Teaching Camels to Fly: Can The Pentagon Win This War?
Seth Shulman, The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military. Beacon Press: Boston, 1992. 253 plus xv pages. $23.00.
November 1987. At the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, Representative Mike Synar of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources, is growing more and more impatient with the inability of high-level Pentagon officials to explain progress made by the Department of Defense in cleaning up hazardous waste on military property.
Late in the hearing, Shulman reports, Synar, frustrated by the lack of responsiveness of Carl J. Schaler, assistant secretary of defense for the environment, picked up and read from a report by the Defense Department’s Inspector General, castigating the Pentagon for fragmented policies, lack of effective structure management, lack of communications at all levels. Shulman describes the events:
“‘What are you doing?’ Synar bellowed again. ‘Don’t tell me about the problems. Tell me what you’re doing.’
“’We are doing everything we can,’ Schafer offered halfheartedly ‘We have issued policies from my office on each and every one of these subjects.’
“’Policies?’ Synar asked.
“’Yes, sir,’ Schafer replied. ‘That’s my function. We are pulling together policy on these things. We have issued policy’ He paused briefly… What, after all, could really be said about the department’s poor record on the environment and the long litany of toxic atrocities that he had just been hauled through?
“’It is easy to say it is fragmented,’ he exclaimed at last, as though he finally knew how to make Synar understand, ‘but camels can’t fly.”‘
Intractable, Obdurate
Time and again, Shulman makes the point that the Pentagon’s approach to environmental problems is so cumbersome, so top-heavy with concerns over prioritization and protocol, that it is nothing short of a miracle when an actual clean-up occurs. “As critics have long charged,” he writes, “the military often seems to address every aspect of its environmental problems except the actual contamination itself” (45).
For years, the belief that sovereign immunity protected all military actions caused the Pentagon to act without regard to consequences, according to Shulman. As late as 1986, he notes, two attorneys for the Air Force were lamenting the intrusion of environmental laws into military activities. As quoted by Shulman, the lawyers wrote: “One might expect that due to the unique status of the military in our society; environmental laws would, like the public, stop at the installation gate, leaving the Department of Defense free to concentrate on military matters.”
However one views it, the fact is that Congress has ordered the Pentagon to hew to essentially the same environmental standards that private parties are held to. But the Pentagon record of compliance is dismal, as its own reports show. And whereas private parties can be prosecuted by the Environmental Protection Agency; the Defense Department generally need not worry about EPA enforcement. Thanks to a determination by the Reagan administration that the Justice Department has to approve any action brought by one federal agency against another (the EPA against the Pentagon, for example), federal enforcement actions against the Department of Defense are virtually unthinkable. (Shulman provides an extremely helpful account of the spurious “unitary theory of the executive” that underlies this Reagan administration approach. See pages 55-57. Despite this approach, the Justice Department has itself gone after individuals whose irresponsible actions at Pentagon facilities has resulted in environmental harm. The most celebrated case concerns three employees at the Aberdeen, Maryland, Proving Ground, who were convicted of criminal conduct. This case, too, is discussed at length by Shulman.)
Policies Aplenty
As suggested in the testimony of Schafer, the Pentagon has no shortage of policies when it comes to environmental clean-up. But as good as the Pentagon is at making policy, the policies themselves are not uniformly good. One example Shulman cites is the Pentagon’s re-invention of a priority model that was, for all intents and purposes, identical to one developed by the EPA. While the Pentagon claimed it had special needs, in some areas, where Pentagon needs veer far from those of private industry, the priority model failed utterly to address them. A case in point, and one especially of interest in Hawai’i, is the matter of unexploded ordnance, which gets “shunted to the bottom of the military’s priority list” (49).
(In keeping with this policy, in 1989 the Pentagon ordered that no funds authorized under the Defense Environmental Restoration Account would be used to “investigate or clean up former explosive target ranges such as the subject site [Waikane Valley].” This was set forth in a memo dated July 31, 1989, from the Commander of the Pacific Division, Naval Facilities Engineering Command, to the commanding general, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. The memo stated that the prohibition on using DERA funds for ordnance clean-up “is a recent Assistant Secretary of Defense (Environmental) policy decision, which will be incorporated in the next update of the SECDEF FY90 DERA finding guidance.”)
Bombs Away
The policy on unexploded ordnance or, more generally, what is called ordnance and explosive waste (OEW) is unfortunate, not only for Hawai’i but for hundreds of areas around the country; Shulman makes reference to a 1990 report from the Congressional Budget Office that estimated nearly half of the 7,000 formerly used defense sites identified to date will require large, costly clean-ups. “Clean-up of another several hundred of these sites, according to the report, will necessitate the removal of unexploded ordnance and explosives manufacturing wastes” (106).
Shulman continues: “New information indicates, though that buried explosives could be far more prevalent than previously imagined…. [A] new estimate from the Army Corps branch in Huntsville, Alabama, projects that as many as a thousand of the military’s formerly used lands could be contaminated with unexploded bombs, including, in certain cases, unexploded chemical munitions.”
Incredibly, as vast as the problems at formerly used defense sites are, the Pentagon has, as suggested in the Navy memo above, refused to spend money on their clean-up. The director of the Army Corps of Engineers’ program to address contamination at FUDS is Thomas Wash, who is quoted by Shulman as describing the FUDS program “dollar rich, plan poor”. Annual funding has jumped nearly 50 percent in 1989 and 1990, but until recently, Shulman writes, “the Army Corps has been unable to spend the money allotted to it. Instead, the FUDS program has returned unused funds to the parent Defense Environmental Restoration Program (DERP) annually despite the extent of the problem that lies ahead”. Complicating matters further, Wash says, “the Army Corps often operates in the dark.” It frequently lacks access to information about past practices at sites used by Navy or Air Force personnel. Often little or no documentation about such practices even exists.
In Our Back Yard
As well as providing a context for understanding the Pentagon’s approach to environmental problems, Shulman provides case studies of pollution at military sites around the country. No Hawai’i site is discussed – but from all that I have been able to see of military operations in this state, this is more a matter of dumb luck than it is any lack of problems whose complexity and gravity are comparable to those recounted by Shulman.
More than a description of this dismal state of affairs, Shulman’s book is a guide to action. In his epilogue and in several appendices, he provides information that is intended to be of help to people wanting to learn more about potentially contaminated sites in their own communities. He lists addresses and telephone numbers of military agencies, EPA offices around the country, and national organizations that, in his words, “have contributed to the debate over the military’s environmental legacy.” He reprints pertinent passages of environmental laws and executive orders verbatim and has prepared a glossary of the sometimes arcane terminology one comes upon in discussions relating to military practices. Indeed, the last 90 pages of the book are devoted to appendices and references, including a section entitled “Strategies for Action.”
Shulman, a science writer by profession, recounts his own personal history of involvement with a military site in his home town of Watertown, Massachusetts. One cannot help but think that this has taken him from the armchair to the streets, figuratively speaking. For anyone wishing to repeat his journey the book he has written will be invaluable.
Volume 3, Number 2 August 1992