Concrete Impacts: A Supply Chain and Life Cycle Analysis of the US Military's Environmental Footprint

Militaries are among the most resource intensive institutions in the world, requiring vast volumes of material and energy for both domestic and foreign operations. As a result, militaries are some of the most polluting institutions as well, but very little is known about military contributions to climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, nor about their total material consumption. Furthermore, the accessibility of reliable data about military resource use and environmental damage is highly variable, and depends on military transparency, the context of military operations, and broader emissions reporting requirements between countries. Our preliminary research has shown that one novel, workable approach to examining a military's material footprint is to focus on the logistics that move raw materials move across global military and civilian supply chains. For example, by concentrating on procurement, purchase, and distribution of hydrocarbon-based fuels, we revealed that the U.S. military is a larger polluter than as many as 140 countries. However, a systematic study of the sourcing of raw materials and their circulation supply chains, including the resultant environmental damage, is entirely lacking.

This research will build on our previous work on the climate impacts of US military operations to look at other kinds of materials that have significant environmental impacts. We will source and collate secondary datasets that allow us to quantifying and visualize US military acquisition and use of three seemingly banal materials - sand, water, and concrete- that have serious environmental, social, and economic impacts when purchase and deployed in the large volumes that the US military did during the occupation of Iraq from 2003-2011. We will source this data from publicly available reports produced by the US Congressional Budget Office and individual procurement orders made by the Defense Logistics Agency, supplemented with data from Freedom of Information Act requests as needed. As the most extensive military operation of the 21st century, Iraq from 2003-2011 provides an ideal case study because procurement and supply chains are documented on digital spreadsheets and accessible for analysis, and because analysis of that data can help researchers, governments, and the public understand the consequences and impacts of foreign intervention in new and dynamic ways.

We will undertake a number of activities to make this data useful and available to a range of users, including policymakers and the US military itself. First, we will create a GIS database that collates currently disparate datasets and geographically situates the procurement, distribution and use of sand, water, and concrete. This spatial approach will allow us, and other researchers, to consider all manner of adjacent questions around the social, economic, and environmental impacts of material practices of US military during wartime. Additionally, following our previous research on US military fuel consumption, we will conduct life cycle analyses on all the materials we study, calculating not only the climate change impact of these materials in practice, but also other environmental consequences, such as local air pollution impacts. We will collate all this data and our analysis and visualizations thereof onto a public-facing data lab website, enabling anyone with a web browser to conduct high-powered quantitative analysis of the data for themselves. Further, we will produce policy-relevant literature on the environmental implications of war beyond the usual kinds of analysis in time for the next round of global climate change negotiations at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. We seek significant outreach to non-academic partners, such as the US and UK military, climate and environmental policymakers and civil society groups in our current network and beyond.