FERN’s Back Forty: Rethinking how we feed the troops
The Pentagon recognizes climate change as a “destabilizing force.” To meet this growing national security threat, it urges adaptation, resilience and mitigation. In a recent commentary, Leo Blanken, a professor in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Ben Cohen, a student in the school’s Applied Design for Innovation program, argue that sustainable agriculture should be part of the military’s climate change strategy. Modernized victory gardens—container farms that use hydroponic or aeroponic systems and can theoretically generate as many vegetables as a five-acre farm while using a fraction of the water and fertilizer—could help improve the health of soldiers while reducing expenses and the military’s environmental footprint, they argue. Given that the way we produce, process and package food accounts for more than a third of all anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, it seems worth exploring. That same technology could help U.S. allies become more food secure, and strengthen partnerships. And if the Department of Defense turned its vast research capacity toward climate-friendly farming techniques, it could help push forward the entire field of sustainable agriculture. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why should the DoD be thinking about this?
Blanken: An organization as large as the Department of Defense—even if it marginally changes how it interfaces with food—would have massive impacts. The department has traditionally pioneered new technologies or new ways of doing things, which then have positive externalities for the wider society. (The internet, for instance.) So the DoD could engage in these activities to use in military operations, and also at home bases, to reimagine how they generate their own food. And that could be a springboard for how we might solve food security problems, both in the wider U.S. society and around the world. There’s a huge opportunity.
Cohen: In terms of strategy, a lot of this has to do with the Arctic, where the climate is changing dramatically. As the ice starts to melt, the area becomes much more navigable. From a military perspective, China is interested in that. If the Arctic begins to melt, they increase their ability to reach the world very quickly. They want the ice to melt. There’s also an estimated trillion dollars of precious resources under the ice pack up there. It’s amazing that what we do in Kansas is affecting climate change, and so it’s also affecting what’s happening in the Arctic, which has strategic implications.
Why do you think the Pentagon’s climate adaptation report doesn’t mention food as part of the solution?
Blanken: I think 20 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and thinking about counterinsurgency and terrorism, almost to the exclusion of everything else, is 20 lost years of thinking about bigger issues. How the DoD sources its food has massive implications for the environment, I just don’t think people have even worked through all these implications yet.
The Pentagon called for adaptation, resilience and mitigation to address national security threats posed by climate change. Where do you see agriculture fitting in?
Blanken: The DoD’s core task is national security. But I think what climate change is really pushing on to the national agenda is that it’s not just national security. It’s also human security. If we think of food security and a healthy environment, and the health of the men and women who come in as young recruits and how we train them and how we influence their eating habits—now we can conceive of human security as something that we could be generating as well.
Some of these military bases have a huge amount of space, huge amounts of resources, huge numbers of young men and women. Can we reconceive security in a way that regenerative farming may have a place? Can we change our lens of what security means? And as we take national resources, like taxes, and feed them to the Department of Defense, can we think harder about what we get out of it in terms of positive things for our community? Not just the ability to fight wars and shoot down enemy planes, but also creating a more healthy, secure society by using all those resources a little more thoughtfully.
Cohen: What if we start teaching regenerative agriculture on military installations? We’d be giving our service members some skills to take with them when they transition out of the force.
Can you talk more about what this could look like overseas?
Blanken: In Afghanistan, the vast majority of food that American forces consumed was in facilities that essentially look like your grade school cafeteria. The only time people needed combat rations was if they went outside the wire on a mission. And those missions were so short that guys took water, energy drinks and granola bars. Back in Kandahar Airfield or Bagram Airfield, they were essentially stuck eating terrible grade school cafeteria food served by contract workers. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years and had these massive footprints—you could have created a system to sustain agriculture there that would have made the vast majority of meals much healthier and much cheaper.
You’re never going to use hydroponic farming on the frontlines. But when you move forces to any location where they’re going to spend any amount of time, there’s opportunity to feed the majority of your people in a different way than moving every pound of processed food across the Pacific, driving it through Pakistan in a truck to get it to Bagram, which was insanely expensive, used a lot of packaging and was unhealthy. It cost the American taxpayer an exorbitant amount of money to get canned spaghetti and corndogs and fruit cocktail to the troops.
Cohen: If I have an 8-foot-by-40-foot container farm that’s designed to be self-sustaining for 96 hours, I can transport it anywhere in the world. So instead of us having to drive or fly the food for hundreds of hours, I can deploy the equivalent of a three-acre farm—or several three-acre farms—to staging areas. It would reduce the length of the supply chain. That’s actually really important for the military. We spend a lot of money, and we waste a lot of resources.
You write that these farming operations are even more important in the case of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific region. Why would a conflict there be more challenging?
Blanken: If you look at the nature of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific versus Europe—Ukraine, for example. There’s infrastructure, railroads, it’s relatively easy to move things to Ukraine. But the Pacific is massive. The nations are so far apart, they require huge amounts of shipping. Simply moving things, even in peacetime, is really expensive. If you have forces out there, those folks need to eat. And are you shipping all the food over to them all the time?
Now imagine a conflict with China. China is extraordinarily good at this thing called anti-access area denial, and that is going to disrupt the U.S.’s ability to move things. They’ll sink ships, shoot down airplanes, disrupt communications, target all of our refueling stations, etc. China’s goal is to prevent the United States from moving people and things across the Pacific. Having fewer things to move is going to make your life a lot easier.
You also talk about how agriculture could play a role in ‘partner force enablement.’ What does that mean?
Blanken: Security force assistance and building partner capacity is going to become increasingly important. Iraq and Afghanistan have soured the American public on sending hundreds of thousands of American troops to fight around the world, which means that a lot of security outcomes are going to be driven by us working with partners and allies. It basically means going to a country and helping them with their security, to both build a friendship and then also be able to coordinate with them during a potential conflict.
Traditionally, we go and train their troops to be able to shoot, or do communications better, and we give them equipment or sell them equipment—radios or guns or whatever. But as we move into the future we need to conceive of security in a broader sense: moving beyond traditional war-fighting into these notions of human security. That is going to make us be more empathetic to what these folks are actually interested in, what their concerns are. Our concern may be that we want you to be a friend because we’re concerned about the influence of China. But they may be more concerned about human security issues in their country—terrorism, disaster relief, the fact that climate change, in some of these countries, is literally an existential threat.
I went to a very rural outpost in the Philippines around 2011. I got to eat with the Filipino Ranger colonel, the senior ranking guy there. The food was barely edible; it was like starvation rations—a spoonful of rice and a chicken wing from a chicken that must have been the size of a canary. I couldn’t believe these guys were stationed there for years, eating like that. But they were out there because that’s where the terrorists were. What if there was a hydroponic farm there? They could eat fresh food all the time. Would it be worth it to give them an $80,000 shipping container farm instead of another $80,000 pile of weapons?
We need to think about partner nations’ food security issues. If food security is impacting our neighbors in Georgia or Indiana, how do you think it’s impacting people in Bangladesh, or the Philippines?
There’s been a lot of worry about the declining physical fitness of recruits. Do you think a focus on sustainable agriculture could play a role there?
Blanken: Our recruit base is a reflection of society. Every time I go to a military base, I drive around and it’s all fast-food restaurants. And it’s full of 18-year-olds eating Jack in the Box and McDonald’s for lunch. It is an endemic problem, not just for our young military men and women, but for society in general. The Department of Defense uses a lot of society’s resources — both human resources and tax money. There can be other good things that come out of the military [beyond national security]. People don’t realize that the U.S. military was one of the first institutions to mandate racial integration. They decided to get out ahead of civilian society on this issue. And there’s a lot of military sociological literature saying we can be on the front edge of doing something good within the military, that would be good for society as well.