Transcript: U.S. Military Energy Strategies

CEBROWSKI INSTITUTE
U.S. MILITARY ENERGY STRATEGIES

WELCOME:
MITZI WERTHEIM,
FOUNDER, THE ENERGY CONVERSATION

MODERATOR:
MARV LANGSTON,
PRINCIPAL, LANGSTON ASSOCIATES

SPEAKERS:
REAR ADM. PHILIP HART CULLOM,
DIRECTOR, FLEET READINESS DIVISION, U.S. NAVY

MICHAEL F. MCGHEE,
ACTING DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY; ENVIRONMENT, SAFETY AND OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH; U.S. AIR FORCE

CARLA E. LUCCHINO,
ASSISTANT DEPUTY COMMANDANT, INSTALLATIONS AND LOGISTICS, HEADQUARTERS, U.S. MARINE CORPS

JEFFERY G. ORNER,
DEPUTY ASSISTANT COMMANDANT FOR ENGINEERING & LOGISTICS, U.S. COAST GUARD

KEVIN T. GEISS,
INSTALLATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT, U.S. ARMY

AMANDA J. DORY,
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR STRATEGY,
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2009
5:30 P.M.

Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.




MITZI WERTHEIM:.  Hello, My name is Mitzi Wertheim and I am the Director of The Energy Conversation and I’d like to welcome all of you to our 37th session of The Energy Conversation. The effort to get this started began 5 years ago when my former boss, Deputy Secretary of the Navy, Jim Woolsey, was asked what he would do if elected President, and answered, “I would reduce our dependence to foreign oil.” Marv Langston, who was then at SAIC, asked me to lunch so we could “do something about the energy issue.” It turned out there were a lot of people who wanted to do something. Back then you couldn’t even mention the word “energy” in the Pentagon without getting deer in the head lights response. But for some of us, the situation was too urgent. Between catastrophic climate change issues, 2 wars and 80% of the casualty rate in theater from IEDs while transporting liquid fuels – a group of interdisciplinary and intergenerational Americans – from high level Pentagon officials and advisors, Service members, congressional staffers, leadership consultants, and a Hollywood screenwriter – a group started to form, that became The Energy Consensus. Now it is a first rate learning group that serves as a think tank for The Energy Conversation. It was from activators within this group – that we were able to get the leadership of the Department of Defense and the Office of the President, in late 2005 and early 2006, to declare to the world in a few words that “America has a problem. It is addicted to oil.” Those words changed the game forever and opened a new door for change. I would like to recognize the people that made that happen: Marv Langston, Nora Maccoby, Lisa Wright, from Congressman Bartlett’s office, Steve Wehrenberg – Steve, where are you sitting? – from the Coast Guard and Maj. Todd Hathaway, who’s from the Army, but I think he’s out front.  Is Todd here?  Anyway, what – okay – and Adam Siegel, and without these people – Adam is from Northrop Grumman – without these people, none of this would happen, so please let’s give them a round of applause.  (Applause.)

Now, look where we are today, five years later.  All five services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense are now leading the country and the world, setting in motion new models for sustainability.  It’s an incredible opportunity for America, for states, local governments and the federal government to work together creating new models and the new energy roadmaps that will create more jobs and in the process ensure greater security for all of us.

We haven’t – we have two awards that we give from the Naval Postgraduate School, and I think we’re going to start without our second awardee.  The Energy Conversation, which is an award from the Naval Postgraduate School and the Cebrowski Institute, gives this award to an individual or individuals who show profound excellence in leadership and showing the way and working within the system.  They help change for the common good along the Energy Conversation mandate of listen, learn, connect, share, collaborate.

Our first award this evening goes to Marine Corps general – Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, who is on vacation this week.  He gets to his new assignment in November.  He gets the award for in 2006, when he was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom as the commanding general for the Multinational Force West, he sent a message back to Washington asking for renewable energy for the troops.  Lives were being lost on the long convoys taking fuel and water to the troops.  These convoys – I saw photographs of them – they looked like enormous freight trains, one tanker next to the other.  Embodying the common – the principles of common sense, Gen. Zilmer became the first and highest-ranking official to raise the question from the field about doing things differently.

With 80 percent of our soldiers in the field dying from moving liquid fuels, Zilmer’s action was dramatic.  He wanted technology that would not only lower costs but save lives.  He’s a true American hero, and we honor him this with award, and accepting the award for the general is Col. Fred Milburn, who was in fact the general’s aide when they were all in Iraq together.  So Fred, please come up.  (Applause.) 

COL. FRED MILBURN:  Holy cow.

MS. WERTHEIM:  Holy cow.

COL. MILBURN:  Okay.  Well, I’m not sure I’m going to actually give this to Gen. Zilmer.  (Laughter.)  I didn’t tell him about it.  No, I’m just kidding.  You’ve got to understand, back in those days it was a desperate time.  The Marine Corps had moved out; when we came there, there were only 50 places.  Within the first four months, we had moved to 173 bases, because we were in every little village out there trying to stop the bad guy in one of the most violent places at the time that was out there.

And our – the convoys going out there were just incredible, and we were doing everything we could and everything that Gen. Zilmer could find, and we were stealing and anything else we could do, any technology from any place trying to lessen that load and give the Marines out there in the most desperate end out there some power and all that he would need and she would need to fulfill the job.

So it was out of actually desperation that he came up with this, and we worked very hard.  We’re in the same situation in Afghanistan, both us in the Army and the services out there.  We’re spreading out further and further to those little villages and trying to help them help themselves, and that means more people on the road, it means a lot more energy use.  And we’re – you know, when the Marine Corps at the tactical level is talking this, we’re in need of any technologies that we can get to lessen that load.

For Gen. Zilmer, I’d like to say, thank you very much, and he appreciates this, and so does I MEF Forward.  Thank you.  (Applause.)

MS. WERTHEIM:  Oh, I have to talk more.  (Inaudible, off mike) – find the page.  Our second award this month goes to Paul Werbos, from the National Science Foundation, and Paul is a – he’s with the Brookings Institution at the moment and working in Sen. Specter’s office on the Hill, and perhaps he’s gotten held up that way.  I never gave him my cell phone, so he didn’t have a chance to call and say, oh, I couldn’t be here.

Paul has core responsibility at the academy, and this is really long, for the adaptive and intelligence systems area within the power-control and adaptive-networks program and for the new area of quantum, molecular and high-performance modeling and simulation for devices and systems.  Can you imagine trying to get all of that on a business card?  (Chuckles.)  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Paul.  His contributions and leadership and innovation through the many years in government service are absolutely stunning.  And his résumé is on the table for you to read.

As a leading member of the Energy Consensus, Paul has stood out consistently as a dynamic thinker who continues to open the aperture and push our ability to understand complex issues.  Recently, Paul pointed out that our national addiction to oil is within the same Rubik’s Cube as our previous addition to slavery.  Paul really does have a way with words, and on behalf of Paul, Adam Siegel is going to accept this award.  (Applause.)

ADAM SIEGEL:  I think it’s worth taking one note to say that not in the bio not used by Mitzi is werbos.com.  Paul is a very innovative thinker in system of systems.  He has an approach for how you would come close to eliminating our demand for fossil fuels in support of cars in a flex-fuel system using plug-in hybrids.  He also is a very big thinker when it comes to space-based solar power, so werbos.com, I think Paul would appreciate that promotion.

MS. WERTHEIM:  Right, thank you.  (Applause.)  Okay, so the program begins, and Marv Langston, who basically kicked the can down the road and started it all, is going to be our moderator for the program this evening.  So Marv, the program is yours, and I just want to welcome all of you who are sitting up here, and thank you for being part of the program tonight.

MARV LANGSTON:  So let me first thank all of you for being here.  This is exciting to have such a great audience of very interested people and such a wonderful panel here for you tonight.  I used to work with Adm. Art Cebrowski, who the institute is named after, at Monterey, and he was one of the most innovative thinkers in the Navy Department and unfortunately died of cancer long before his time was up.  So he would be proud to know that this room is filled in his honor tonight.

So first of all, I’m going to introduce each of the speakers as we go through.  I’ll ask the speakers to speak for 10 minutes or so, and then we will have a – the panel reassemble for your questions, and I guess answer your questions until everybody’s tired or they kick us out, or one of the two.

Our first speaker tonight is Amanda Dory.  She’s the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, which is a new position she might tell us about, I think, under the Under Secretary for Policy’s Office in the Department of Defense, and she has – if you look at all of the bios for these folks on the table that – I think you can see what an amazing person she and the rest of the folks are on the panel.  I know she also spent a good deal of time over at CSIS with John Hamre, the fellow that I used to work for, who is one of our great Americans in this great city of ours.  So let me turn it over to Amanda and let her give – you’re welcome to do it either way.  (Inaudible, off mike.)

AMANDA DORY:  Good evening.  This is a terrific crowd.  I wasn’t aware of all of the interest in energy around town that kind of pulls together an event like this.  I only found out on Friday that I had been invited to participate, but I’m delighted to be here and would like to thank Mitzi for that.  And I regret that I wasn’t able to line up the two-parent, three-child schedule to be with you the entire evening, so I will give remarks and stay for a little bit and then unfortunately duck out, so apologies to you and to the other panelist colleagues.  So sorry about that.

The strategy office is not a new position.  The strategy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense has been there for quite some time, but it is a new-to-me position.  What we are focused on, our day-to-day work, is long-term strategy, development and articulation, and as part of that we do long-term trends work, long-term futures.  And so we’re a part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense that is really trying to look out 20 years to the extent possible, 50 years where we can.  We do it with a great sense of humility and humbleness, knowing the inexact nature of trying to make those types of projections.  We do trends analysis, and then we also do scenarios work, where we have the specific scenarios where we try to work through, in future settings, how the Department of Defense and other government agencies may be called upon to operate.

As part of that work, for some years now we’ve been looking at a range of trends that we think are critical to the future security environment, and they go well beyond the typical conflict or the science and technology trends that you would anticipate that the department looks like.  We’ve been looking at demographics for a number of years, we’ve been looking at climate change, we’ve been looking at the environment, we’ve been looking at the economy, we’ve been looking at culture and identity and governance and trying to understand. 

You know, many of those don’t have quantitative data projections underlying them, but in terms of conversations with experts throughout the U.S. government and well beyond the U.S. government with international partners, we have a variety of conversations – not 200-people-at-a-time conversations, but smaller conversations of trying to understand how others see the future unfolding, and from that we assemble alternative futures and then try to understand what the Department of Defense might be called upon to do.

Another role that is specific to this time right now is the Quadrennial Defense Review, which is something that – it’s a congressional reporting requirement that we undertake every four years, as the name would imply.  And for the first time in the Quadrennial Defense Review, we are looking at climate change and energy, based on the law, which was amended to require that we look at that specifically.  So we have had an effort underway for the last six months or so that is looking specifically at energy and climate considerations.  And so I’ll share a little bit about that with you tonight.

But the message I would like to get across this evening before turning it over to the speakers from the services, who will be able to give you a terrific sense of what’s happening in terms of installations energy and operational energy and just the tremendous effort underway in the services, what I would like to give you the sense of is that the department is taking these issues very seriously; we’re looking at energy and we’re looking at climate directly as interrelated issues.  You can’t really look seriously at one without looking at the other.  We are looking at both because we need to for our future-oriented security environment explorations, as I was mentioning earlier. 

So we have an internal demand signal that causes us to do that and then we have an external demand signal, as far as the congressional requirement that we specifically address those issues in the QDR.  So we are taking that seriously, and I think you’ll see, in terms of what the service presentations are this evening, they’re taking it very seriously based on operational imperatives that energy efficiency is truly a part of the department’s operating procedures now and on into the future.

Another point that I would like to make is that while the department spends a lot of time trying to understand when it is in the lead in a particular context and when it is in support of another government agency, for example.  And so in the case of both energy and climate change, the department is not the lead federal agency for either of those items, but the department has an important leadership role to play in support of other agencies, whether it’s the Department of Energy, whether it’s the EPA, whether it’s in support of the State Department, as far as climate negotiations.  So the department is not the lead for either of those issue-sets, but we are taking them very, very seriously and supporting the other agencies in a whole-of-government approach to those issue-sets.

I do think – I’d like to spend just a little bit of time talking about areas where I think we can demonstrate and are demonstrating that type of leadership, and I have a very short list of six things I’ll try to run through in my remaining five minutes to highlight some areas of leadership, in my view.  The first has to do with long-term planning.  This is something that the department does culturally with that long-term focus and very structured planning processes and approaches, and in my view, that’s an area where we can lead, whether it’s with other elements of the U.S. government or whether it’s with foreign partners.  But bringing to bear those techniques that we used, the planning techniques, the scenario and analytic techniques, we can use those in support of broader efforts to understand the impacts of climate change and energy on national security.

The second has to do with efficiency, and I think you’ll hear a lot about that from the – my service colleagues here tonight.  The department has important opportunities to lead, whether it’s installations efficiency, energy efficiency, whether it’s operational energy use and efficiencies there.  And we’ve already heard in the presentation of the award the imperative for operational energy efficiency in terms of loss of life, loss of treasure based on inefficient energy-consumption approaches.

A third area where I believe we can lead is in adaptation.  Adaptation is how we will begin to adjust, moving forward to climate changes.  And given the department’s extensive installations within the United States, as well as facilities overseas, this will be an imperative, and I think you’ll hear some of that in the service discussions as well.  Within the United States, it’ll give us the opportunity, again, to support the efforts that will happen at the state level and at the local level as we all contend with the impacts of climate change, whether it’s sea-level rise, whether it’s temperature rise, whether it’s an increase in extreme weather events, their intensity or their number.

The fourth area where I believe the department can show leadership is in support to civil authorities, and I’ve kind of mentioned that indirectly in some of the preceding ones.  But it’s something that we do.  If you’re familiar with the homeland-security efforts within the U.S. interagency, the department routinely provides support to domestic civil authorities at the federal level and state and local and I believe will continue to do that and will be able to do that in the domain of energy and climate change.

The fifth area has to do with military-to-military engagement, and it’s something that we do on a daily basis with countries around the world.  But that gives us an opportunity to introduce energy and climate considerations into those dialogues that we do, military-to-military and also political-military dialogues with other civilian ministries of defense personnel.  This is something, if you look around at the current combatant commanders, U.S. AFRICOM and U.S. SOUTHCOM are well our in front, leading the charge based on the situations that they see and their areas of responsibility and based on the demand from foreign military partners.

And last but not least, I’d like to mention moral authority, and I think this will be something that is right up Mitzi’s lane, as far as her perspective on how to proceed.  But the moral authority of the military as an institution, whether it is retired military leaders who are speaking out on the issues of energy and climate change, as we’ve seen in recent publications.  I won’t cite any institutions in the specific, but I’m sure you’re all very familiar with some of the work that’s come out in the last several years.  And with serving military, I think there’s an opportunity when the Defense Department takes things seriously, and given the tremendous buying power as an institution and the ability to impact on R&D and S&T, that there’s a real opportunity for moral leadership as well.

So I’d like to close with that for now.  Just to let you know, we are indeed, within this Quadrennial Defense Review process, taking these issues very seriously, and on into our normal planning processes.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.) 

MR. LANGSTON:  So while we have Amanda here, I was going to offer anybody in the audience who would like to ask one or two questions before we lose her.  We will do it out of sequence right now if anyone has a question.  If not, let me just ask you quickly, how are we dealing with the aspect of the increased threats associated with what would happen in energy-constrained environment or crises as a part of the work you’re doing over there?

MS. DORY:  Increased threat as far as –

MR. LANGSTON:  If we have energy crises going on around the world, the potential of military operations associated with that to get our oil.

MS. DORY:  Okay.  So the question has to do with how are we dealing with the increased possibility of conflict related to energy consumption.  I would answer in two different ways.  One is that in terms of the actual Quadrennial Defense Review and the depiction of the future security environment, we’ll certainly capture that dimension of the future security environment and the sweat as far as sea lines of communication, freedom of navigation, the ability for energy supplies to transit safely and securely around the world.

As far as particular manifestations of energy scarcity, whether it’s instability within a particular producer country or whether it would have to do with interruptions to freedom of navigation, whether it’s from non-state actors, for example, piracy, or state actors through deliberate blockade type of scenarios, those types of issues are typically worked out within the scenario process that we use, where we will look at a particular setting and situation and work through what the – what a particular – informed by intelligence, what a plausible scenario might be, and then how the department would posture, along with other agency partners, to address that issue.  So you won’t see that played out in the public QDR report document, but it is certainly underway in the internal planning processes.

If I could take just a minute, I’d like to recognize two members of my staff who are here tonight and are the core of the energy and climate team.  I hope this won’t embarrass them too much, but Col. Paul Shimpf (ph) and Com. Esther McClure, they are the – at the core of a two-person tiger team that has been working this issue-set for the last six months or so, and they’re just terrific and I wanted to recognize them.  (Applause.)  Sir?

Q:  Yes, ma’am.  How much do you count not possible –

MS. WERTHEIM:  Please identify yourself.

Q:  Oh, sure, Bill Chase (ph) with J-5 – not possible events like the decoupling of the dollar from oil trade or China not buying our bonds?

MS. DORY:  It depends on – again, if you’re talking about specifically within this particular congressional reporting requirement that we do that has kind of got a lot of focus right now because we’re in the endgame before delivering it to Congress in February, or if you’re talking about broadly speaking.  More broadly speaking, in the interagency process, we do have the opportunities to sit down with the multiple agencies that do lead the economic dimension of the instruments of national power and work through some of these scenarios.

We have opportunities to do that in advance.  You know, certain long-term planning groups work through these types of situations to identify what would policy responses be, what would operational responses be?  In the specific report document, again, you’ll see an economic treatment that will highlight some of the different economic dimensions, whether they’re at the strategic level, like you’re talking about, or at more of an operational level, as far as, if you look at our operations underway in Iraq and Afghanistan and how important it has been to get the economic dimension right in that smaller micro-setting.  Ma’am.

Q:  Hi, I’m Lisa Wright, with Congressman Roscoe Bartlett’s office and I have a question about the fully burdened cost of fuel currently in the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.  There was an article just last week in The Hill.  Mr. Geiss was quoted – the headline was $400 fully burdened cost of fuel delivery in Afghanistan influencing Congress’ decisions.  That was a quote of some concern by John Murtha, who is the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.  And Mr. Geiss quoted other analysts that the fully burdened cost of fuel delivery in Afghanistan could be up to $1,000 per gallon and that the Marine Corps, for instance, were using 800,000 gallons per month.  Does that type of very, very immediate-term cost of fuel burden – how is that, or is it at all appropriated into the QDR deliberation basis?

MS. DORY:  That’s an excellent question, and I think you’ll hear part of the answer in the service presentations that focus on here and now, today in current operations and current budgets.  What is the impact of the fully burdened cost of fuel?  And so you’ll see that kind of divergence between, here’s the price at the pump and then here’s, no kidding, what it costs to deliver it to the very end of the supply chain.  You’ll see an appreciation of the necessity of using the fully burdened cost of fuel in terms of our medium-term operations, as well as moving into the longer-term acquisition processes for future acquisitions to ensure that energy is correctly valued there as well.

So what you see in the near term is kind of the pinch of what’s happening because those factors weren’t taken into consideration previously – in previous planning, so now you have the budget impact today and the budget crunch there, and what you’ll see in something like a QDR will be the, okay, how do we fix this going forward?  What – how do you reset the demand signal in the medium term and the long term within the acquisition processes to get that right?  Sir?

MR. SIEGEL:  Adam Siegel, Energy Consensus.  To continue with the economics, one of the lines in the energy world for energy experts is, those who can afford the energy-efficient upfront payments can afford to be inefficient.  Those who can’t afford inefficiencies can’t afford the upfront costs.  DOD is going through a period of very tight budgets, declining budgets – (inaudible, off mike) – how are you in (your look ?) from the major and the colonel and otherwise taking this and dealing with the comptroller and otherwise to say, here are investment streams we need so we’re not killed tomorrow?

MS. DORY:  I think I’ll give you a down payment on the answer, but it probably won’t be fully satisfactory, and again, I think you’ll – as you probably know, the vast majority of the department’s resources are vested within the services, and I think you’ll hear a little bit about how that’s playing out in real time in terms of the current budget cycle and how you make those types of tradeoffs, because, yes, there’s an investment now to get the payoff later, and it’s a very painful investment relative to other types of capital and acquisition costs.

Within the broader review that I’m working on, what you see is an effort to – we talk about balancing risk, that we have to balance the risk across the department between – the secretary talks about balancing between the near term, and succeeding where we are, and then in the future.  So you’ve got a temporal balance.  He also talks about balancing between the types of operations we’re doing today, which are broadly characterized as irregular warfare or a counterinsurgency, counterterrorism-type operations on the one hand with the possibility of high-intensity, advanced-technology types of conflict with a state actor on the other hand.  And how will we balance, from a capabilities perspective, from an investment perspective across those two?

But the other part of it is – the other balance to be made is between people, and we can roughly think of that as kind of force-management challenges, and the resources associated with maintaining the force that we have and then the institutional risk or the institutional dimension.  When you look at facilities, when you look at acquisition reform, the industrial base.  So we are trying to use a framework where we’re looking across all four of those dimensions to achieve the overall risk balance, and within that, the resource balance as well.

So I can’t give you a, you know, here’s the answer type of answer, but I can give you, here are the considerations in coming up with that answer.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.  (Applause.) 

MS. WERTHEIM:  I’m sorry to interrupt at this point, but I have some administrative announcements.  Would you raise your hands again where there are some seats, because we’ve got people standing in the doorway?  So please come forward, come in, find one of these empty seats.  We’ve got a table of five which only has one person sitting there, right?  Nora, she’s great.

MS.    :  There are other people here.

MS. WERTHEIM:  Oh.  Well, but they’re on stage, so those seats are available.  So come on in, don’t stand in the doorway.  Secondly, I’m going to ask you all to turn off your cell phones.  Right.  The other thing I want to do is I want to have the Naval Academy midshipmen stand up.  I mean, I’m so impressed how many have come in from Annapolis, so would you folks all stand up and be recognized?  (Applause.)

And, finally, on every table – and King Kong knows this very well – I would like you to take the envelope because we have a signup sheet.  And I’d like you all to sign up, print – so we can read it.  We get these sheets where people sign their names and you have no idea who they are, but this turns out to be terribly important to us.  (Chuckles.)  Look at that.  It’s wonderful because last time he walked off with the envelope but got messed in with his papers and I had to track him down. 

So if you all – someone take responsibility and make sure that everybody at the table signs up, leave the envelope and your nametags on the table and we’ll collect them afterwards, and I’m sorry to interrupt with these administrative issues but I wanted to make sure everybody got to meet the midshipmen. 

MR. LANGSTON:  So in case those of you who are newbies don’t understand why your nametag is so big, it’s because of Mitzi – because Mitzi is a social anthropologist and she figures if we can’t read each others’ names, we’re not going to get very much farther.

So I was glad to see that you mentioned the sea lines of communication and protecting our oceans.  And next up, we have Adm. Philip Hart Cullom, who is the director of Fleet Readiness from the CNO staff in the Pentagon.  Adm. Cullom is recently returned from Carrier Strike Group 8 so he’s a true war-fighter that has been out there protecting our interests in wherever his ships were traveling, so let me just ask you to say a few words.  (Applause.)

REAR ADM. PHILIP HART CULLOM:  Well, before I get started, I’ll also mention that Amanda made a point of saying that energy and climate change are linked.  And on the Navy side of the house – and actually, I think – and certainly, Navy and Marine Corps side of the house – and Carla will be speaking shortly, too – we look at those two things as linked.

I run taskforce energy for the Navy; there’s also a taskforce climate change.  The oceanographer of the Navy runs taskforce climate change.  He has people on my taskforce; I have people on his taskforce. 

So as you can see, we’re certainly looking at these things in a very linked way.  As I start out, I’m going to go back to the midshipmen again, and the reason I am is because it is great that they’re here today, and it’s great that there are a lot of young folks – I think you all probably are the youngest folks in the room here. 

But the point I want to make on that is that – and that kind of kicks me right into the brief – is that by the time that you all are either air wing commanders or commodores of squadrons or commodores of submarine groups, the energy consumption, if you will, at looking at lights and whatnot at night 24 hours around the clock, if you could look at it all in one fell swoop, looks like this today – (pause) – that’s what it’s going to be in 20 years.

So before the people in this room – some of them are actually out there commanding things at a very significant level, the world is going to look an awful lot different.  And as it looks a lot different this way, if things don’t radically and profoundly change – and probably at least the desire of people around the world, I think, and speaking with the folks in OSD, I think they certainly see that those demands will be probably somewhat similar to that – that we’ve got to make sure we’ve got a plan.

On the Navy side of the house – and we look at this from the far-out side – with the help of the Air Force, I might add – looking at it from this point of view – and from NASA, other interagency, 80 percent of the world’s fuel travels by ocean.  We’ve got to worry about this because if that is – and that gets to the heart of one of those questions that was just asked, about what if instabilities occur, are we prepared for that – we really do need to be prepared.

When I quickly go around the Horn here – and actually, for this one, I’ll use my handy dandy pointer on the right here – it is a political, military, economic and environmental problem.  Here’s the politics piece of it.  The energy comes from some pretty not nice places.  The economics piece is that any time supply and demand gets out of whack, the price, which is shown in green, does something pretty significant – either goes down when you’ve got too much of it or it goes way up if you don’t have enough of it. 

What that means for us in the Navy – and this is what got us looking at why we had to have a plan for energy – is that it cost us 1.2 billion for fuel in 2007.  The next year, in 2008, when it went up to $147 a barrel, it cost us 5.1 billion. 

Now, as the director of Fleet Readiness, I pay the fuel bill, so that became very relevant not just to me but also to my boss, the chief of Naval Operations, who said, you better come up with a plan, Phil, as well as with the secretary of the Navy, who said the same thing. 

So looking at it, we also could not ignore the fact that you’ve got to keep an idea as to what’s going on with carbon and where carbon’s going to take us.  And, again, that’s why taskforce climate change and taskforce energy are both linked together.

And then we looked back at ourselves, our problem inside the Navy lifelines is, okay, we’ve been doing a great job in conservation efforts, and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, but where is it going to go in the future?  There were a lot of indicators that it was not a good potential story in the future if we don’t start to figure out different ways of doing business and aggressive technology and policy changes. 

Here’s our USA Today slide, if you will, of energy in the Navy.  75 percent of it is tactical.  Only 25 percent of it is shore.  That does not mean that one is the preponderance of the focus; it just means that we’ve got to know where the energy’s going and where, also, that it’s coming from.  You see that more than half is coming from petroleum.

When you look at petroleum, necking down to that, and you look at U.S. petroleum consumption – by the way, 60 percent of these barrels – this is a hundred barrels – 60 of these come from overseas.  The U.S. government has 2 percent of it; DOD is 93 percent of that, and the Navy is about a quarter of the Department of Defense.  We’re pretty evenly split between maritime and aviation but we also have an expeditionary piece and a shore piece of that, as well.

We’ve had a lot of successes over the years.  We’ve got geothermal plants that’ve been in operation for 20 years.  We’ve had an incentivized conservation program that actually did make a difference even when I was out there in my first command tour; something that people vied to try to get was that award. 

You can see down there in Guantanamo Bay we’ve got a wind farm already operational – 3.8 megawatts.  We’re doing a lot more in training simulators these days.  And we’ve actually put up on bases around the country solar panels that are actually providing shade for the cars at the same time that we’re getting megawatts of power that goes back into our consumption on the base.

But we do have a problem and CNO said, okay, I want you to set up a taskforce energy.  And I’ll tell you, a taskforce energy is a lot tougher than a taskforce out there at sea because there’s a lot more moving pieces to it, and a lot more coordination that has to happen that’s a lot more difficult, really, than the simple means of just putting out an order and everybody goes out there and goes and does it. 

And when working with the other departments, we have to understand the culture involved with each and every one of those departments to move forward properly.  We set up an energy coordination office and, in fact, Capt. Brown, if you just kind of wave your hand or stand up – he is in charge of the energy coordination office.  We have working groups – functional working groups as well as supporting working groups; you can see what those are.  Those are all led by flag or senior executives – one- and two-stars and/or senior executives – SESs. 

Our strategy is we tried to make it, as much as we could, pretty simple.  At the end of the day, it truly is about energy security whether it’s ashore or afloat.  And afloat is when we look at both of those things together, what we find the common theme throughout each of these is conservation, efficiency and alternatives.  And I’ll explain a little bit more when I do a quick clean-up slide at the end that shows why those three things are actually very interrelated together at the end of the day.  The base of the whole thing, though, has to be environmental stewardship and to be good participants and members of the federal family as well as the nation. 

We looked at it as a line of site though from tactical, if you will, close in, with near-term budgets and figuring how we were going to go ahead and get that aggressive technology and policy course changed; be able to take and leverage those quick wins; to be able to look out 10 years or so – and we got some help just last week – I see a number of folks that were at the naval energy forum from last week.  And those of you that were there know the secretary of the Navy put out some things that fit right into this category.

We also have to look a little bit further into the 20-year vector period to make sure that we are looking to the long term – remember the 30-year ambition and where the lights will end up being and what the dynamics of that end up implying.  So we’ve also tried to dovetail in with the long-term efforts that the secretary of defense’s office has been doing with looking at the longer term as well. 

We also did a global war game – in the global war game in 2009, just this year, we played energy in it.  In fact, Cmdr. McClure was up there and played a portion of that game, as well; saw it firsthand.  A number of other folks, I think, in the room were there, as well.  The bottom line on that – it’s right in the bottom line here – logistics is an Achilles’ heel.  Most people that have ever played war games know that, but when you really play it hard, what you find out is fuel efficiency, fuel-efficient platforms, could truly, truly make the difference.

And we’ve looked also out to the 2030 timeframe, looking at the kind of alternative energy futures and what could end up being more important or less important and the trends and uncertainties that Ms. DORI? (40:43) – talked about are exactly the kinds of things that we were trying to figure out and opt-test out there that long-range 30-year vision piece.

And where you end up – and for context, if this is where we’re at today and this is where we’re going to be in 20 years or so, looking at that – expanding – it could be like looking at the wall out there – your future could be over here or it could be over here; there could be anyone of a number of those things but if you’ve – in your alternatives that you’ve looked at, you’ve kind of taken that into account, then we’re probably pretty sure that what we’re planning for and what we have actually set in motion for our energy plan will, in fact, be able to account for almost any eventuality that could end up occurring.

Some of the current initiatives that are out there – and at the end of the day on initiatives, it isn’t just about what we say; it’s truly about what we do.  These are the things that we are in fact doing, things that we have money devoted to and things that we are moving towards.  We are going to put – many of you know, Makin Island commissioning is coming up here shortly and she is a hybrid electric ship, has some of the greatest advancements that we’ve made in propulsion power in quite a few number of years. 

Well, we’re also going to go back to looking at reset, if you will, looking at the current force that exists out there and going back to the destroyers, the work force or the fleet out there – and there are an awful lot of those – and make them hybrid electric drive.

Looking at HVAC systems and, behaviorally, changing how we plan and go from place to place so that we can do that in the most efficient way we can, stern flaps to keep the amount of rooster tail, as we call it, from the back end of the ship from getting kicked up, if you can minimize that, then you’re much more efficient; you get three to 4 percent out of that.  Advanced hull coatings, again, several percent, but a percent is a lot when you spread that across a significant portion of the Navy. 

Aviation side, the F414 engine, we’re making modifications to that so that as those come in through the aviation depot maintenance overhauls that they go through, they’ll get a new, refurbished engine that has some significant advancements in it that, again, saves us a couple of a percent – of fuel. 

Now, when you think about that, the most expensive fuel for us is F-18-to-F-18-delivered fuel.  And anything you can do that gives you an extra 3 percent is an extra 3 percent more range or an extra 3 percent more time underway.  And that’s important if it’s a dark stormy night and you have a nugget pilot that’s boltered twice already, is coming back around for the last time before, hopefully, there’s another bingo field he can go to.  But if there isn’t, the only place he can get to is where you’re at.  So that 3 percent could become very critical from a tactical perspective.

So we’re looking at all these things that are doing in terms of in addition to is it more efficient, is it giving us something in terms of combat capability?  And then you see spreading that energy conservation program to the aviation side, as well.

Expeditionary side, full-mission trainers – you heard me talk about that – well, we’re spreading that out to a lot of other parts of the Navy and, of course, these things are gas turbines that run these LCACs.  So being able to do those in simulators saves a lot of fuel.  On board vehicle power – and I think you’re actually going to hear Ms. Lucino talk about this a little bit more because this is something jointly shared between both the Navy and the Marine Corps – and efficient environmental control units, again, which helps out both the Navy and the Marine Corps.

Current shore initiatives, we are moving towards smart metering.  And some of that is a down payment – a down payment towards a smart grid.  That down payment is something that has to be paid.  You may not see an initial ROI out of that, but if you don’t do that first, you’re not going to be able to get all of the other things that are necessary for a smart grid, which gives us not only the capability to ensure that we are more efficient because you can certainly get great efficiencies out of a smart grid, but you can also – from a critical infrastructure protection, you can get a great deal out of it that way, as well.

This little moniker over here is ocean thermal energy conversion for some of our remote sites, remote bases, out there where fuel is very expensive – even places like Hawaii where fuel is very expensive – to be able to use the difference in temperature between the surface of the water down to very deep levels, that serves as an engine that you can convert into power and fresh water.

Wave action, obviously wind turbines as well and photovoltaics.  Alternative fuels – and this is an area that directly relates to some things that the secretary said last week – moving ahead very closely with the other services on biofuels – and you’ll hear more about that, I think, in some of their talks, as well. 

And as you can see, we’re testing out a lot of different things – they’re all kind of around the circle down here – and ultimately to give us a DDG and a green strike group and a green Hornet.  In fact, the first piece of that – this is Assistant Secretary Natsuhara looking at an F404 – this is a Hornet engine; this is being run on biofuel – Camelina-based biofuel – in afterburner; first time, I think, that we’ve run an engine in afterburner with a biofuel.  The Air Force has done it a lot before and they’ll talk about their side.

Energy message – these are our energy messages:  assuring mobility – and this is so that we have off ramps to petroleum – other sources, other advantages petroleum – and that gives us security, which translates to mission success.

Expanding our tactical reach – that gets to that F-18 to F-18-delivered fuel or, instead of every four days that you have to refuel alongside an oiler, which is tactical vulnerability, you can stretch that out to eight or 10 or more days – lightening the load, as well, and you’ll hear the Marine Corps talk about that.

And then, finally, greening our footprint:  Everything we do in the top three – particularly expanding the tactical reach and lightening the load and assuring mobility – can help us accomplish greening our footprint and assure greening our footprint also gives us resiliency from the grid.

Finally, these were the five goals that the secretary of the Navy announced at the Naval Energy Forum.  Some of these relate to, as you can see, acquisition processes, and things that we will now mandatorily include:  sailing a great green fleet; a green strike in local ops in 2012 and then sail it in 2016 – and that will include the aircraft that are flying off it; reduce petroleum on nontactical vehicles by 2015 – we’ll be at 50 percent in the commercial fleet; alternative energy ashore by 2020 – 50 percent shore-based by alternative sources; and then, finally, down there at the bottom, energy-use Navy wide, 2020 – 50 percent of total energy consumption from alternative sources.

So it could mean that – (laughter) – or it could mean that – and in fact, you may see some sails and things in the future.  But they’ll look a lot different than these, promise you.  But if you think about this as a platform, this was revolutionary for its time, and the Navy, over the years, over the centuries, has always tried to look at how can it get that extra couple of knots of speed, if you will, or the extra couple of whatever to be able to have tactical advantage. 

Well, these days that tactical advantage will not necessarily be an extra knot; it may be an extra gallon gas.  And going from the coal to oil and now oil to the next steps are the places that we’re headed and where we’re going.  Thank you.

MR. LANGSTON:  Thank you, Admiral.  That was great.  So we’re going to have the great green fleet as opposed to the great white fleet.  That’ll be impressive. 

    Next up, we have Dr. Kevin Geiss; he’s the program director for energy security in the secretary of the Army’s Office for Installations and Environment.  And my paper says here he’s responsible for development coordination and implementation of the Army’s energy security strategy, so that’s got to be a big job.  (Chuckles, applause.)

KEVIN GEISS:  Well, while we’re waiting, I took the opportunity to drop some propaganda on all the tables, so please grab one of those, take it home with you.  If you don’t capture the principles from my talk, I’ve got them written down here in blue and white.

I’m happy to once again be Mike McGhee’s warm-up act.  (Laughter, off-side conversation.)

Okay, I’m pleased to be here this evening.  If the Army was standing up here a year ago, Mr. Paul Bollinger sitting here in the front table here would have a whole lot less to say – (chuckles) – but he did kick things off, and over the last 11, almost 12 months here, the Army has made significant strides in moving forward and addressing energy security for us – not only for ourselves but I believe that we’re leading the nation.

Obviously, leadership is very much interested in what we’re doing as far as energy, not only in the Department of Defense but across the nation.  So I think we’re at a critical time right now where we have the support of the administration and our leaders, including our brand-new secretary of the Army. 

One of the first things that was looked at in the Army was what are all of the existing directives, executive orders, mandates, et cetera – and this is just an eye chart, but it just sort of lays out for you all the things that we’re looking at that add to the context of how we have to address energy security for the Army. 

And then just recently, we had the new executive order signed by the president, and the NDAA, which is yet to be signed – I think the House passed the conference on that but we’re waiting for the Senate.  So we’ll have more mandates as the Army and the other services have to meet.

So on the one hand, we’re focusing very much on the things that are going to improve our tactical advantage as we operate, but also we’re very cognizant of the things that make up the context of how we, as a federal agency, address energy in the conduct of our mission.

So out of that legislation and other mandates, when we pooled that together, we had a group called the Army Senior Energy Council, and we put together a series of goals that we thought addressed most of what we wanted to do in the Army – and they’re laid out there for you on the right-hand side:  reducing our energy consumption where possible; increasing our energy efficiencies across all platform as well as our installations; increasing our use of renewable and alternative energy; assuring access to sufficient energy supplies; and reducing our adverse impacts on the environment. 

And how each of these goals is applied to a particular situation – whether it’s on an installation or a weapons system – may have a different mix employed, but these are the guiding goals that we have for the strategy within the Army. 

You know, it’s not our purpose to come up with a brand-new definition of what energy security is; I think most people understand what it is.  But for our purposes, we wanted to focus on five key components that address the main things that we were concerned about as far as energy security for the Army. 

And first off, surety (sic):  We need to make sure we have the power that we require for our missions.  Supply – where are we getting that power and energy from?  Is it being trucked in on a tanker?  Is it coming out of the outlet within our barracks and our offices?

Sufficiency – well, it’s not just enough to have power but you need to have sufficient power to complete the mission that you have whether it’s operating a tank or conducting training operations on an installation. 

Survivability is a topic that I think has gained a lot of interest and attention over the last year as far as our dependence upon the electric grid and our vulnerabilities that relate to that situation.

And then finally, sustainability and how we impact the mission, our community and the environment as we carry out our operations in the Army.

Now, we have over 150 installations all over the United States – active duty installations – but then we have reserve sites, National Guard.  And all those sites are scattered across the United States and other parts around the world, and obviously, we have lots of opportunity for solar, wind, geothermal biomass. 

And part of our challenge is coming up with what the right opportunities are for a particular installation because it’s not enough to look at the map and see, oh, we’re under a pretty bright spot there on solar; let’s go do solar.  Well, you have to think about all the other aspects that add to the context and the milieu of what the challenges are at that installation because each installation is at or near a city, a county, a state; either in a regulated utility zone, unregulated; some states are wind-friendly; some are solar-friendly. 

And then you have to put on top of that, what’s the mission at the installation?  If I put a 365-foot wind turbine on that installation, is that going to cause problems when I’m doing Nap-of-the-Earth navigation with our rotary wing aircraft?  You have to consider those things. 

Is this particular project going to impact training lands that we have?  Are there endangered species; are there environmental issues?  Is there enough water?  All of those things have to be considered as we look at getting the right solutions for each installation.  And it’s not enough to just look at a map and say, okay, let’s go put it there.

So I just wanted to emphasize the challenges that we have, and not only within the Army, but as we work with the other services because something that we do at Fort Irwin, California, could very well impact Edwards Air Force Base just up north or us, or Twentynine Palms just south of us. 

So right now, we’re engaged in discussions within the DOD to talk about how we work out these issues so that we don’t get caught up in the morass of the “each’s” of the projects that we want to engage in.

One other slide I threw in here was basically because in the NDAA, there is a section that calls for a study on development of nuclear power plants and of military installations.  We do have six sites that have nuclear certificates, so we’ll see what happens with that.

I want to talk just briefly about some of the major initiatives that we have within the Army.  I’ll skip down to the bottom one first.  Last Friday, we signed the memorandum of agreement with Clark, the developer, and ACCIONA Solar to develop the 500 megawatt project at Fort Irwin, California.  We got a lot of press on that and a lot of attention.  We have the potential there, perhaps, to go up to a gigawatt, depending on the technology that’s used. 

So we basically, you know, started, as was said, on Friday.  That was day 1 of probably a 12-year process, starting off first with about 18 months, 2 years to go through all the environmental assessment before we even put the shovel to the ground but that process is now started in earnest with the development partner that we have there.

Getting back to the issue of this context under which we develop these projects, these large-scale projects really come down two basic things:  real estate and finance.  You have to have the real estate that’s available and that will not conflict with your mission.  You have to have the right real estate instrument to make it happen.  Is that land that the federal government owns?  Is it managed by DLM?  Is it land that’s been withdrawn from military purposes?  You’ve got to identify the appropriate real estate instrument to make these large-scale projects happen.

And then secondly, you have to have the financing.  This is a private developer that’s getting capital to make this project happen; this is not money that’s coming from the Army.  And it’s important that that company be able to make the business case to its financier that they can make this project work; they can make it happen; and that financing agent is willing to accept the risks that are inherent in that project.

So again, it’s not good enough just to pull a map out and say, look, it’s really bright red over here, let’s build a big solar project.  You’ve got to think about all of these aspects.  But even given all of that context, there is still a significant opportunity across the United States and within the Army installations.  And we’re engaged in going through a number of those to identify some of our priorities.  So watch the news; we’ll probably be going out with a few more EULs here in the next couple years.

The next one is 30-megawatt geothermal project out at Hawthorne.  I just saw Ron Diehl (ph) on my way over here --  I don’t know if Ron’s here but he had the MOA that was just finished staffing through the Army, headed back to the Navy.  So hopefully, that agreement between the Army and Navy will be worked out so that we can get the technical support from the Navy because they have the geothermal program office and we’re partnering with them to make that project happen.

And then the top one on this list is our significant employment of both hybrid and electric vehicles.  We’re currently now not the largest federal electric and hybrid fleets.  I think the Post Office got a few more hybrids than we did.  But we are certainly the largest in the DOD, and with a fleet of 70,000 vehicles – nontactical vehicles – that indicates the significant opportunity that we have just within our fleet to make a significant transition and transformational fleet portfolio to move both the Army and the nation forward.

We’re doing a lot of projects.  Here’s just a few:  incorporating solar walls, fuel cells, traditional solar rays, building integrated solar panels – you name it, we’re doing it, and I’ll mention our stimulus work in a few minutes. 

Now, shifting gears just for a minute to the operational side, this was an example that was put together over a year ago.  And it’s not to focus on what happened in 2007, but basically it’s just to give you some perspective that if all of the fuel were being transported or secured and protected by military members, this is the impact that just 1 percent would have, a 1-percent fuel savings on the number of soldiers that would be put in harm’s way just to carry the fuel.  Now, they still may be running convoys, but maybe they’re running convoys for water or ammunition or humanitarian aid or something like that.  But the purpose is, they’re not just running fuel to keep the tents warm or cool.

So some of the things that we’re doing to explore our options within the operational scenario – and I’ve been using this phrase, “beans, bullets and BTUs” because I think that that expresses the theme that power and energy is vital to what we do in an operational setting, just as much as the ammunition is and just as much as the food is to keep our troops moving over there.  And you would no less dump a tanker of fuel on the side of road than you would a load of ammunition.

And so what we’re trying to do is identify through our RDT&E program – and I’ll talk briefly about that in a minute – a number of options for developing and exploiting technologies to reduce our requirements for fuel and energy in the field because it’s not just a matter of cutting down on the number of convoys, but also you could be extending your range.  The fewer times you have to come back to get refueled can give you a tactical advantage.  You’re not tethered and tied down by how many times you need to return or have somebody come out and find you to give you that resupply.  So there is a list there of the technologies that we’re looking at.

This is a slide that I stole from Dr. Bochenek; and she is the director of the Army’s Tank Automotive Research and Development Center up in Michigan – just to give you a flavor of all of the various things that the Army is doing from prime power technology, energy storage, thermal management, power management.

On the issue of thermal management, sometimes we don’t understand how much thermal management is required by a particular vehicle.  Somebody told me that on the FCS ground vehicle, the one that got canned, it had a 75-kilowatt power requirement, 45 kilowatts for thermal management of the engine and subsystems.  That is what I was told.  And there are other examples that are pretty much in line with that.  Thermal management is a significant challenge for our vehicles.  It’s not just the mobility, getting from point A to point B; it’s all the subsystems that you have on there, the sensors, the counter-IED, the communications and all of those other things that we keep throwing on there in addition to more armor.

So thermal management is a huge issue.  And then, finally, power management.  Now, one of the concepts that the TARDEC folks are trying to get  across is let’s think about the field, the deployed energy arena as a system.  And how do we integrate both power development, power storage, power management and power utilization in that system.  So the folks up there in Michigan are looking at this as a way to put together the power and energy requirements in an operational scenario and trying to help us solve that particular problem.

I think a significant thing that was done back in January, Mr. Popps, the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology in the Army, signed out this memo that said that all acquisition-category programs will include the fully burdened cost of energy calculation in their total ownership cost analysis.  And that also that energy productivity is what we’re measuring. 

And just to be clear, energy productivity means that for that weapons system, what is all of the energy that is needed for that weapons system to do everything within the lifecycle, not just mobility, going from point A to point B, but while it’s sitting there, communicating, sending rounds downrange for all of that operation, how much energy is required?

Quickly – sort of our “what did I do last summer?” – the stimulus money that we got in the ESEP (ph) program, we got $32 million funding 17 projects across our installations.  In SRM I think the number is actually $385 million just on energy projects.  I think our total SRM was about 1.4 billion (dollars), but almost 400 million (dollars), specifically, we used for energy projects, for the same kinds of things I showed on that six-panel slide a few slides ago.

And then, at RDT&E, we got 75 million (dollars) to address a number of the topics that I have talked about previously.  One of those is not yet awarded but will be a microgrid demonstration out at Fort Sill where they want to take a portion of the installation off the grid for, they say here a minimum of 30 days, but for a significant period of time and demonstrate that technology.

The last thing I want to talk about is what we’re doing with one of our installations that is sort of a flagship for us as far as energy goes.  Maj. Gen. Bromberg talked last week at the Association of the U.S. Army conference about how he’s trying to look at all of the requirements that he has at that installation and, if you’re not familiar, Bliss is undergoing the largest growth of an installation since World War II:  $4 billion worth of construction.  His overall installation population is growing a few hundred percent, 260 percent it says here.  So there are a lot of opportunities to address new technologies and incorporate new technologies for renewable and alternative energy as well as maximizing efficiencies of those buildings.

So we – I took a tiger team down there back in February and they are in the process now of implementing a number of those recommendations in partnership with DOE FEMP, Richard Kidd and his staff Anne Crawley here working with us.

We got a project funded out of the stimulus to have DOE help with the technical support of implementation of those recommendations.  And one of those examples is looking at use of geothermal to provide power for one of the ranges which is far out from the rest of the main cantonment area where it’s not really feasible to build power lines to get stuff out there.  So there is actually potential for geothermal at that particular site.

And the last thing I have to say, I made a couple of notes, it’s important that we look at energy not just as a special-interest item.  Energy is a thread that runs through everything that we do.  And we need to think of it that way.  We need to consider it in all of the decisions that we make, in acquisitions of systems and in operations and to optimize that.

If we see it as just something over on the side that has got to compete with everything else and maybe we’ll get to it or maybe we won’t then we’re not changing the culture that we need to change to get us to think about energy in everything that we do.  And I think that especially some of the initiatives we’ve seen in the Navy in trying to push that is helping to change that culture.

You know, the tanks won’t run; the ships that run on oil, the planes that run on oil and fuel won’t fly.  And I can’t even think great policy thoughts and type them on my computer without the electrons flowing out of the wall.  So from that all the way to people really doing stuff we need the power and energy.

And I guess another thing is that we need to also consider energy as a multidisciplinary problem.  We’re not going to solve it just by coming at it from how to minimize greenhouse gases.  But we also have to look at, what is the impact on jobs?  What is the impact on the economy?  What is the impact on our operations?  What is the impact on finance and gaining capital to engage in these projects?  What is the impact on the local community where these bases are growing and causing more power requirements for that region? 

So it’s not just something that one or two small groups within the DOD or within an agency is going to attack; it’s something that at least we in the Army see we have to have all of the major stakeholders around the table looking at this because everybody has some skin in the game.

I thank you for your time and I’ll look forward to your comments.  (Applause.)

MR. LANGSTON:  Thank you.  That was excellent.  From the Air Force – and, by the way, those of you that are in the back there, there are seats down front here in several places so if you feel like it, please come on down and sit. 

We have from the Air Force Michael McGhee, as you just heard a minute ago.  He is the acting deputy assistant secretary for energy, environment safety and occupational health, which means he obviously has a lot of things to worry about.  But he is leading the Air Force’s effort in environment and energy.  So – (applause).

MICHAEL MCGHEE:  Thank you, sir.  Thank you very much.  Again, it’s a pleasure to be here enjoying my fellow panelists.  We’ve heard each other’s stories before, but I will tell you, each and every one of these events is meaningful to me.  I think it’s meaningful to them.  We’re learning something every single week about what we need to do with respect to what we call the energy imperative.  We’re learning exactly where the touch points are in a more refined state every week, I submit.  I don’t think we’ve got all the answers figured out, by any stretch, but we’ve all got some amazing stories to tell.  And I’m going to tell you the Air Force story.

To say that I am leading the effort would be misleading you; I am channeling a lot of great leadership that the Air Force has demonstrated over the past several years.  I am going to try to share that with you tonight.  We have all got our own personal battles that we wage.  One of mine is to have more PowerPoint slides that anybody else on the panel.  (Laughter.)  So I’m going to click through these at a rather rapid pace sometimes to skip over them.  Don’t try to read them; you’ll get dizzy if you do.

There is a lot of – there is an expression that says Washington is a one-issue town.  Of course, that’s not true; there are many issues.  There are many huge issues to tackle, lots of problems to address, energy only being one of them.

In the energy space, however, you find the intersection of several very important agendas, agendas that would be of vital importance to the Department of Transportation, Department of Commerce, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and the Department of Defense.

The energy space contains a substantial intersection from a host of different competing policy requirements and policy agendas.  So we like to start here when we talk about energy to tell you what is foremost in our minds.  And it is about the Air Force mission.  So we try to view the energy imperative through the lens of what is the Air Force mission.  Of course it’s to fly, fight and win in air space and cyber space.  And everything that we do in our energy programs we attempt to view through this lens.

Let’s start with a snapshot of what we’re doing on energy.  A lot of information here.  I’ll point you to the upper-left portion of this slide.  The good news is, over the past several years starting in about 2003 – we’ve got our trend line here – the blue line going down represents basically our energy consumption in millions of millions of BTUs.  And the good news is, it’s going down, right?  It has been for several years.  The bad news is, the cost of it has gone up in spite of our economy of use of energy.

And it has gone up rather substantially.  Those are billions of dollars on the right.  That’s the green line going up.  If you look at that, the bottom left of this slide, you’ll see that there is an obvious thing that sticks out.  There is something that is big and blue, which is aviation.  So maybe that’s a no-brainer to you.  But if you’re outside of the DOD fence line, many people think of energy in terms of powering facilities and maybe powering the over-the-road fleet.  You come inside the Defense fence line and it starts to shift into what we call mobility fuels or mobility energy.

You get inside the Air Force fence line within the DOD fence line, it gets very specifically to be largely about aviation and about the energy we use to conduct our mission.  Again, a bit of a no-brainer if you think about it, but, in this case, we like to make people aware of that.  For us, it’s kind of about the jet fuel.  Now, it’s about a lot of other things too because there is certainly energy used throughout everything we do.  We have become increasingly dependent on energy.  There is very little that’s an actual mechanical system anymore.  Everything I do requires some amount of energy.

If we lose access to energy, we don’t have the mechanical systems that we can go pull the lever manually by hand anymore to do that.  We are utterly reliant upon so much for use of energy.  So in our ground vehicles and equipment, our facilities, we have many requirements there, too, that need to be met and addressed with energy concerns.  But to give you a breakdown, on the right, you can kind of see how we use our energy and about where the costs lie.  And it’s inescapable to view aviation as an important imperative – overall about $9 billion spent to acquire energy in 2008.

But that’s not all we spend our money on with respect to energy.  However, we have not asked ourselves, what do we spend our money on for energy, much, except very recently.  We know what we pay for our bills, for our fuel bills, that type of thing.  But as far as the investments we’re making, we are making substantial investments.  And if you’ve tried to address accounting for how money is invested within your organization, perhaps, I can assure you that it can be daunting for any of us, but it has been challenging for us as well, only because we’ve been asked repeatedly how much money are you spending on energy?  Have we been able to sort of tag accounting expenditures in terms of energy?

It’s also a little bit unfair to say that these are pure energy expenditures.  If you’re replacing an oil boiler in a facility that is used to heat water maybe to heat the building for the facility, are you replacing that boiler because it’s an old, worn-out boiler and it needs to be replaced, which is a capital investment or recapitalization, or are you investing in it because it’s an energy requirement?  So it’s hard to tag some of this money cleanly and say it’s all about energy.

But to give you some sense of feel for the reinvestment act monies, you can see on the left of this pie chart in FY09, you know, a lot of money has been spent on recapitalizing our energy infrastructure.  And a big chunk of that was from energy conservation.

You get over to the right-hand side of this graph and you start to see how much money we’re investing in new technology.  This starts to shift a little bit and gets away from the facility and infrastructure type of requirements over into the aviation requirements.  This is where you get into looking at new types of engine technology, looking at new types of aviation technology that are both more effective as well as being efficient and may have a host of other attributes that are desirable – greener than, for example, the previous generation of jet aircraft engine, greener than the existing fuel that is presently used.  We spend an awful lot of money trying to better our situation on the energy frontier that also has an awful lot of co-benefits in other areas.

The Air Force has understood that energy is a priority for quite some time.  Of course, our present leadership happens to be right in step with the administration and it is not by accident.  The Air Force has been focusing on energy for a number of years.  In fact, we put in place an energy governance structure in about the 2005 timeframe when we realized that, in spite of those declines in energy use, we’re spending an awful lot more money on energy as the admiral pointed out and others pointed out.  It was a real eye opener for a lot of people. 

We said, we’ve got to get our arms around this.  How do we do that?  First of all, we’ve got to get senior leadership engaged to make people aware of this energy imperative that is developing.  Our leadership established our energy senior focus group, again, back in 2005 represented by the top leadership of the Air Force.  What these – does this have a laser on it?  There we go.  Thank you, sir.  More power! (Laughter.)

These are what we call the two digits:  IE, AQ, IA, PA, FM, A1, testing my vision here in the evening, A35.  What that means is those are three-star and two-star equivalent general officers or SES.  We’ve got the senior leadership of the Air Force at the headquarters engaged on energy governance to make sure that we’re all aware of the imperative, that we’re all taking the steps to address energy in all of our portfolio, whether we’re public affairs, whether we’re international affairs, whether we’re financial management, whether we’re personnel, whether we’re logistics for example, all those arenas. 

We set in place a number of focus areas underneath of that structure as well highlighted here.  This is too much detail to go into but it is safe to say, we’ve got the governance thing mapped out.  It wasn’t until later, however, this year, that we recognized that in spite of making folks aware and trying to get our arms around addressing energy, we need a higher degree of focus and concentration on energy.

We approached our secretary, one of the gentlemen, Kevin Billings, sitting over here.  Mr. Billings, thanks for being here – was part of what is called the two-man team that hit the secretary up and said, you’ve got to have more resources addressing energy.  You’ve got to get more of a laser focus on energy matters.  He agreed; he stood up the energy program management office.  To give you some ideas, what these blue boxes mean as that is the secretary of the Air Force; that is kind of the big guy, close ally with the chief of staff of the Air Force. 

Here is the undersecretary who is the Air Force’s senior energy official.  Here is my boss the installations, environment and logistics Assistant Secretary.  Here is my office, with me in acting capacity and here is our energy program office.  We’ve got a pretty tight network that gets right to the secretary and the senior most leadership of the Air Force.  The Energy Program Management office was set up for a couple of different reasons I’m going to go into here in a second.

First of all, in spite of all the Air Force energy goodness that knew was out there and we know it was underway and we could point to it and you could find it everywhere you looked, we couldn’t find that it was necessarily focused with a clear idea of what we were trying to archive.  Some of this is a derivative of the fact that there have been compliance requirements in the energy domain for a number of years under the energy acts primarily and some previous executive orders that require us to pursue renewable energy, energy conservation measures, et cetera.  And there is a lot an awful lot of goodness that was being as a result of those requirements. 

However, as far as going back to what the mission requires, what we’re looking for there, to fly, fight and win, what are we doing in terms of energy?  So we recognize that our Air Force sometimes can be resistant to move out if you don’t we have a policy that you can point to that is governing upon our Air Force staff.  So we set about developing Air Force energy policy.  These common-looking documents here, I can tell you, the blood, sweat andd tears behind these would fill this room.

It took roughly let’s say two years to get these senior policy documents out that gave us the launch pad to say “thou shalt do” with our Air Force.  A lot of people want to “do,” a lot of people would “do” but this says “you shall do.”  This was an important step to get this policy in place. 

Behind that we are developing what we call our energy plan which is – you can guess by looking at it perhaps that it is a lot more visual.  This plan is meant to be a plain language version of those policy documents.  This is meant to speak to airmen and others who support our Air Force to help them understand what we’re trying to do with our energy policy, where we’re trying to go and how we’re trying to weave energy to support our mission to fly fight and win and it reflects a simple three-part strategy of reduced – again, thank you, sir, for letting me use it.

Reduce demand, increase supply and change the culture.  That is pretty simple; it goes in the back of a business card.  It went on the back of my boss’ business card.  That is how we came up with it this way.  It speaks to people; they understand what it means; and it is something you can internalize pretty readily. 

This simple plain language version of our energy policy, this energy plan is currently out for our final signature.  We hope to get it published and up on our Web page pretty soon. 

It also has a pretty simple vision:  Make energy a consideration in all that we do.  That plan and those policy documents reflect a whole host of goals that time will not permit me to go into tonight even though I talk pretty fast.  But suffice to say that it reflects a whole host of various goals on the reduce demand side like talking about more efficient pilot operations and training, reducing our installation energy intensity, looking at aviation fuel consumption and reducing that by 10 percent, reducing our motor vehicle fleet fuel use also by certain percentages.  Again, some of these you’ll recognize some of the threads from previous executive orders and energy policy acts.  Here we go, it lays you down there. 

What shape might these initiatives look like to meet these goals?  Well, you look at reducing aircraft weight, you look at the flight routes your flying.  Some of these flight routes are historic and no one is necessarily really sure why we’re flying that way.  Perhaps if we asked the right people the right questions we can get a tighter route that puts a straight line between point A and point B. 

There are some compelling stories I can go into about our international travel and we have to fly around countries, for example, because perhaps they might not necessarily have full support for a particular mission that we’re executing at that moment and we have to request permission to fly over those countries; they may say no.  They say fly around.  So we’ve been able to negotiate with some of these countries and say, well, is there a way we could find some common ground here that allows us to fly directly over your country and save a lot of time and a save lot of fuel?

And I’ll tell you one of those compelling example that I’m thinking of, is to support the global war on terror.  There have been some countries that say, not so much.  We’re not necessarily able to allow you to fly over our country on this particular mission that you are flying right now.  We said, well, this mission we would like to bring home some wounded warriors for medical treatment.  Can you support that?  And they said, yes, we can. 

So we’ve been able to find some common ground where we can optimize our flying routes, save some time, save some airmen’s lives probably and also save some fuel.  Infrastructure, well, decreasing energy use, that is a no-brainer, purchase more efficient energy supplies.  There is ways you can approach the marketplace and do a better job of purchasing your energy as well as just simply blindly paying someone for energy.  But the big bucks could be down here in acquisition technologies.  We look at more efficient and more adaptive engines for our aircraft operations. 

On the reduced demand side, then, one of the particular areas that we’ve been really focusing on is the operations fuel demand, as I mentioned.  And we’ve got some success, 3.8 percent reduction in fuel usage from 2006 to 2008.  You can’t show with causality some correlation that says why that happened but we have a lot of good activities that have caused this to happen.  But some of it has to do with the particular tempo that we are flying at.  We’ve done some neat things like you simply wash the engines and they work better; they work more efficiently. 

You get a lot of gunk out of them and you save a lot of fuel.  You add this up over the number of miles the Air Force flies and you can get a tremendous savings out of that.  We’ve changed the pattern in the way that we approach some of our aircraft training and we’ve, when you add up all the savings from that individually you can generate an awful lot of fuels savings by flying more effectively – more efficiently, excuse me. 

And, by the way, I’m not going to touch upon it to a great extent but it should go without saying that every pound of energy not used is a pound of emissions probably not emitted.  And the Air Force recognizes greatly the greenhouse gas contributions from the combustion of fossil fuels and other forms of energy the Air Force use.  In fact two years ago, we undertook a comprehensive look at our greenhouse gas footprint and they told us what we pretty much thought we knew, which is it is about energy.  That is what your greenhouse gas footprint is from.  There is also some other chemical related processes that utilize global warmers that emit greenhouse gases that have high potential.  But, in the main, it is largely about our energy use. 

And we’ve recognized that we need to look for ways to optimize our reduction of greenhouse gases while we’re also reducing our energy use.  And so we did this study to help ourselves find where were the most compelling cases where we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. 

On the facilities side that is what probably a lot of people think about when you think about when you think about reducing the demand for energy.  We have lots to be proud of there and we’ve made lots of progress in reducing our facility energy demand. 

One of the easiest things for people to appreciate is that we’ve adopted the LEED standard; we’ve got policy out there that requires all of our vertical construction – that is versus horizontal like runways, vertical like buildings – for the projects that our climate controlled that is where you’re trying to control the amount of energy that is in them, be capable of achieving elite silver standard.  We’ve got a whole host of other areas there that I wont’ be able go into tonight. 

There is a series of goals on the increased supply side as well embedded in our policy; these are a couple of the examples of them here:  Acquire 50 percent of the Air Force’s domestic aviation fuel requirements via an alternative fuel blend.  That is a long phrase that has an awful lot of meaning behind it.  I’ll go into some of that with a little more detail.  Increase your facility renewable energy use at various targets over time.  Increase your non-petroleum based fuel use for the fleet as well. 

These are some of the ways that you might go about achieving those goals:  Look at purchasing green power, look at commercial-scale energy projects, utilizing Air Force underutilized land perhaps.  This is the Nellis PV array; that is our president right there on the left.  I’ll go into that with a little more detail later.  This is a wind turbine going up on Cape Cod, Massachusetts Military Reservation. 

This wind turbine will be feeding our environmental clean-up systems, the energy requirements for those systems.  This is a C-17 flying on synthetic fuel, developed in a test program the Air Force has underway.  This is a hydrogen fuelling station out at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii. 

So there is a whole host of initiatives right now where we’re looking at increasing the supply.  In fact, there is too many to talk about.  Many of these you’ll see say operational.  This is actually some dated information, some of these are in development, some of these are in development, some of these are awarded by not yet constructed.  But, you name it, we’ve been working on it like the other services by the way. 

We all equally have a lot to be proud of.  It is finding all these samples of energy goodness and getting them focused on particular strategy.  That has been the real challenge, frankly.  Nellis: Nellis, Nevada; Nellis Air Force Base, the PV array.  This is too tempting not to talk about but I’ll give the rest of the story here in a second.  Been online sine November ’07.  It is the largest photovoltaic array in the Americas versus other types of solar technology like solar thermal.  This is straightforward solar PV.  And yet it does not quite satisfy the base’s energy needs.  It is 14 megawatts.  That is important as we talk about and you hear these other numbers from the services. 

This is the largest PV array in the Americas until tomorrow.  And if the press release comes through Florida Power and Light will turn on a 25 megawatter (ph) in Florida and that will become the largest.  But hopefully in a few years as you look at these projects that you’ve heard the other services talk about and the Air Force will be talking about and other will bet talking about, these numbers will become inconsequential.  You’re going to see some multi-hundred and even some gigawatt representations of renewable power as well.  This is something we have a lot to be proud of; this is done in a public-private partnership by the way.  The Air Force can’t take complete credit for this. 

We were a participant in this wonderful exercise but it gave us a benchmark to compare ourselves against and others to compare themselves against as well.  We can do this; there is a way to overcome some of these challenges but that some of those challenges are situational dependent and site specific, as Paul Bollinger and others, Kevin Geiss, knows. You can’t create the success everywhere you want to; there are other factors at play depending on the site you choose. 

So we also have energy EUL projects underway – excuse me, in progress.  By that we mean that, as Kevin pointed out, they just signed an MOA to begin one of these EULs.  We are also pursuing signing MOAs to begin a couple of other EULs at these locations.  Give you some sense of them, 1 megawatt, 600 megawatt, 20 mega-watt and so on: a mix, mostly solar but also wind and some other types of projects. 

One that we’re particularly interested in is the Air Force Academy, of its own accord, has decided it is going to become a net-zero installation or operation, I should say.  And they’ve got a whole host of projects lined up to show that it can be done.  You can take one of these bases basically and you can make it self sustaining in energy terms.  And it takes an interesting array of technologies to do that which gets back to I believe the point that Kevin was making and also the admiral that there is not a single silver bullet out there. 

It is a system of systems approach and often there are collateral benefits across these various systems.  And finding the right types of skills in individuals and companies that can integrate these different systems has been a challenge.  You’ve got someone who is a natural gas company, someone who is a wind company, someone who is a coal company, someone who is a solar company.  What you don’t have are companies that are large-scale integrators of various technologies.  They’ve got two or three technologies maybe at best that they are trying to work with.  The solutions here require a whole host of very sophisticated integration of technologies to get something like net zero, I submit. 

As Kevin pointed out there’s lots of opportunity out there.  Air Force is scattered all over this map as well.  There is lots of places there that if there were just the transmission lines available and just the right political climate and just the right permit structure, by golly, you could do an awful lot. 

It is not just a matter of go where the sun is.  It is a matter of go where the sun is and where the people are with the money and where the transmission lines are and so on and so on and so on.  So this presents a host of challenges but the opportunity sure is compelling.  It is out there, isn’t it?  One thing I’d like to point out is that the Air Force, in particular, the other services experiencing this as well, these renewable energy projects are presenting some unique challenges.  Some of those have to do with interference or potential interference with radar or flight operations. 

Both of those are of very high interest to the Air Force.  So the Air Force has been working with the regulatory entities that you can work with at the federal level to come up with some ability to help screen projects in the event of avoiding a future conflict.  It’s been recognized that there is a lot of folks that have interests in, if I can go backwards, the compelling picture in this map and they have an idea and they arrange some financing and they do some site work and they keep it to themselves, and then they announce a project, and then they go to the FAA and say, I have this really tall thing I want to make and the FAA says, not unless I say so, and they bump into a problem.  And some of these technologies involve tall structures.

And so the FAA Web site has the – rats, I’m going to forget the acronym right now – well, it’s got the OEAAA, Obstruction Evaluation/Airspace and Airports Analysis, I believe.  The idea is that if you want to put something up that’s going to interfere with flying operations, you’re supposed to contact these people first, and there’s a threshold.  So we took advantage of this Web site and the Air Force, working, if you will, on behalf of the host of DOD services, we put in a tool here that allows potential developers to put in a latitude and a longitude for an energy project. 

If it has a vertical component to it, or even if it doesn’t, we would ask that maybe you visit this site, type in that lat and long, and it will tell you by name and by phone number people within the Department of Defense that you can call for more information about potential conflict with DOD operations.  And we’d like to know about it sooner rather than later, and we’d like you to know about it sooner rather than later, and we’d like to be engaged.  All parties benefit by collaborating early.  I encourage you, if you’re a developer or you know developers, please make them aware of this opportunity. 

The Air Force has also been very interested in looking at alternatives to the existing petroleum-based paradigm for jet fuel, and we’ve made a lot of press and achieved a lot of keen interest by looking at synthetic-fuel opportunities.  That is, there’s technology that is available and has been available or decades that is looking for the right price point for the alternatives – that is, petroleum – and if that price point is met, which typically can be around $70 a barrel, you start to get into the range of potentially attractive economic conditions for this technology, referred to as Fischer-Tropsch.  Fischer-Tropsch can take any hydrocarbon source and you can make synthetic liquid fuel out of it. 

And the additional beauty to the Air Force, for our interest, is if you blend that synthetic liquid fuel from the Fischer-Tropsch process 50-50 with standard conventional jet fuel, the jet doesn’t know the difference.  It meets the spec; it does not interfere with the operation of that system – we’ve tested it.  It does not compose – it does not institute any additional maintenance or other requirements that we would care about.  It’s essentially neutral.  This is a very compelling set of circumstances to the Air Force for our jet fuel operations.

And so we were approached by a number of entities that were interested in pursuing this technology and wanted to know if the Air Force was interested, and the answer was, yes, very much so.  In fact, our leadership said, we’d like to go test our aircraft, starting with the heavy guys, the heavy guys that suck down a lot of fuel, B-52, B-1, B-2, C-17 and so on, and see if we can in fact demonstrate that these aircraft can fly and can be certified to fly on synthetic fuel-blend.  And we have a well-managed program underway to prove that out.  And we have a goal that the entire fleet can be certified and ready to operate on synthetic fuel.

But beyond that also, we’re interested very much in alternative fuels other than synthetic.  This is where you start to get into the biofuel arena.  The synthetic was brought to us – we didn’t go after it.  It was brought to us by industry, who said, we’re going to build this thing, are you guys interested in it?  And we said, yes, we are.  We’re also very interested in other alternatives, however.  That was the first one that walked in the door, basically. 

We also have another program underway to try to create the same success, looking for the same types of opportunities, on the biofuels frontier, and we’re looking for potential, if you will, developers or technology providers who can bring to us product that we can test and evaluate to see if it can meet our mission requirements, to see if it can meet our certifications and standards.  If we find it can, we would be interested possibly in testing it in our fleet.  Now, the trick here is, we’re not interested in boutique fuels – boutique fuels, pardon me.  That is, if it’s a special fuel, then a special circumstance, it requires a special transportation-handling system and special people to store it and special people to maintain systems – you’re already too special. 

The Air Force is about on peer with a commercial airliner in terms of – one of the large commercial airliners – in terms of the amount of fuel that we use for our jet aircraft.  However, those same commercial airliners have maybe a fleet of 500 to 600 aircraft.  The Air Force has about 5,600 aircraft.  So we do not want one-offs.  We do not want special boutique requirements.  We want something that we can find in a marketplace at the drop-in.  And we’re very interested in looking for those alternatives, and we’re willing to invest our resources to help discover those alternatives, and have been investing our resources. 

In fact, we recently held a Biofuels for Aviation Summit, where we brought together policymakers – Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Transportation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the research community – university of X, university of Y, university of Z – brought these two groups together in a summit and said, are you aware of what success looks like?  Because there’s an awful lot of overlapping policy requirements from other organizations in the federal government that are interested in this also, but they have a different perspective.  And we brought those two communities together to try to share information and hoped to further the technology for the nation’s sake, but also for the Air Force’s benefit.

Finally, our last – reduce demand, increase supply, change the culture – our last goal, change the culture, we’ve got an awful lot of activity underway there, but we need more.  We believe that this is the stealth goal that can rock the world.  If you can get people to think differently about energy, change the paradigm, change the way they think, you can achieve far more than you could with a new technology or with a new 300, 600 megawatt solar thing.  You can get an awful lot more distance if you can have everybody pulling for you and everybody pushing behind you to get energy made and consideration in all that you do.

So we in fact also kicked off an energy forum in 2007, the Air Force Energy Forum, had our second forum in 2008, and we are scheduling our third forum, not yet locked into the date, but in the early 2010 timeframe to help change that culture, to help make people aware, inside the Air Force and outside the Air Force, of what we’re doing and what we hope to achieve. 

We’ve got a host of other activities.  We sponsor an energy chair of the National Defense University, where the National War College is and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and so on.  We’ve also introduced, thanks to some great intel from the Navy, energy into our war-games.  In fact, Dave King, who works in my office, who’s our director for energy policy, he’s down at the Air Force Title X futures game as we speak, making sure that energy is incorporated into our war-game exercises, making sure that energy is a consideration in all we do, including the way that we fight.

Finally, I’ll end with this:  Energy security can be what you want it to be.  These Venn diagrams have become very important in trying to describe something we all know is true, in that there is something to do with environment, something to do with economic, something to do with energy that all come together in some kind of a sweet spot.  We believe that sweet spot is something that we’re all calling energy security.  Some people put different things in the middle of this, but we want you to be aware that our Air Force energy strategy, reduce demand, increase supply and change the culture, attempts to address all these matters – the environmental-security issues, the economic-security issue, the national-security energy issue and the energy-security issue for the Air Force.

And that’s all I have for you.  If you’d like to learn more, we do have a public Web site right here.  It’s .safie.hq.af.mil and otherwise, I’d be happy to take any questions you have.  Thanks very much and have a good evening.  (Applause.)

MR. LANGSTON:  I know it’s getting a little bit long out there for some of you, so if you need to step out quickly, I think we’d rather press on than try and break.  So I love your culture notion that you left off with, Michael, and I’m sure Mitzi loves that as well.  I was thinking that the Naval Academy folks that we have back here could connect through Twitter or Facebook and get those Air Force guys to help them figure out how to do the same thing at the Naval Academy.  (Chuckles.) 

So let me introduce next, from the Marine Corps, Ms. Carla Lucchino, who’s our assistant deputy commandant for installations and logistics.  She’s been doing this for about – since about 2002, so she’s probably responsible for everything the Marine Corps is doing in this energy-environmental business.  (Applause.)

CARLA LUCCHINO:  Thank you.  It’s times like these you’re going to be thankful the Marine Corps is the smallest of the services – (laughter) – because we have the smallest number of charts.  Maybe the Coast Guard beat me out, I’m not sure, it remains to be seen.  I’m going to give you some wave-tops on the Marine Corps energy program, and hopefully you’ll ask me some good questions afterwards.

You all know the nature of war-fighting is changing.  We’re prepared, of course, for traditional warfare, but as you know, we’re going to nonlinear warfare.  We’ve got a lot of good lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’re planning for a seabasing and expeditionary-maneuver warfare scenarios in the future.  I will tell you that right now in Afghanistan, the Marines operate in small, autonomous units forward of the forward-operating bases, out in the middle of nowhere.  And so they’re very self-sufficient, but they still have to be re-supplied, and for us, that means all sorts of supplies, but predominantly fuel and water. 

And let me just focus on that specifically, because I think Mitzi mentioned the convoys, and I’m going to show you a picture of that.  But we got used to bottled water in Iraq, and that’s good, and the Marines should certainly have the best water.  We don’t have that in Afghanistan, and so we’ve got to haul it, and we haul it in convoys.  And we are digging some wells in Afghanistan, we’re going I think 600-feet deep, but I will tell you that you’ve got to be very cautious about what you do to the watershed in Afghanistan when you do that, and then we can’t get that water certified, so we’re not sure we can drink it or not.  So that’s a problem for us.

Now, we’ve got some new technology.  It’s a lightweight water purifier we put in the back of a Humvee, it purifies about 125 gallons of water an hour.  We’re testing that out, but the water is essential.  So if there is a way to get those convoys off the roads or for them to haul less, we will save lives, because as you know, we have a smart enemy.  They learned a lot from what we did in Iraq, and the bombs are bigger and far more deadlier in Afghanistan, so the less we travel on the ground, the safer the Marines will be and we will save lives.

With fuel, same situation.  We’re hauling large amounts of that, it’s essential.   We’re looking at some biofuel alternatives with the Navy.  We’re also looking at what the Army’s doing with solar-powered Humvees, for example, and ideally, from a power standpoint, we’ve got a lot of vehicles that will use all types of energy, but in the middle of the desert, if we could have a vehicle that not only uses energy but disperses it so we can light a hospital in the middle of the desert, that would be phenomenal.  And I know it exists because I’ve actually seen it at some different contractors, Oshkosh for one.  So there’s a lot of good things that can be done. 

We had an energy wake-up call in Afghanistan, and some of you may know that the commandant sent a MAGT energy-assessment team to Afghanistan about a month or so ago.  We call it the MEAT, and we’re going to send MEAT II, a second team out to take another look.  But we found a lot of different things that we think we can improve.  Some of this I’ve already discussed with you, but we want to look at ways not only to save money, to be safer, but let’s remember something very important about the Marine Corps: the Marine is our deadly weapon.  So if we can make the Marines lighter, faster, more agile, then we will be more effective in combat.  So we’re looking at ways.  You saw lighten the load earlier on Adm. Cullom’s charts.  We want to be a lot more efficient than we are today, and there’s a lot of good opportunities out there for us to do that.

I’ll just point out the convoy picture in the top right corner.  That’s exactly what they look like.  There are lots of them.  I don’t remember the exact numbers per day, but there are many, and so it’s very, very dangerous.  The roads are full of IEDs, and then everywhere else is full of IEDs too, so you can’t even travel off the roads.

The commandant really has energy fever in the Marine Corps.  He understands how important it is to make the Marine Corps more energy-efficient, and he’s got a tactical-equipment focus, because I’ll highlight for you some of the things we do on our bases and stations and some of the things we do with garrison mobile equipment, but those programs for us are fairly mature.  Could we do more?  You bet we could.  But we’re not quite so mature with our tactical equipment and our weapons systems.  So that’s been his focus.

I will tell you, Marines carry anywhere from 90 to 120 pounds on their backs, so if we can make them lighter with new and different types of battery technology, new and different types of SAPI plates and other equipment, we’ll be doing good.  They’ll be far more lethal.  And I will tell you that I’ve seen some of the technologies in some of the labs, and Richard Kidd and I have talked about this, but I saw, for example, composite technology for SAPI plates which is very, very light and has the ballistic capabilities that we need.  But here’s the problem, and you’re going to find this in a lot of the labs with a lot of prototypes: the prototypes are phenomenal, and there’s all kinds of stuff out there, some of which we can find easily and some of which we can’t, and it takes a lot of time to match requirements to the prototypes.

I actually sent Marines out to take a look at some SAPI plate technology, and they came back and said, it’s great, but guess what?  We can’t produce it affordably.  That’s the problem.  We’re either not linked to a program of record or to a big defense contractor who can make it affordable for us to buy, and that’s critical, because it’s not going to do me any good just to have a great prototype in a lab.  I got to be able to buy it, whether it’s lightweight helmet technology, SAPI plates or anything else.  So that’s key.

Now, we’ve got a few things that we’ve been working on, and I’m going to highlight some of the tactical improvements and I’m not going to give you a whole slew of examples, just a couple.  We use a lot of energy in the desert to keep the tents cool.  Marines need a good night sleep, and getting them out of 115-, 130-degree heat is good.  So what we’ve done is we’ve put a foam sealant on our tents, and it worked so good that Brig. Gen. Bob Rourke (ph), who just came back out of Iraq, said he was able to turn off 600 air conditioners.  That’s phenomenal.

But here’s the problem: when you need to tear those tents down and move them, the foam destroys the tent.  So the foam is not necessarily all that practical for us.  Now, we are looking at different canvas technologies, sealants, other coatings so that we can reuse our tents, but that would be very important for us.  We’re also looking at solar panels that you can roll up, very flexible.  I’ve seen those as well, and that’ll do a lot of good for us too, because we can absorb energy when the sun is blazing and then use it later.  So there’s some positives there for us.

I talked a little bit about getting those convoys off the road.  So cargo, unmanned aerial vehicles are extremely important.  Anything that we can do for food, water, ammunition.  So this is a big point of interest for us in the future, and we have our Combat Development Command looking at a lot of these alternative technologies.  But this is certainly important for Marines, and remember, I told you, we’re forward of the FOBs, so you’ve got to be able to get to those Marines and re-supply them regularly.  So this is one technology we’re very interested in.

Let me talk to you a little bit about our facilities program.  I told you that that’s a pretty mature program. We don’t have the stats you might hear from the Army, for example, and we do a lot with the Navy because a lot of bases are – we’re tied together, at the hip, with the Navy, but we’ve got solar power on all different types of buildings, warehouses, the Marine Corps Marathon building, and when we renovate the commandant’s house very shortly, this coming year, he will even have solar panels on his roof.  So that’s quite a good commitment from him.

Wind power – certainly not on the level of what the Army’s doing, but we have a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine at Barstow that we set up this year.  We’re doing geothermal as well, deep-well studies are going on at 2 Twentynine Palms, exploratory drilling at Yuma next month, so there’s good news there.  Ground-source heat pumps at Beaufort, Cherry Point, Lejeune, Albany.  So we’re making some progress for the Marine Corps.  And we’ve got some biomass projects – burying woodchips at New River and then getting methane gas out of landfills at Miramar and Albany, for example.  So for us, that’s a pretty good start.

Garrison-mobile equipment:  These are our non-tactical vehicles, the cars.  We bought a lot of them that are hydrogen powered or ethanol-flex-fuel hybrids, electric cars.  It’s all good, we drive them around, but I want to tell you a story about what we’ve done which has really yielded some surprisingly positive results.

The average age of a Marine might be 20 years old, so we had some trouble with Marines not always following the traffic laws.  (Laughter.)  No surprise there, so what do we do?  We put cameras in the vehicles.  Now, you know, if you’re a parent, you can do that for your own cars, but we put some cameras in the vehicles, and the footage is pretty enlightening.  But I will tell you that as soon as the Marines realized they were being filmed, and when you add that if they committed a violation or had an accident, they had to report to their CO, who in many cases was a general officer, guess what?  They slowed down.  So not only is that a good safety thing, but we saved a lot of fuel in the process of slowing them down.  So there’s good news there.

I will tell you, too, that we can buy all the alternative-fuel and electric-fuel vehicles that we can find, but the real important thing is to have the infrastructure.  In other words, if – actually, Capt. Tony Irmavik (ph), who runs our facilities program on the bases and stations, had – it might have been in a natural-gas vehicle, I’m not sure.  He’s driving down the road from the Pentagon to Quantico.  Guess what?  He ran out of gas.  And guess what?  Nowhere to refill.  (Chuckles.)  So we really need the infrastructure.  Now, I don’t know that the Department of Defense should build the infrastructure, but it absolutely has to be there because once it’s there, people will buy those vehicles because you can get the gas.  So there’s goodness there.

I’ll just give you a brief way ahead for the Marine Corps.  As I said, we’re sending a second team to Afghanistan.  The first team came back with all kinds of great observations and good ideas for solutions.  We’re going to send a second team to look a little bit deeper and possibly come up with more solutions for us.  We are standing up a Marine Corps energy office.  It will be a direct report through the ACMC to the commandant.  And a colonel will run that office.  It’s not in place yet, but will be very shortly. 

We’re also going to host an NDU forum next month to try to create some themes and some ways to inspire industry for a symposium that we will be holding the last week of January.  And we’re not sure of that location yet, but there’s more to come on that.  But we’d like to challenge industry to help us find solutions for some of our energy issues.  And we’re going to continue all our progress in garrison. 

And I will tell you, for the Marine Corps this is very much a cultural change.  It’s a new way of thinking about making Marines more lethal and more effective in combat.  So it’s very much about the people in how we think about these issues.  Okay, so I look forward to your questions.  (Applause.)

MR. LANGSTON:  Okay, so up last for the Coast Guard, which is – we all think of that as small, but the Coast Guard’s chief logistician, Mr. Jeff Orner, is going to tell you about how he supports environmental and energy efficiency in his 23,000 facilities, 230 ships and 1800 boats.  So we’ll learn a lot there. 

JEFF ORNER:  Well, good evening.  This is the last presentation of the evening, and I’m going to demonstrate to my Marine Corps colleague that we are the lean, agile service.  I’m not sure I have fewer slides than you, but I’m sure I can make it through these slides relatively rapidly. 

MS. LUCCHINO:  Challenge accepted, Mr. Orner.  (Laughter.)

MR. ORNER:  And part of the reason for that is, as I sit and listen to my colleagues on this panel, what really strikes me is the similarity in our approaches.  I think that there’s an awful lot of similarity in how we, the various military services, see the energy challenges facing our nation and our military services and what exactly it is that we intend to do about those challenges.

So very simply, what is Coast Guard energy management?  First of all, sustainable energy usage – greening our footprint.  And my colleagues have talked a lot about that.  These are the same philosophies.  Secondly, fuel management – providing the fuel that our operators need when they need it.  And finally, energy resource management that is the business case for the first two points. 

Energy program dynamics – again, I don’t think any of this is new.  We’ve all been talking about this, this evening, for some time.  Rising expenditures – even though we also are using less energy than we used to use, we are, like the other services, spending more money doing it.  We are subject to the same laws and executive orders that the other speakers have outlines and that has increased our focus in this area.  We have a lot of scrutiny from our chain of command, who are very motivated to do something about this and to make some progress.  Our workforce is motivated. 

And finally, we are in the midst of a Coast Guard-wide strategic reorganization.  And I’m not going to go into the details of that this evening except to tell you that we’ve created a deputy commandant for mission support, and that is the CIO, all of acquisition, my directorate, which is engineering and logistics, the chief human capital officer and all of the field activities who provide mission support to our operators. We are, in the mission support organization, all about providing the operators what they need to do their jobs. 

And as part of that, we have moved the energy program into the mission support organization.  It was previously under the chief financial officer.  But at this point, it seemed obvious to us this is mission support and we are creating a centralized energy program at Coast Guard Headquarters.  Our new energy program manager, Danny Gore, is in the audience.  If you have tough questions, I’m going to point in his direction.

Those of you who know anything about our program, you may remember he was with us before and he left for another agency.  I think we persuaded him to come back, very recently, when we told him we are very serious, at this point, about creating a comprehensive, Coast Guard-wide energy program. 

We’re doing a lot on our on-shore facilities.  And much of this is going to sound very familiar because much of this are the same kinds of innovations that the other services have talked about.  The top of the two pictures is at our Coast Guard yard at Surface Forces Logistics Center in Baltimore, which is Curtis Bay right near the Baltimore Beltway.  And that’s an example of the kind of innovation that I think is going to be really important to our future.  We don’t see a single magic pill here; what we see is a whole plethora of related solutions.

What we like about the landfill gas project is, really, the creativity and the multi-agency approach.  Our Coast Guard facility in Baltimore sits right across the Beltway from the Baltimore landfill and the city of Baltimore had been paying fines to the EPA because landfills generate methane gas.  So we got together with the city of Baltimore and cut a deal.  We drilled wells into their landfill, piped the methane under the Baltimore Beltway and to our Curtis Bay facility.  A company built the co-generation plant.  They’re generating enough power to take our Coast Guard yard out of the grid.  And all they need out of it is the right to sell the excess power back to the grid. 

I see part of the solution, at least on the shore side, to our energy challenges in a thousand projects like that.  We also run – have aids to navigation that any of you who are boaters or sailors have seen in our waterways.  The bottom picture there is an example of one of those.  They’re pretty much all, at this point, solar-powered as opposed to battery-powered, which also not only saves energy, but it also saves an awful lot of labor on the part of the people who used to change all those batteries. 

Like the other services, we’re designing new buildings to lead standards, we’re installing meters and we are focusing on reducing water consumption.  Up at our facility in Kodiak, we’ve been able to reduce usage by 49 million gallons a year, and in a remote location like that, that matters.  On cutters, these examples are not only remarkably similar to the admiral’s, but some of the same Navy field activities were used by us to install these stern flaps and these high-energy propellers and coating for our hulls.  So I’m not going to linger on that, but we’re trying to do as much of that as possible, particularly for our new ships, but where it makes sense, we’re also retrofitting our older cutters. 

Fuel management – like the other services, most of our energy use is on the operational side, not in ashore infrastructure.  That’s where the real challenge is, particularly in light of the fact that we are recapitalizing our ships and our airplanes, but not all that rapidly.  You build maybe a ship a year.  So these things take time.  But we are developing policies to try to reduce our operational fuel use. 

Resource management – we’re a rounding error when you compare us to the Department of Defense, but not so much in the Department of Homeland Security, where we use 70 percent of the energy that the Department of Homeland Security uses.  And as you can see by the bar charts – I know you can barely read them from where you’re sitting – but we’re spending more money every year.  And so that is one of our motivations – the business case. 

Finally, we are also creating something akin to a taskforce energy.  We’re really just at the point where the charter has been drafted, and we’re getting ready to stand it up.  There’s a number of Coast Guard people in the room here and my theory is that you know who you are and if you’re here, you’re probably going to be part of our taskforce energy.  You, too, Dr. Wehrenberg.  (Laughter.)  Thank you.  (Applause.)

MR. LANGSTON:  So that was obviously an excellent panel and you saw a lot of very interesting and exciting work going on.  I think we have a couple of mike out there, do we not?  So we’re going to open the panel for discussion, for those that have a little bit of extra time to ask these folks questions.  You’ve got the experts here tonight, so please take advantage of that.  Sir?

Q:  Bill Tenny (ph) from IBM.  A question for Adm. Cullom.  Typically, it’s a resource-sponsored dream to fund something which has got an ROI and be able to collect the money to be able to reinvest in something else.  Historically, that’s been impossible in the Navy to follow the money in a way to do that and to sort of fund things that are going to do benefit and, you know, some little benefit monetarily, but not the resource – (inaudible, off mike).  Is there any success that you see in that changing, in the way you’re structured along financial business lines or anything like that? 

REAR ADM. CULLOM:  Not immediately.  And unfortunately – you know, I’d love to be able to tell you yes – we looked at different possible, very much out-of-the-box thoughts for being able to do that. 

At the end of the day, given the constraints of what we all have to live with in terms of DOD budgeting and the fact that there’s always somebody to be able to look over your budget and look at something as being a potential source for something else, to try to fence that ahead of time, create a wedge.  We’ve created wedges in the past, as you know, along the way.  But those tend to get whacked when times are hard, and they’re certainly hard now because of the constraints we’re under.

That said, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t looking at what we’re going to do for POM ’12 and in fact actually looking at how we build an energy plan for that, that does take into consideration the fact that if you are saving things, then you should be able to appropriately invest a certain amount in a certain plan.  But it has to be looked at kind of holistically.  You can’t just say well, what we saved last year will get rolled into next year, because budgeting just doesn’t tend to work that way.

Q:  (Inaudible.)  To what degree are energy specialists in your services addressing mission resilience in light of potentially shifting resource supplies and – (inaudible) – in the future, changes in the short term or the long term?  How is mission resilience being planned to accommodate those perspectives?

MR. LANGSTON:  Anyone want to jump on that one? 

REAR ADM. CULLOM:  Okay, I’ll jump on it.  The resilience, I think, is a critically important part of things, whether you’re looking at it from a tactical perspective or you’re looking at it from a shore perspective – infrastructure perspective – for us. 

Because on the shore side of the house, just, a lot of us have been up to places like PJM and others where we see, you know, how all that grid gets used in various places, in addition to many of our bases that use it, and realized that there are some challenges that they have and some challenges that we will have in case something is to come up that drags a portion of the grid down, for a period. 

We have to be able to be resilient to that.  And I think that’s what we’re looking at when we look at, for instance, for the shore investments:  how do our investments contribute to making us resilient on those bases?   So you go to net-zero bases, whether it be the Air Force Academy or it be to the ones at the Navy and the Marine Corps, as sister services are looking at, that’s actually in the calculus.

On the tactical side of the house, I think we’re all faced with some of the same challenges.  We buy fuel from DESC and as you heard from the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard is moving that direction as well.  In buying from DESC, we end up having to buy from places all around the world, and there is a certain amount of vulnerability associated with buying from places all around the world.  We are thinking about and looking at this.  One of the things that we’ve thought about as part of our energy future is war games to try to think about exactly those kinds of things. 

So some of the choices that we look at have to take into consideration, for instance, if we go to alternative fuels, who else will help produce those with us?  Other nations – other partner nations – that we routinely deal with.  And how can we be able to – if we have to be able to supply some of that ourselves, how do we do that ourselves?  All of which are very valid questions and things we have to be able to answer if we’re going to be able to support, you know, whether it’s the 1-MEF that’s out there or it’s a forward-operated strike force – Air Force or Navy strike force.  Anyone else?

MR. LANGSTON:  Ma’am?

Q:  Darcy Immerman from – (inaudible, off mike).  As a contractor looking into the services and looking at the requirements to try to meet these energy efficiency and renewable portfolio standards, that involves the use of a lot of other people’s money.  And when you look at the – (inaudible) – and all the other things that go around with other people’s money, we get very concerned about the availability of those funds to actually be able to be willing to be put up to fund those – (inaudible, background noise). 

So when we do our spot analysis, we see that as a major threat to the ability to actually respond to those requirements.  So my question is, as the services go on, is there any room to push to try to work with – (inaudible) – alternative financing sources, et cetera to give them a better level of comfort to bring into the program so that those of us from the engineering, et cetera, can get more work (ph)?  Because it did dry out this year badly when the economy tanked, so we’re worried.

MS. LUCCHINO:  I think there are always opportunities for us to work together, particularly when we share common requirements.  So to the extent we can do that, we will do that.  We’ve also had a little bit of discussion about public-private ventures related to industry where we would have partnerships with industry. 

And then one other thing that might tie together the prior question and your question a little bit is, we’ve spent at least the prior administration outsourcing a lot of the energy requirements from our bases and stations, whether it’s sewer water, electricity. 

So when this administration first came in, there was some thought that in the event we had an attack or a natural disaster, that we would want to insource all those capabilities thinking that the military would be called on to react immediately, whether it was against an attack or if – you know, to keep the government running in the event of a natural disaster. 

And then as we thought about it more, we realized that if we learned anything from Katrina, it’s that as soon as the lights go out, folks in the local community maybe can go a day, a couple of days, but you can bet they’ll be tearing down the gates and busting into any military installation that has lights on when they don’t.  And so the interdependencies with local power authorities and the bases and stations is really critical and we would want to keep that, to some extent, and perhaps expand upon that.  But we’re going to have to do a whole lot more to be prepared in the event there was something that crippled us and we needed to be able to react. 

MR. LANGSTON:  The gentleman over here.

REAR ADM. CULLOM:  I’d like to actually add onto that, because in addition to just being able to provide the power – hold on, I’m – (laughter) – I think I’m still me – (laughter) – that we have actually looked at being able to expand outside those bases.  Because if you think about it, a lot of the military personnel, civilian and uniformed, live not too far outside the bases. 

So you think about, if things get really bad, due to natural disaster or whatever, you’re going to want to be able to have those people come back to the base to continue the missions that we have to be able to do at those bases.  So the necessity to ensure that you don’t just end at the fence line, which I think is really what Carla was getting at, is really an imperative – that we’ve really got to be able to do more than that if we’re going to expect, particularly critical infrastructure, to do the mission that it’s really going to have to go do.

MR. LANGSTON:  We had a gentleman over here.  Right there – yeah.

Q:  Kurt Perot (sp).  I’m a neuropsychologist, and I did a talk on the psychology of global warming in May and many people thought I had psychiatric problems.  (Laughter.)  So it’s nice to be in an environment where people can say those terms. 

And I was just wondering, this cultural change – I wonder if it would be useful to have, maybe, a three-question questionnaire – do you believe climate change is occurring; do you believe global warming is occurring; do you believe either one of those two – (inaudible, background) – influence by human activity – just so we can get a sense of what kind of a mountain we’ve got to climb with the culture, because this addiction – (inaudible) – needs to change. 

MR. ORNER:  I think that I can officially agree with – say yes to the first two of your questions.  As to why it’s happening, you’ll have to go to a scientific organization.  But the fact that it is happening, I think, is clear.  And from a Coast Guard perspective, the Arctic is an area of dramatic focus for us because it is very clear that the Arctic ice cap is shrinking.  We, the Coast Guard, don’t have a position on why it’s shrinking, but we have clear, obvious evidence that it is and we know the consequences of that and we’re spending a lot of time thinking about and planning for the consequences of that. 

REAR ADM. CULLOM:  On the Navy side of the house, I told you that we have a taskforce climate change as well as a taskforce energy.  So I’m not the expert to answer that question, but Adm. Titley is the right person to answer it.

He actually did, I think, come up with a pretty complete soup-to-nuts answer on that because one of his first tasks in the taskforce climate change was to look at the Arctic.  And during the Naval Energy Forum, he actually spoke about that.  You can go to – Google Naval Energy Forum or go to the Facebook page for it and you’ll find – I think you can get his transcript of what he said. 

MR. LANGSTON:  Good information.  Sir? 

MR. MCGHEE:  Can I also tag onto that? 

MR. LANGSTON:  Oh, go ahead.

MR. MCGHEE:  It’s perhaps obvious – it’s obvious to you, sir – I think you know – but maybe not obvious to many that the Air Force, as well as the other services, make great investments in monitoring, tracking and predicting the weather, for example.  And we do that for no small reason; it’s a great determinant of the success of mission and operations. 

And so in fact, just this morning, I was meeting with our weather operations folks in the building and talking about, what can we do to contribute additional resources to the development of the science and the understanding, for DOD needs, to the potential impacts that we have to evaluate in our mission planning associated with climate change?  And the answer is, there’s a lot more than I thought we could do. 

I’m happy to say that the Air Force is addressing this matter.  It’s addressing it at the early stages.  All of us are, at present, waiting to some degree for the outcome of the evaluation being done as the result of the QDR’s task to examine climate change and energy.  That being said, we’re not all sitting around on our hands; clearly, the Navy’s got a clear understanding of real-world consequences that they need to address pretty quickly. 

The rest of us are, perhaps, shaping – I don’t want to speak for the rest of us – but I would guess the rest of us are perhaps trying to shape what exactly is the role that our organizations could play.  Is it a standalone role or is it a participant in a larger role with the federal government?  And I think we’re still trying to shape that. 

But I believe the vibe is clear that climate change is understood to be a compelling issue that we have to address by the many.  And so we’re trying to move past the debating about whether or not it exists or whether or not there needs to be something done about it; we’re trying to move to the question of, what exactly can we do about it and what is our role?  Where can we contribute to this large problem? 

MR. LANGSTON:  Anyone else on the panel?  (Chuckles.)  Okay, we had one question here and then we’re going to wrap it up.

Q:  Yes, this is a question for the panel.  Two weeks ago, we signed an agreement with –

MS. WERTHEIM:  Who are you?

Q:  Oh, Bill Jane (ph) with – (inaudible) – to build solar-powered, ultra-light rail networks in the city of Kunming, China.  It’s a 6-million-person city.  If we come with the capital, can we build these on bases to save on car payments for family and take most of your oil-powered administrative vehicles off the road?

MR. GEISS:  Two things.  First of all, the executive order that was just signed references the importance of looking at transportation planning, and I think that we’ll be looking at weaving that into our broader installation planning as we go forward.  The second thing is, there are certainly installations that are experiencing significant growth in population, experiencing the challenges of moving people from one place to another, expanding the number of gates and getting people in from town and across the bases.  And so there may be some installations that would, in particular, be –

Q:  Yeah, we had a meeting where – (inaudible, off mike).  (Laughter.)  (Inaudible.)

MR. GEISS:  Well, our process is that I work directly with the IMCOM – the Installation Management Command – and that would be the conduit, if this is a worthwhile meeting, to have them contact through our IMCOM up to our office and I’d be interested in the results of your discussions.

MR. LANGSTON:  So let’s let the others take that up after the class.  I’d like to give a round of applause here to the folks up – (inaudible, applause).  Adam is going to wrap us up here and get you on your way.  Thanks, Adam.

MR. SIEGEL:  After overwhelming you with so many excellent speakers and so many excellent panelists, we’re going to try a different path, which is going to be putting one face in front of you next month, on the 16th of November.  Our next event will feature Jonathan Trent for NASA.  As long as I’m promoting things via the Web, try searching “Trent algae” and I think you’ll be in the hundreds of thousands of hits.  His topic will be on a mega-algae. 

It sort of sounds like a very narrow topic, but truly, what Jonathan represents is an excellent example of a systems problem solver.  His work envisions a range of problems and provides a path for quite serious wins across economic, jobs, energy, environmental and security demands.  He truly is a multidisciplinary thinker, connector and opportunity-seeker and he serves as an excellent example, I think, perhaps, for all of us.  To top all of that off, he’s an engaging, knowledgeable, passionate and articulate speaker. 

I will collect my $20 from him afterwards for promoting him.  (Laughter.)  No, he’s really an amazing person to listen to; it should be an excellent presentation and provide us much food for thoughtful engagement.  And that’s November 16th.  Leave your nametags; you will be caught if you don’t.  Sign your envelope, leave it all on the center of the table and again, thank you very much to all of our panelists.  (Applause.)

(END)

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