Engelke, 2016), there has been a
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correspondence between environmental degradation and the dramatic increase in rich‐world consumption made possible
through modern logistics and supply chains, even if the explicit link between supply chains and the environment has been
undertheorised. By critically examining the DLA‐E's logistical practices –based on “just‐in‐time”supply chain technologies
and delivery capacities developed in tandem with powerful multinational corporations –we show how the material infras-
tructure of the DLA‐E makes possible the “carbon costs”we demonstrate here.
In the next section, we present geopolitical ecology as a framework for understanding the hidden carbon costs of the
US military's supply chain. In the subsequent section, we examine the DLA‐E's supply‐chain infrastructure, how the agency
functions, and the scope of its operations. Based on our DLA‐E records database, we explore how it becomes possible to
procure, distribute, store, and consume the massive volume of fuels required for contemporary military operations. It is
important to note that this is a partial picture of the US military's “carbon boot‐print.”What our critical analysis of the
DLA‐E allows is an understanding of the bureaucratic practices and physical infrastructure required to facilitate the US mil-
itary's consumption of hydrocarbon‐based fuels on a global scale, which, we argue, can only be appreciated by examining
the scope of its supply chains. We outline several “path dependencies”–war‐fighting paradigms (e.g., counterinsurgency),
weapon systems, bureaucratic requirements –that sustain a heavy reliance upon carbon‐based fuels into the interminable
future barring a radical rupture in US foreign policy. Our focus on the DLA‐E's international flows illustrates its central
role in making the “everywhere war”possible, from Special Forces shadow engagements to major conventional operations,
and allows us to highlight how the hidden carbon costs of war are produced.
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THE GEOPOLITICAL ECOLOGY OF MILITARY SUPPLY‐CHAINS
2.1
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Geopolitical Ecology and Institutional Bureaucracy
We begin from the premise that material‐ecological metabolic flows shape geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations.
In what follows, we make visible the scale of logistical practices required by the US military to burn vast quantities of
hydrocarbons. A geopolitical ecology framework exposes the larger institutional processes at work in the material produc-
tion of global natures (Labban, 2010; Mitchell, 2011; Usher, 2018; Valdivia, 2008), and in our case, the contribution of
militaries to environmental change at a variety of scales (cf. Ojeda, 2012; Ybarra, 2012). By mobilising geopolitical ecol-
ogy, we develop synergies between the careful attention to multi‐scale environmental politics in political ecology, and the
“discursive‐material co‐constitution of global institutional politics”(Bigger & Neimark, 2017, p. 14).
This explicit encounter between critical geopolitics and political ecology is not necessarily new (Benjaminsen et al.,
2017; Dalby, 2015; Harris, 2017; Parenti, 2011), but remains timely, as the effects of climate change and some of the mas-
sive institutions that are most responsible, such as the US military, are left generally unchecked, both within the critical lit-
erature and outside the academy. Here, we emphasise that the military's “self‐styled relationship to the environment justifies
the self‐provisioning of infrastructure and material resources needed to carry out the protection of scarce nature, both home
and abroad”(Bigger & Neimark, 2017, p. 16). Our geopolitical ecological framework moves scholarship on “global nat-
ures”into new analytical territory by incorporating the material elements of hydrocarbons and its supply lines that actually
shape geopolitical relations. For example, by focusing on the material infrastructure of the U.S. military that actually exists
outside of its “greening”policy papers, our approach calls into question the veracity of the US military's attempt to rebrand
itself as an ecologically friendly actor.
Critical geographic research on the hydrocarbon infrastructures for US military provision hardly exists. The conditions
under which the US military operates are constantly shifting in light of rapidly changing geopolitical and ecological dynam-
ics. There have been three significant shifts in US warfighting over the past 20 years. First, in the late‐1990s “revolution in
military affairs”(RMA), there was an emphasis on “network‐centric”military capabilities coupled with conventional air
bombing (“shock and awe”). A more ground‐troop intensive approach followed in the mid‐to late‐2000s embrace of coun-
terinsurgency (see 4.2 below). Lastly, in our current period, there has been a hybrid special operations‐centric mode of
warfighting buttressed by digital information‐based technologies, such as drones and high‐tech computing (Niva, 2013).
The US military's current climate change security strategy evolves along with these changes in combat paradigms, orienting
its institutional approach to an unpredictable geopolitical order that is slowly being upended by the climate crisis (Dalby,
2014; Gilbert, 2012).
Every mode of warfighting requires its own unique hydrocarbon delivery system. The DLA‐E is the bureaucratic appara-
tus mainly responsible for procurement and arranging delivery of hydrocarbons in this shifting geopolitical environment,
and therefore controls the size and shape of the US military's carbon boot‐print. Without the highly developed,
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professionalised logistics and military supply‐chains, the US military's reach, as well as its capacity to burn so much fuel,
would be substantially impeded. Yet we know very little about the DLA‐E's sprawling operations or its own role as a cli-
mate actor.
How can we use a geopolitical ecology to understand the processes and procedures behind the US military as a climate
actor? What is the infrastructure and day‐to‐day bureaucratic process that makes this massive fuel‐provisioning operation
possible? Scott (2008, p. 48) defines bureaucracy as “the existence of a specialized administrative staff”or as the “increas-
ing subdivision”of organisational functions –all components that can be applied for understanding the DLA‐E. It is an
institution that “hides in plain sight,”as it were, behind the US military. A study of the bureaucracy of the DLA‐Eis
important to expose the oft‐overlooked aspects of the military's ability to wage the everywhere war. As Weber discusses,
bureaucracy is a “rational‐legal form of domination and control”(2013, p. 300) that systematically organises human activity
and complex processes for purposes of efficiency and order. Kuus has noted that modern‐day institutions are too often “dis-
missed as lumbering iron‐cage bureaucracies”(2018, p. 1). The US military and DLA‐E are not lumbering at all, as they
“lock‐in”a future of highly mobile fossil‐fuelled warfare, in spite of, and likely because of, widespread environment change
(Gilbert, 2012). However, as we show below, geopolitical ecology is more than a focus on institutions as ecological actors.
To appreciate the DLA‐E's dynamic carbon‐inflected (indeed, constituted) bureaucracy, we must examine their flexible sup-
ply chain infrastructure that, paradoxically, is a primary component of fossil fuel lock‐in. Thus, the emerging field of criti-
cal logistics and supply studies can help understand the infrastructural basis that makes such material‐ecological flows
possible.
2.2
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Critical Logistics and Supply Studies
Global supply chains and institutional logistics, as well as the organised spaces produced by corporate managerial logics
and techniques, have lately come under critical scrutiny in a move to interrogate the material infrastructure of global capi-
talism (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008; LeCavalier, 2016; Neilson, 2012; Toscano & Kinkle, 2015). However, with few notable
exceptions (Cowen, 2014; Crampton et al., 2014; Gregory, 2012; Khalili, 2017), there has been relatively little written on
the role of supply chains in contemporary US military practices, not to mention the role of supply chains in contributing to
climate change more generally (Bergmann, 2013; Bergmann & Holmberg, 2016; Carse & Lewis, 2017). This is surprising
given that, from a historical perspective, logistics and supply chains, as a way of organising the movement of goods and
services, are fundamentally a military technology.
As Deborah Cowen (2014) has emphasised, the entanglement between logistics and military operations has only grown
more pronounced as corporate management practices have assumed a privileged position within the US military since at
least the Vietnam War (Gibson, 1986). Ucko (2009) has shown how US counterinsurgency doctrine, adopted by the US
Army in the mid‐2000s as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were chaotically deteriorating, incorporated a small business‐
model approach to provisions, technology development, and tactical operations. This enacted a “bottom‐up”command
structure that enabled on‐the‐ground officers to challenge the provision assumptions of US commanders running the wars
from Central Command in Tampa, Florida and the Pentagon.
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For Cowen, what is important is not so much the US mili-
tary adopting management techniques and practices fashioned by multinational corporations. Rather, it is that US corpora-
tions are also reliant on the US military to secure their own logistical supply chains; or, more precisely, that there is a
symbiotic relationship between the military and corporate sector. In terms of liquid fuel logistics, one might think of the
role the US military plays in securing oil shipping routes, some portion of which the military is likely to go on to burn.
“This is a matter,”Cowen writes, “not only [of] military forces clearing the way for corporate trade but corporations
actively supporting militaries as well …The entanglement of military and corporate logics may be deepening and changing
form, but logistics was never a stranger to the world of warfare”(2014, p. 4). For this reason, Khalili stresses the role of
the US military as “a wielder of capitalist infrastructural power”(2017, p. 2; original emphasis):
This role includes not only the US military's provision of large contracts to private businesses, but also espe-
cially the construction of the physical and virtual infrastructures that underlie the emergence of liberal capital-
ism overseas. Nor is this activity limited to wartime. In fact, it is in moments of global economic and political
transition, and in ostensible peacetime, that the US military's infrastructural power has been a dispositif central
to the task of disseminating liberal capitalism. (Khalili, 2017, p. 2)
What is at stake for the US military in logistics and the DLA‐managed supply‐chain infrastructure for its current wars?
It is the movement of lethal matériel to a host of conflict zones and dirty wars across the globe, interconnected through thin
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channels of mobile supply, rather than to a handful of battlefields relatively localised in a specific region or place. As
Derek Gregory notes, “it is, above all, the mobility of military violence that is central to the conduct of late‐modern war”
(2012, n.p.). The DLA is the institution which ensures that mobility across the globe. However, there is an important mate-
riality to the logistical movement of lethal matériel. As Chua et al. (2018, p. 618) have argued, logistics must be under-
stood both as a “calculative rationality”and a “suite of spatial practices”that ensure the circulation of capital, commodities,
bodies, services, and information, to overcome the “friction of distance”(Gregory, 2012). Logistics is a calculative rational-
ity insofar as it seems to abstract the movement of people, goods, and services from their operational context; subject these
movements to logics of precision and streamlining efficiency; and finally (re)orient the movements along predetermined
pathways (i.e., the supply‐chain). “Logistical thinking,”Chua et al. write, “prioritizes quantity over quality, reducing the
diverse relations of production and distribution to delivery times, stock‐keeping units and other values amenable to mea-
surement and calculation”(2018, p. 621). Logistical thinking is coupled with a sprawling physically networked infrastruc-
ture –whose management can often be messy, improvised, and thus flexible –from containers to container handling
equipment, container ships and GPS tracking systems, to IT networks and new software.
We share Cowen's and Khalili's interest in the role of these calculative rationalities and spatial practices in fostering a
“new logistical imperialism”(Cowen, 2014, p. 195), which better highlights the geoeconomic role of the US military in
fostering global supply chains. However, our purpose is to shift the focus somewhat by underscoring the relationship
between the material reality of military supply chains, as managed by the Defense Logistics Agency, and the distribution of
carbon‐based fuels and emission of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) along its supply chains –that is, we wish to examine its
geopolitical ecology.
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THE DEFENSE LOGISTICS AGENCY: THE INVISIBLE HAND OF
IMPERIALISM
3.1
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Aims and background of DLA‐E
In this section, we detail how the DLA‐E came to assume a powerful role in global fuel markets, as well as the physical
infrastructure and logistical practices it engages to carry out its mission. The Defense Logistics Agency, the umbrella
administration housing the DLA‐E, was established in 1961 as the Defense Supply Agency under President Kennedy and
Defense Secretary McNamara. Since that time, the broad mission of the Defense Logistics Agency has been to provide a
“full‐spectrum supply chain”for its warfighting and other missions such as humanitarian operations (McGuire, 2009). The
Defense Logistics Agency has a worldwide distribution infrastructure that provides logistics and staff‐planning support to
the military's geographic combat commands and war zones around the world.
The DLA‐E has its roots in the Second World War as part of the Department of Interior's Army‐Navy Petroleum Board,
which later became the Joint Army‐Navy Purchasing Agency. The DLA‐E specifically manages the energy requirements of
military and federal agencies and departments, as well as various foreign militaries. The DLA‐Eisthe one‐stop shop for
fuelling purchases and contracts within the US military both domestically and internationally, and acts as the US military's
internal market for all consumables, including fuel. DLA serves as the entry point for energy companies to US military
operations, as the DLA‐E conducts regular competitive bidding for lucrative, predictable contracts to supply military‐grade
liquid fuels for warfighting.
The question of fuel and fuelling, and the geographies of each, has been central to US military operations for nearly its
entire history. The US military's reliance on hydrocarbons began with the US Navy's 1814 commissioning of Demologos,a
coal‐fired paddle‐steamer warship sunk by an explosive gunpowder accident on the Brooklyn Naval Yards in June 1829,
killing 48 men. Throughout the 19th and 20th‐centuries, hydrocarbon fuels were increasingly critical as warfare became
increasingly mechanised. Liquid fuels, both their use and their procurement, were a central concern for military planners
beginning with the US Navy's transition from coal to diesel‐powered combustion with the launch of the “Great White
Fleet”in 1906 (Yergin, 1990). The switch from coal to diesel was highly controversial in its time, opposed by a majority
in the US Congress primarily on logistical grounds, namely as questions of access to fuel outside of well‐established coal-
ing stations were thought to pose a grave national security risk. President Theodore Roosevelt addressed these concerns in
1907 by ordering the US Navy to construct the first global hydrocarbon supply system (Mauer, 1981). The significance of
this moment cannot be overstated, as it was the genesis for the US military's modern supply chain for hydrocarbon fuels.
Prior to the 1961 creation of the Defense Supply Agency (renamed the Defense Logistics Agency in 1977), procurement
and distribution of matérial and fuel was the responsibility of individual branches of the US armed forces, meaning that
each branch had its own acquisition practices, distribution networks, and fuel standards used for various vehicles. This
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meant, in effect, that the military was maintaining separate, and potentially overlapping, supply chains. As the Cold War
heated up in the 1950s and 60s, the modes of conveyance required for military operations –from larger naval vessels,
including aircraft carriers, to ground and air transport (e.g., the introduction of helicopters as mechanised “cavalry”in Viet-
nam) –required unprecedented energy demands by the US Department of Defense (Gibson, 1986). The increasing demand
for fuel, as well as access and interoperability between military branches, was a primary driver behind the creation of a sin-
gle bureaucratic entity for managing the global supply infrastructure of military operations.
The consolidation of supply and logistics services was a relatively slow‐moving process, which is unsurprising given
the sheer scale of purchasing and distribution conducted by the US military, and points to the “momentum”that socio‐tech-
nical institutions produce and to which they are beholden (Hughes, 1969). However, the reorganised fuel infrastructure was
largely in place as the American presence in Vietnam grew in 1965. During the Second World War, each US soldier con-
sumed, on average, one gallon of fuel per day. By the end of the Vietnam War, that number jumped to nine gallons per
day per soldier (Karbuz, 2006). That nine‐fold increase demonstrates some of the many differences between the Second
World War and Vietnam, reflecting (in part) the increased use of airpower; e.g., the use of F‐105s and F‐4 Phantoms in
Vietnam bombing missions, and combat helicopters (cf. Clodfelter, 2006). However, it also reflects how the Defense Sup-
ply Agency was successful in creating both infrastructure and logistical practices to deliver massive volumes of fuel in war.
US military fuel consumption is even higher today. According to the Swiss security think‐tank Deloitte LLP, since the
Vietnam War, there has been a “175% increase in gallons of fuel consumed per US soldier per day …In today's conflicts
[in Afghanistan and Iraq], fuel consumption is 22 gallons used, per soldier, per day, for an average annual increase of 2.6%
in the last 40 years”(Deloitte, 2009, p. 1).
The refinement in managing energy supply chains reflected a broader organisational shift within the Department of
Defense in the 1960s. Defense Secretary McNamara, the former CEO of Ford Motor Company and trained in statistics and
economics at Harvard, was especially enamoured by systems analysis and computers capable of vast number‐crunching
(Barnes, 2015). The RAND Corporation, closely aligned with the US military, was responsible for developing “systems
analysis”for managing military budgets and the distribution of resources (McCann, 2017). As Cowen (2014) shows, sys-
tems analysis developed by military intellectuals and statisticians fed directly into the contemporary management and logis-
tics economy.
Since Vietnam, the Defense Logistics Agency has undergone a number of name changes and organisational realign-
ments, but its service mission of supplying petroleum, and all other consumables, to the US military has essentially
remained the same. As one government official put it, “America's military infrastructure is a large part of what makes it
dominant …During and before World War II, every military branch had its own way of dealing with logistics, and now
it's been consolidated and turned into one overarching middleman”(Koebler, 2015; n.p.). Over the past 20 years, there has
been a widening of the scope of DLA‐E services delivery. In 1998, the object of DLA‐E management transitioned from the
management of energy infrastructure to the management of energy products (DLA, 2017). This subtle shift entailed the
expansion of logistical competencies for the sub‐agency, leading to a comprehensive suite of logistical fuel‐based supply
chain practices deployed by the DLA‐E to every corner of the globe. These developments have strengthened the DLA‐E's
current and unique position in present‐day global fuel markets, for it is not just a provider of infrastructure for fuel distribu-
tion but actively manages a dense web of relationships, contracts, and material facilities.
3.2
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DLA‐E logistics and operations
Now that we have a picture of the emergence of the bureaucratic apparatus that facilitates the acquisition and distribution
of staggering volumes of fuel, we can turn to the DLA‐E's logistics operations. The institutional path dependencies that
made consolidation difficult are still in place in many ways, and these path dependencies play a critical role in reproducing
the US military's spatialities of energy, as access to refined hydrocarbons is fundamentally important to every aspect of its
operations. Even as branches continued their own procurement of weapons systems, the Pentagon moved to consolidate fuel
acquisition and distribution throughout the 1960s. The early move to consolidate energy logistics for the US military,
before food or other necessities of war, demonstrates the centrality of fuels within the supply‐chain infrastructure.
Given the spread of US operations across the globe, the DLA‐E's material infrastructure for fuel is correspondingly
sprawling. The DLA‐E's global supply chains are inextricably tethered to other, non‐military logistics systems, such as pri-
vate contractors who traffic between military and non‐military clients (Cowen, 2014). The DLA's task is to coordinate all
aspects of contracting, procurement, storage, and distribution with both internal and external entities to ensure that fuel
(and all other materials) arrives when needed. The DLA‐E uses a US Government internal ecommerce platform called FED-
MALL to manage this supply chain. Essentially the “Amazon.com”of federal agency commerce, FEDMALL is an online
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shopping catalogue maintained by the Defense Logistics Agency that allows federal agencies to purchase government‐com-
pliant goods from external vendors. FEDMALL grew off the Department of Defense's DOD eMALL, the Defense Logistics
Agency's first web‐ordering interface unveiled in 1993, and was one of the first examples of ecommerce, again demonstrat-
ing the tight linkages between military and commercial logistical practices (Cowen, 2014; Johnson & Lucyshyn, 2003).
To give a picture of the DLA‐E's daily energy operations, the agency handles 14 million gallons of fuel worth $53 mil-
lion per day (DLA, 2015). Operating from a nondescript building in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the DLA‐E has an extensive
chain of sites for distribution and delivery, with 258 terminal operations worldwide (DLA, 2017). Moreover, the DLA‐E
has delivery capacity to 2,023 military posts, camps, and stations in 38 countries; 230 bunker contract locations in 51 coun-
tries; and 506 into‐plane contract locations in 97 countries. On a daily basis, the DLA‐E makes US$1.1 million in foreign
military sales of fuel (DLA, 2015). At DLA‐E headquarters, there are 23 office heads (such as “Business Process Support,”
“Bulk Petroleum Supply Chain Service,”“Manpower and Workforce Analysis,”and “Procurement Process Support,”etc.)
that provide implementation support for the DLA‐E's regional offices across the USA, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and
Bahrain. In turn, these offices coordinate the purchase and movement of fuels around the world, as well as manage con-
tracts with utilities, negotiating access to fuel infrastructure in foreign countries, down to the management of individual fuel
purchase cards, along with every other step in managing the massive task of fuelling interminable global wars. It is worth
examining, as part of the DLA‐E's structure and practices, the scale of US interventions currently underway. After all, the
goal of the US military is not the consumption of fossil fuels, but its goals require that consumption. Savell (2018) has
recently mapped the breathtaking swath of the globe over which US military activities are situated. Between 2015 and
2017, the US military was active in 76 countries, including seven countries on the receiving end of air/drone strikes, 15
countries with “boots on the ground,”44 overseas military bases, and 56 countries receiving counter‐terrorism training
(Savell, 2018). Each of these missions requires energy –often considerable amounts of it –and the DLA‐E is the institu-
tion that supplies it.
In the development of its fuel supply chains, the DLA‐E and the US military commit to particular hydrocarbon‐based
path dependencies, or “situation[s] where the present policy choice is constrained or shaped by institutional paths that result
from choices made in the past”(Torfing, 2009, p. 71). In the case of US military reliance on fossil fuels, these institutional
paths include decisions about procurement of infrastructure like pipelines and fuel tankers, but also organisational and spe-
cialist knowledge, computer hardware and software to manage daily operations. The kinds of knowledge practices required
to keep the furnace burning range from the personal relationships that local fuel distribution companies cultivate with
DLA‐E's small business liaison who supplies fuel to domestic installations, to the expertise required at DLA‐E's laboratories
to test and certify fuels for military specification. These laboratories, located in Germany, Alaska, South Korea, and Japan,
are tasked with testing samples for quality control of fuels, as well as training soldiers in on‐site testing methods (DLA,
2016).
The fuels delivered by the DLA‐E power everything from routine base operations in the USA to forward operating bases
(FOBs) in Afghanistan. In FY2017, the DLA‐E managed US$8 billion in contracts, and was staffed by around 1,200
employees, both military and civilian, on an annual budget of US$14.6 billion (DLA, 2017).
9
However, this budget takes
into account only the direct costs of fuel acquisition and distribution, of which some of the cost must be borne both by the
wider Defense Logistics Agency and the military branches themselves. The full cost of liquid fuel delivery is significantly
higher when accounting for the dangerous conditions when it is delivered in “non‐conventional battle spaces,”such as
Afghanistan (Gregory, 2012). Indeed, a primary reason the US military has worked to “green”its operations is precisely to
cut‐back on the extraordinary costs of fuelling wars in remote areas (Deloitte, 2009), as well as the rigidity that high fuel
costs impose on overall military spending. Every dollar spent on fuel is a dollar not spent on military kit or operations
(Vidal, 2010). However, the acute interest in alternative fuels has recently dropped out of many military documents.
The de‐emphasis of non‐fossil fuels has not occurred because military contributions to climate change have fallen in any
meaningful way. Rather, the drift away from renewables seems to be driven by a combination of factors that include the
availability of domestically produced fuels as a result of the fracking boom, persistently low and relatively stable oil prices,
and a reduction in long‐term deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq where oil delivery accounted for significant costs. The
most active period of renewables development and discourse was between 2008, when global oil prices peaked at nearly
US$150/barrel, and 2011, when the average oil prices was US$111/barrel, the first time oil prices averaged more than $100
for a year (Energy Information Agency, 2012; Read, 2008). The need to curtail fuel usage seems to have rhetorically sub-
sided as the way the US conducts war has shifted from energy‐hungry FOBs, and the DLA‐E focuses on “wartime effec-
tiveness and peacetime efficiency”(DLA, 2017, p. 22). Given the open‐endedness of the everywhere war, the DLA‐E's
logistical practices of fuelling seem increasingly tailored to the effectiveness side of the equation –indefinitely.
BELCHER ET AL.
|
7

The result of coordinated action of the US military's logistics operations, particularly given its extraordinary and flexible
budget, is the capacity to acquire and send fuel anywhere in the world. The larger DLA's expertise in developing supply
lines over the course of the last two decades also allows the agency to build logistics networks where they are not yet con-
solidated as the everywhere war continues to expand. While the headline numbers are staggering, as is their environmental
cost, the bureaucratic processes that make it a reality are extremely mundane and look very much like any institutional pur-
chasing programme, but on a global scale.
10
The acquisition of bulk fuels, which comprise by far the largest proportion of
the fuels the military consumes, follows a regular, predictable process. Each fuel‐purchasing region will assess projected
needs for the upcoming year based on modelling done in dialogue between military branches and DLA staff. The acquisi-
tion process is planned, and then the request for bids is offered on the US government's public solicitation webpage, Fed-
BizzOpps. Offers received are evaluated and ranked, the winning bid is chosen, final terms are agreed, and the contract
moves from solicitation to management.
Once contracts are agreed, fuels of various types are delivered to agreed supply hubs, where they can be dispatched to
any number of fuel depots. These shipments can either be arranged in‐house, or through a number of logistics contractors.
In 2017, the DLA‐E made over 25,000 fuel shipments, or about 68 shipments per day. Of these, more than 80% took place
within the continental USA, representing 61% of the total gallons of fuel distributed by the US DLA‐E (DLA‐E, 2018).
This flags up a critical point: namely, that fuel consumption, while conditioned to some extent by the modalities of
warfighting, is still primarily located domestically. The US military would be the largest institutional consumer of oil in the
world even without foreign oil‐fuelled operations. Thus, even a less interventionist US military would remain an important
economic and climate actor.
4
|
THE US MILITARY AS CLIMATE ACTOR
4.1
|
GHG emissions and the global military logistics network
Based on the preceding discussion, what does the US military look like as a climate actor when one accounts for its mas-
sive logistical supply chain? What is the geopolitical ecology of the movement and usage of military fuels? Here, we draw
on our DLA‐E records database of US foreign and domestic military fuel purchases between FY2013 and FY2017, includ-
ing military posts, camps, stations, and ship bunkers. The database contains near comprehensive domestic and international
contract information on fuel‐type purchases. Based on these FOIA requests, we use fuel purchasing and GHG emissions
from 2017, and country GHG emissions data from 2014, as they are the most up‐to‐date and comprehensive dataset of all
the years collected.
Given its extensive institutional infrastructure and operations, both domestically and overseas, the US military consumes
more liquid fuels and emits more CO
2
e (carbon‐dioxide equivalent
11
) than many medium‐sized countries.
12
In 2017, the
US military purchased about 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted 25,375.8 kt‐CO
2
e by burning those fuels (see Fig-
ure 1). If the US military were a country, it would nestle between Peru and Portugal in the global league table of fuel pur-
chasing, when comparing 2014 World Bank country liquid fuel consumption with 2015 US military liquid fuel
consumption. For 2014, the scale of emissions is roughly equivalent to total –not just fuel –emissions from Romania (Fig-
ure 2). According to our DLA‐E data, covering GHG emissions in Scope 1–3,
13
which includes direct or stationary sources,
indirect or mobile sources, and electricity use, and other indirect, including upstream and downstream emissions, the US
military is the 47th largest emitter of GHG in the world, if only taking into account the emission from fuel usage. This cal-
culation excludes emissions from the electricity and food the military consumes, land use changes from military operations,
or any other source of emissions. Critically, these emissions are not counted as a part of aggregate US emissions following
an exemption granted in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol (which the Bush Administration refused to sign in 2001). This gap
was to be rectified by the Paris Accord, from which the USA, famously, has withdrawn.
All country emissions data were sourced from the World Bank (World Bank, 2017) and the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA, 2015). The World Bank data were used to contextualise the emissions data from US military sources in
terms of US total emissions and global emissions. Different levels of emissions data, from individual fuels and departments
of the US military to total emissions, Scope 1–3 inclusive, were calculated as percentages of US and global emissions to
gain more perspective. Raw data of the tonnes of CO
2
emissions were compared to World Bank data, scaled up from kg
CO
2
to tonnes CO
2
to find the relative position of US military emissions by country.
The DLA‐E supplies a number of fuels and lubricants to all military branches, but the most common are jet fuel (e.g.,
JP‐8, Jet A), and terrestrial and marine diesel. Each of these has its own emissions profile and co‐pollutants. For example,
military jet fuel (JP‐8) is, like all jet fuel, molecularly similar to kerosene, and it emits CO
2
water, SO
x
, and NO
x
(known
8
|
BELCHER ET AL.

in aggregate as carbon‐dioxide equivalent, CO
2
e). These pollutants are more potent than terrestrial equivalents because
burning at higher altitude produces different kinds of chemical reactions, resulting in warming 2–4 times greater than on
the ground (IPCC, 2014). This difference in GHG output is one of the reasons why impact is significant, as the bulk of fuel
consumed by the US military is jet fuel used for the Air Force or Navy. The two biggest contributors in kt CO
2
e are
18,348.9 and 3,633.8 for Jet Fuel and Navy Special (heavy fuel oil), respectively (see Table 1).
Greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory methods for the country data were used by adopting conversion factors sourced from
the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This method allowed the conversion from volumetric measurements of
fuel consumption to kg CO
2
(EPA, 2015). Further factors were available in each dataset to convert the kg CO
2
values to
kg CO
2
e (kilograms of carbon‐dioxide equivalent, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen dioxide emissions)
(Table 2).
The Air Force is by far the largest emitter of GHG at 13,202.4 kt CO
2
e, almost double that of the US Navy's 7,847.8 kt
CO
2
e. In addition to using the most polluting types of fuel, the Air Force and Navy are also the largest purchasers of fuel.
In 2017 alone, the Air Force purchased US$4.9 billion worth of fuel and the Navy US$2.8 billion, followed by the Army
at US$947 million and Marines at US$36 million (DLA, 2017).
FIGURE 1 US military carbon emissions (CO
2
e) in kiloton (kt) and relative comparison by branch (approx.) for year 2017.
Source: Defense Logistics Agency –Energy
BELCHER ET AL.
|
9

0
2000000
4000000
6000000
8000000
10000000
12000000
China
United States
India
Russian Federaon
Japan
Germany
Iran, Islamic Rep.
Saudi Arabia
Korea, Rep.
Canada
Brazil
South Africa
Mexico
Indonesia
United Kingdom
Australia
Turkey
Italy
Thailand
France
Poland
Kazakhstan
Malaysia
Spain
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Argenna
Egypt, Arab Rep.
Venezuela, RB
Iraq
Netherlands
Vietnam
Pakistan
Algeria
Qatar
Philippines
Uzbekistan
Czech Republic
Nigeria
Kuwait
Belgium
Colombia
Chile
Bangladesh
Romania
Turkmenistan
Greece
Israel
4102nisnoissime2O
C
tk
US Military
FIGURE 2 Comparison of US military against top 50 countries’CO
2
emissions in 2014.
Source: World Bank and DoD GHG 2014
TABLE 1 CO
2
emissions (kt) by fuel type for the year 2017
Fuel type Kt CO
2
e
Auto gasoline 167.5
Aviation gasoline 3.5
Biodiesel 15.7
Diesel –distillate 817.5
Flex fuel 6.7
Heating fuel 366.8
Jet fuel 18,348.9
Kerosene 1.4
Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)/Propane 0.03
Lubricants 5.1
Navy special 3,633.8
Total 23,367.1
TABLE 2 CO
2
emissions (kt) by military branch for the year 2017
Branch Kt CO
2
e FY2017
Air Force 13,202.4
Army 2,204.7
Marines 1,12.1
Navy 7,847.8
Total 23,367.1
Source: Defense Logistics Agency –Energy
10
|
BELCHER ET AL.

4.2
|
Hidden carbon costs and energy path dependencies
Another dimension of the “hidden carbon costs”in the operations of the US military are the path dependencies built‐in to
major strategic commitments such as weapons systems –from the assault weapons used by soldiers, to the convoys, air,
and sea carriers that deliver troops to particular sites –and the bureaucratic requirements that facilitate the operations of
those commitments. Every step is dependent on a hydrocarbon fuel commitment; that is, hydrocarbon path dependencies
are intertwined with the modes of warfighting chosen by the US military in operational contexts.
Consider the hydrocarbon path dependencies of counterinsurgencies, such as President Obama's “surge”of US ground
troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan in 2009–2010 when counterinsurgency was guiding military doctrine (Belcher,
2014). In contrast to “kinetic”operations that aim to bring an enemy into submission through a conventional troop presence
and weapons saturation (e.g., air bombings, tank convoys, attack helicopters), counterinsurgency doctrine stresses “winning”
an occupied population's loyalty to the “host state”and US military by turning the people against the insurgency. In US
counterinsurgencies, the military assumes a posture more akin to police (Belcher, 2015), and the arts of persuasion, effec-
tive governance, and economic development become paramount for gaining population support. Therefore, a pronounced
ground troop presence “amongst the people”becomes an important dimension for the military in the towns or areas where
they are based. Unlike air raids, which can be commanded “at a distance”from a secure military base in the capital (e.g.,
the Green Zone in Baghdad) or US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, counterinsurgency operations in environments
like Afghanistan required establishing FOBs in rural and remote areas where the majority of the Afghan population reside
(Belcher, 2018).
The scale of FOB‐based operations in counterinsurgencies is immense. At the height of the war in Afghanistan, there
were over 100 FOBs located throughout the country, mostly in the east and south where the Taliban and other insurgent
groups were strongest. A typical FOB in Afghanistan required a minimum of 300 gallons of diesel a day to operate
(Deloitte, 2009). One appreciates the scale of hydrocarbon use when considering that a single US Marine Corp brigade
operating across of a network of FOBs requires over 500,000 gallons of fuel per day (Deloitte, 2009, p. 15).
As many FOBs are remote relative to major US bases in Bagram and Kandahar, guaranteeing reliable fuel and matériel
supply is a significant logistical difficulty over a wide terrain with little by way of reliable infrastructure. High fuel require-
ments in forward‐deployed locations present the military with a significant logistical burden. More important, the transport
of this fuel via truck convoy represents casualty risks, not only from IEDs and enemy attacks, but also from rough weather,
traffic accidents, and pilferage. DoD officials reported that in June 2008 alone, a combination of these factors caused the
loss of some 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel (Deloitte, 2009, p. 15).
As per Gregory, “[b]y the start of 2010 around 30–40 percent of bases were being supplied by air because the Taliban
controlled much of Highway 1, the ring road that loops between Afghanistan's major cities, and its IED attacks on NATO
and Afghan forces were increasingly effective”(2012, n.p.). Air drops of fuel and other kit to FOBs had their own fuel
delivery cost at an estimated US$400 per gallon by air (Hodge, 2011). For this reason, the US military and USAID
invested heavily in paved road construction in Afghanistan to ease the conveyance of Humvee convoys around the IED‐
pocked Ring Road, as well as new roads connecting remote FOBs to main transport arteries. Indeed, from the military's
perspective in Afghanistan, “roads ain't roads.”As Kilcullen (2009, p. 109) writes, “people [use] the process of road con-
struction …as a framework around which to organize a full‐spectrum strategy to separate insurgents from the people”in
two ways: (1) by creating greater security as it is more difficult to place IEDs on paved roads than dirt roads and (2) by
depriving the insurgency of recruits as local men make‐up the road construction work force. What Kilcullen and the US
commanders overlook is the civilian, and indeed the insurgency's, lock‐in to carbon path‐dependencies by their use of the
new infrastructure. Our point is to say that a commitment to a military doctrine, like counterinsurgency, is a commitment
to multidimensional hydrocarbon path dependencies –from the supply of fuel to troops, bases, and vehicles; to securing
the logistical supply chain in place to guarantee delivery, including across borders; to building new roads (“public works”)
for military and civilian use.
5
|
CONCLUSION: TURNING OFF THE FURNACE BY CRANKING UP THE
HEAT ON THE US MILITARY
In this paper, we argue that to recognise the US military as a climate actor, geographers must understand how they organise
and operate their supply chains. This is particularly true of oil, but also of other material acquisitions like food, machinery,
and other apparently mundane materials (e.g., sand, concrete, and water). As the US military continues to carry out the
everywhere war in some of the least accessible corners of the globe, its supply chains require logistical sophistication like
BELCHER ET AL.
|
11

never before. In this paper, we have given the first picture of the international organisation of global supply chains that
make the everywhere war possible. Moreover, we have stressed that this supply chain is precisely what allows the US mili-
tary to be one of the largest institutional climate actors in the world. Just how is the US able to burn so much oil? Up to
now, we have known very little about its infrastructural capacity to do so. This paper is an attempt to take a first step
toward disclosing the material infrastructure of possibility for US military carbon emissions, and the magnitude of those
emissions.
How do we account for one of the most far‐reaching, sophisticated supply chains, and one of the largest climate pol-
luters in history? This is by no means an easy task. First, we need to look beyond the surface of discourse of the recent
“green”turn by the US military towards climate adaptation and mitigation, including the adoption of energy‐efficient tech-
nologies and alternative fuel sourcing. Instead, we emphasise the institutional bureaucracy and the material‐discursive
infrastructures that make massive hydrocarbon use possible. Based on our DLA‐E records database, we presented a rough
picture of the US military's current carbon boot‐print, and explored how it becomes possible to procure, distribute, store,
and consume the massive volume of fuels required for contemporary military operations. Our emphasis on path dependen-
cies –war‐fighting paradigms, weapons systems, etc. –also highlights another dimension that “hides”carbon costs.
It is important to reflect on the border contributions of this study. Up to this point, few geographers have taken US mili-
tary energy regimes as a focal point of US imperialism, coupled with the lack of any public reports of carbon accounting.
We address this gap by bringing to the fore the hydrocarbon logistical infrastructure that makes US imperialism possible.
Geopolitical ecology provides a framework to pull together vital work around energy geographies and civilian path depen-
dencies (Bouzarovski & Haarstad, 2018; Huber, 2013; Lyall & Valdivia, 2019; Mulvaney, 2019), critical logistics (Cowen,
2014; Khalili, 2017), and political ecology (Benjaminsen et al., 2017), in particular, how infrastructure, institutions, nature,
and path dependencies intersect for the service of US imperialism. We can now begin to focus on turning down the furnace
by cranking up the heat on the US military's war machine.
Disrupting these sundry path dependencies, and their constituent pieces, turns on a variety of social, political, and eco-
nomic moments and movements. However, the headline summary is that social movements concerned with climate change
must be every bit as vociferous in contesting US military interventionism. Whatever is left of the anti‐war movement must
keep environmental impacts at the front of the critique. What this means in practice is that, among other things, using the
potential of climate‐change‐induced conflict to argue for swifter adoption of renewables to conduct warfare is fundamen-
tally contradictory and self‐defeating. The logics, logistics, and bureaucratic structures embedded in the overarching modali-
ties of the US war apparatus are inextricably tethered to hydrocarbons.
In this climate emergency, we need something rather more radical than a repair‐and‐maintenance (Graham & Thrift,
2007) approach that amounts to tinkering at the margins of the military's vast furnace. While incremental changes can
indeed amount to radical reconfigurations, there is no shortage of evidence that the climate is on the brink of irreversible
tipping points (Steffen et al., 2018). Once past those tipping points, the impacts of climate change will continue to be more
intense, prolonged, and widespread, giving cover to even more extensive US military interventions. It has been argued else-
where (Bigger & Neimark, 2017) that it is probably good that the military has invested in the development of advanced
biofuels technology and markets. But the entire point of these fuels is that they are “drop‐in”–they can be used in existing
military kit –which means that, whenever convenient or cheaper, the infrastructure is already in place to undo whatever
marginal gains have been made in decarbonisation. The only way to cool off the furnace is to turn it off, shuttering vast
sections of the machine. This will have not only the immediate effect of reducing emissions in the here‐and‐now, but will
also disincentivise the development of new hydrocarbon infrastructure that would be financed (in whatever unrecognised
part) on the presumption of the US military as an always‐willing buyer and consumer. Opposing US military adventurism
now is a critical strategy for disrupting the further construction of locked‐in hydrocarbons for the future.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Mike Berners‐Lee for his input and support on this project. We would also like to thank the three
anonymous reviewers for their exceptional feedback throughout the review process. All errors are our own.
DATA AVAILABILITY
The full qualitative datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available at this time
due to the ongoing and sensitive nature of the data, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
12
|
BELCHER ET AL.

The quantitative data table generated is fully available at: Neimark, B. (2018) Access Table Dataset. Lancaster University.
https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/researchdata/229
ENDNOTES
1
http://www.quartermaster.army.mil/pwd/pwd_lab.html Accessed 9 September 2018.
2
In November 2018, a major US federal report was released forecasting effects of climate change on the US economy and natural resources in
the 21st century. Despite the report's assessment of debilitating effects resulting from unmitigated climate change, the Trump Administration
downplayed its significance.
3
Four of the five branches of the US military are part of the DoD, while the US Coast Guard sits under the Department of Homeland Security.
Officially, the Marine Corps is under the administrative jurisdiction of the US Navy.
4
As of this writing (February 2019), the Trump Administration has vowed to withdraw US soldiers from Syria, and more than half of US troop
presence in Afghanistan as it brokers a peace deal with the Taliban. Trump's withdrawal plans were met with resistance by the Pentagon,
Democrats, and Republicans, including a formal rebuke of troop withdrawal by the US Senate. Whether or not the USA completely withdraws
from Syria and Afghanistan, US military and special operations still operate in dirty wars across Africa, and naval operations continue to
expand in the South Pacific to “counter‐balance”a growing Chinese presence.
5
To avoid confusion, we will spell out Defense Logistics Agency, while only referring to the Defense Logistics Agency –Energy sub‐agency
by its acronym, DLA‐E.
6
Through our extensive literature search on carbon footprint data for the US military, we noticed patterns around how other studies were com-
piling US military fuel purchasing data (Liska & Perrin, 2010). During this time, we paid closer attention to the Defense Logistics Agency,
specifically the DLA‐E. We filed two separate FOIA requests. The first request was for data relating to all US military fuel purchases broken
up by branch. The second request was for refined data on fuel type and regional location of purchases, distribution, and consumption. The
FOIA process was unexpectedly quick and the DLA‐E returned with data in.xls format displaying all fuel in gallons as we requested. For an
account on how we obtained data from the DLA‐E, and the politics of FOIA requests more generally, see Belcher and Martin (2019).
7
We follow Urry definition of path dependency illustrating that institutional decision‐making emanates “from contingent events to general pro-
cesses, from small causes to large system effects, from historically or geographically remote locations to the general …” and therefore “systems
develop irreversibly through a ‘lock‐in’but with only certain small causes being necessary to prompt their initiation…” (Urry, 2004, p. 32).
8
An important turning point occurred in 2004 when US troops confronted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over inadequate armour for
Humvees, as soldiers encountered roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for the first time in Iraq.
9
At the time of writing, it has been reported that the DLA could not account for $800 m (£572 m) in an auditing of its military construction
projects and computer systems. According to the BBC (2018), “Of the unaccounted money, $465 m was found to be used for construction pro-
jects for the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies, [and] failed to produce documentation for $100 m of computer systems.”
10
Like other institutional purchasing programmes, it is subject to graft, waste, and inefficiencies. While the DLA is undoubtedly adept at acquir-
ing and distributing massive volumes of fuel and materiel, it is also the agency most culpable for astonishing levels of wastefulness. This is
perhaps unsurprising given the military's soaring budget and the extensiveness of its supply chains, yet military leaders have been quick to dis-
avow numerous reports of waste on a grand scale. For example, a 2016 internal investigation that found logistics practices to be the primary
area where $25 billion could be saved per year was almost immediately removed from the Department of Defense website (Whitworth &
Woodward, 2016).
11
The potential warming caused by any molecule of greenhouse gases indexed to the potential warming caused by a molecule of CO
2
. See
MacKenzie (2009).
12
A standard unit for measuring carbon footprints, carbon‐dioxide equivalent (or CO
2
e) demonstrates the impact of each greenhouse gas in rela-
tion to the total of CO
2
that would have an equivalent effect on climate change.
13
On Scope 3 emissions, see https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards_supporting/FAQ.pdf
ORCID
Oliver Belcher https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0239-8705
Patrick Bigger https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0022-6822
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