Airpower and the Environment: The Ecological Implications of Modern Airwarfare.

摘要

Balancing strategic and operational needs with both military and environmental ethics is certainly not impossible, and responsible armed forces are already beginning to think about how best to balance what superficially seem to be (but actually are not) competing imperatives. Air forces face the greatest challenges. During both peace and war they have far greater carbon footprints than armies and navies. They use potentially more devastating ordnance. Their targets traditionally include objects in or near population centers and the aquifers, waterways, soils, and food sources that sustain them. Also, because of historic targeting trends that appear likely to continue for some years--a feature of several chapters herein--air forces cause far worse damage to environmentally significant production, storage, and distribution infrastructure, much of which is based on petroleum, oil, lubricants, or chemicals. The manufacture and testing of aircraft are themselves major industrial undertakings that have always, and especially during wartime, damaged local ecosystems, sometimes substantially and perhaps in some cases permanently.