War, Money, and Air Conditioning

LH #4 The Chilling Costs of Keeping it Cool

This experience was one of many that set off a near endless torrent of (mostly internalized) institutional criticism, and ultimately led to my decision to leave the military.

In 2021, I was still Active Duty. I was between deployments sitting in an office with fluorescent overhead lights. I was participating in a side quest of sorts that involved reviewing ‘pitch decks’ from the private sector to determine which products or services would be most beneficial to the Department of Defense. If I deemed any of them to be of value, then I would fill out a form signaling why it should pass up to the next person for review.

I must have reviewed hundreds of these over the course of a couple of weeks. Most were technical and obscure sounding, and began with a preamble that would read something like this:

“The U.S Army seeks to develop a small energy efficient self-contained transceiver capable of communicating between two points wirelessly without using the traditional RF transport medium. The US Army is interested in developing an NRF-TAC device that can transmit and receive signaling of up to 300 meters without the use of the traditional radio frequency.”

I don’t really know what this means, but each company usually announces which publicly stated defense requirement they are addressing before diving into why their thing is the best thing for meeting that requirement.

These requirements are first drafted by warfighters in the field, but then vetted and tweaked by an invisible army of what I call, “the Bobs”. The Bobs turn these requirements into sacred documents which essentially dictate how money is spent and on what. These are people with the souls of scrupulous accountants and lawyers, and they play a massive role in what gets put into the field.  They mostly play a role in what doesn’t go into the field. The ratio of “no” to “yes” among this population is staggering, and I’d challenge anyone to defend why this is for good reason.

Anyways, one of these companies that came across my desk really blew my mind, but remained remained dead in the water because it didn’t satisfy an existing defense requirement. At scale, it would have saved the US government billions and billions dollars.

It was a solar powered air conditioning unit.

In 2011, Brigadier General Steven Anderson was serving as the Chief of Logistics under General David Petraeus. In an interview concerning the logistical challenges presented by the mobilization of our forces in the war on terror, he let fly that the U.S. military spent more than $20 billion annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan. This includes the units themselves, fuel for the generators that power them, coolant, etc.

I can attest that the AC in these regions (at least the parts of them I was in), was top notch. Also, on some bases, you couldn’t walk 100 feet without running into a fully stocked refrigerator with ice cold water in it. Stateside, I have distinct memories of walking into empty storage facilities in 68 degree and sunny San Diego with the air conditioning on full blast. Somewhere, some sweaty contingent of Bob’s signed off on this.

This pattern of gross resource inefficiency, as I’ve alluded to in the past couple of pieces, is not just pervasive throughout the DoD, but one of its fundamental features. Waste and ineffectiveness follow largesse like the plague, and there really isn’t much more to it than that. It seems as though this is a sort of universal law, so why not obey it by trimming down?

$20B was more than NASA’s 2011 budget, the same year Brigadier General dropped this doozy . It’s also more than the G8 countries planned to give to Tunisia and Egypt to promote democracy in the region.

Most interestingly of all, this is far more than the estimated valuation of Blackwater, perhaps the most effective and famed private military company in US history, at its absolute peak circa 2006.

I think it’s awesome that the DoD has so much money, but challenge the ways in which that money is spent. I could probably find like 50 guys who could do a lot of great work with $20 billion dollars.

Perhaps it is time for the Bob’s to start saying yes to such a proposition.