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The Pentagon's recent announcementthatglobal warming poses a national-securityrisk should have set off the irony alarms.The Pentagon has as many as 1,000bases inother countries, and maintaining thesebases (andsending troops to and from them) leavesagigantic carbon footprint.

The U.S. armed forces consume about14million gallons of oil per day, half of it injet fuel.Humvees average 4 miles per gallon,while an

Apache helicopter gets half a mile pergallon.The Iraq War, which George W. Bushlaunched in part to protect vital oilsupplies,consumed oil at a phenomenal rate.

At the start, in 2003, the UnitedKingdomGreen Party estimated that the UnitedStates,

Britain, and the minor parties of thecoalition ofthe willing were burning the sameamount offuel as the1.1 billion people of India.

U.S. forces in Iraq during 2007consumed40,000 barrels of oil a day, all of whichwastransported into the war zone fromothercountries.

The U.S. Air Force uses 2.6 billiongallons ofjet fuel a year, 10% of the U.S. domesticmarket.

By the end of 2007, according to areport from

Oil Change International by Nikki ReischandSteve Kretzmann, the Iraq War had putat least141 million metric tons of carbondioxideequivalent into the air, as much asaddingtwenty-five million cars to the roads.TheIraq War by itself added more

greenhouse gasesto the atmosphere than 60 percent ofthe world'snations.

When we are really serious aboutcarbonfootprints, we will know the amount ofgreenhouse gases generated by eachplatoon sent to war, each bombdropped, each

tank deployed.However, today we know the carbonfootprintof a bag of British potato chips from aTescogrocery store in England, but war thatelephantin the greenhouse remainsunmeasured.Consider this one fact: More than 1.4millionliters of bottled water per day are usedby our

troops, who need them to stay hydratedduringBaghdads 115-degree summer days.How muchfuel has been burned to get the waterbottles intothe war zone?

When the Pentagon trumpets is effortsto saveenergy as when it announced inJanuary that itwas replacing 4,200 flourescent lightswith lightemitting diode (LED) lights,saving 22 percent of the energy of theold ones its a bad joke.Likewise, the solar array posted on thePentagonroof is a mirage that is aimed at

passengers in carsdriving on nearby highways.

The business of the Pentagonis still war, and the making ofwar destroys the earth.

So it has been since the dawn of theindustrialage. Less than a hundred years ago, atthe

beginning of World War I, the mainmotiveforce in battle was the horse and shoeleather, astroops in Europe marched off to battleon foot orhorseback. World War I quicklywitnessed adramatic escalation in wars carbondioxideproduction with the advent of aerial

bombardment, however, as well asincreasing use

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of tanks. War is often a powerfultechnologicalmotor, and carbon-consumptioninnovator.World War II began with quarter-centuryoldbiplanes, and ended with jet-propelledfighters.

Compared with World War II, the U.S.military inIraq and Afghanistan is using sixteentimes morefuel per soldier, according to thePentagon.The mechanization of the militaryprovidedmany more opportunities to increasecarbondioxide production during the world

wars of theearly twentieth century. World War II'sShermantank, for example, got 0.8 miles pergallon.Seventy-five years later, tank mileagehad notimproved: the 68-ton Abrams Tank got0.5 milesper gallon.

Fighter jets typical subsonic fuelconsumptionis 300 to 400 gallons per hour at fullthrust (or100 gallons per hour at cruising speed)duringhundreds of hours' training, or combatmissions.Blasting to supersonic speed on itsafterburners,an F-15 Fighter can burn as much asfour gallons

of fuel per second.

During the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. B-52swerein the air at all times, on the theory thatanairborne fleet would prevent the SovietUnionfrom obliterating the entire U.S. nucleararmed

armada on the ground. Each of these B-52sburned hundreds of gallons of fossil fuelper hourwhile aloft. The B-52 Stratocruiser, witheightjet engines, consumes 500 gallons of jetfuel perminute, or 3,000 per hour. In a fewminutes, aB-52 consumes what an average

automobiledriver uses in a year.

How many years of my riding a biketo work would it taketo offset one F-15flying for an hour? Assuming a bikereplaces a car that gets 25 miles pergallon, my daily commute of five mileswould use agallon a week. That's nearly seven yearsto fuel a fighter jet at top thrust for one

hour. We don't have that kind of time.Thermal inertia delivers the results ofatmospheric change roughly a halfcentury after our burning of fossil fuelsprovokes them. The weather today isreacting to greenhouse gas emissionsfrom about 1960. Since then, the world'semissions have risen roughly 400percent. The Cold War, the VietnamWar, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, and theAfghanistan War have all played theirpart. But we haven't even felt their fullenvironmental

effects yet.

Global warming has already acceleratedbeyondeven the predictions of pessimisticscientists. Thepolar ice caps are dissolving and thepermafrost is