Greenpeace on the Operational Planning Staff

摘要

Environmental issues have seldom been a concern for yesterday's operationalcommander. Tomorrow's operational commander, however, will likely have to address environmental issues in planning, execution, and end state phases of operations and campaigns. The concerns will go far beyond the obvious matter of targeting, where the standard concepts of necessity and proportionality serve as guidance. Restraints and constraints will spawn from multiple sources, subtle though they may be. Pre-operational restraints, including basing, pre-positioning, and training, are ever burgeoning. Operational restraints will be required by allies from whose territories the operations will be staged, based, executed, or otherwise impacted. Also, it will not be unlikely that limitations towards the enemy's environment will be necessitated by public pressure in the evolutionary process of achieving anti-septic warfare, and will be impacted during both the targeting and end state phases of the operation. More and more, operational commanders are tasked with conducting MOOTW. The very nature of these operations will necessitate that environmental issues be addressed.