The modern M1A2 Abrams tank, fielded by the US military and some allies, weighs over 73 tons. It gets, at best, 0.6 miles per gallon on jet fuel and consumes at least 300 gallons of that fuel every eight hours it is in the field. Transporting the tanks by air means fitting one into a large C-17 four-engined cargo jet, or two inside a massive C-5 jet. The tanks can also be brought close to where they’re needed by rail and ship, though that’s slower. When the US Army goes to war, it can do so with hundreds of these tanks.

The Abrams isn’t mentioned by name in “Disentangling the US military's climate change paradox: An institutional approach,” a new paper by authors Corey R. Payne and Ori Swed, but they do mention the Bradley, another armored vehicle that has poor fuel mileage. Like the Bradley (a mere 28 tons and 0.9 mpg in the new hybrid version, according to the authors), the Abrams is but one small part of a vast fossil fuel-emitting military.

The US military, to its credit, has identified climate change as real — and a threat — for at least two decades, weathering changes in presidents and shifting political attitudes toward climate action. Yet, the military’s role in contributing to climate change is understudied.

“We are thus left with a paradox: the military is one of the world's major drivers of ecological degradation, while at the same time is one of the few powerful institutions in the United States that has been willing to acknowledge the dangers posed by the climate crisis,” write the authors. “Our review finds that the military does not see saving the planet from a climate catastrophe as a goal that falls within its mandate. Instead, military officials understand the climate crisis as a threat to national security that has to be dealt with.”

One reason given for why the military is so perceptive on climate change is because there are many military bases, especially ports, which are directly threatened by climate change. The United States operates roughly 800 bases around the world, all nodes in a great logistics chain that ensures soldiers have food, vehicles have fuel, and sensors like radar have electricity.

“Any mitigation measures embraced by the Pentagon are thus necessarily limited by the apparent conflict between military effectiveness and emissions reduction,” write the authors, who go on to argue that the overriding logic of the US military is to preserve its ability to fight and mitigate only as a secondary concern. As much as there is a conflict between the two measures, it is one largely internally resolved.

The greenest thing the military could do would be a strategic retreat that contracts its worldwide presence, argue the authors, thus mitigating the need to ship and sustain gas-guzzling tanks across the globe. What the military should be doing, instead, is investing in ways to deliver the same firepower, but from slightly more fuel-efficient vehicles, if possible.

Hello readers! We interrupt this regularly formatted Critical State to invite you to apply for the Creative Capsule Residency. This virtual residency, supported by Inkstick Media and Bombshelltoe Policy x Arts Collective, is looking for journalists, artists, and international security experts, at all skill levels, interested in working on a project about global security issues. The deadline for applications is July 21, 2023. Apply here!

Gerry Hadden chilled in Iceland, thanks to the mysterious “Blue Blob,” or patch of cold water in the North Atlantic that’s keeping Iceland and Greenland cold while much of the rest of the northern hemisphere experiences record-shattering heat waves. “From 1995 to 2010, we had about a meter of the surface thickness of the glaciers disappearing every year,” glaciologist Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir told Hadden. “And after 2010, at the same time as this Blue Blob was appearing, this rate of mass loss actually decreased.” The effect of the cooling is temporary, and the Blue Blob may dissipate in a few decades, but in the meantime, its effect is enough to meaningfully mitigate the rate of glacial loss.

MacKenzie Knight mined the history of the Manhattan Project for the stories of people, especially marginalized people, who may have been left out of director Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer,” debuting on July 21, 2023. “If Nolan wants to paint the fullest cinematic picture, he should include nods to the uranium miners in the Navajo Nation and Belgian Congo (and the victims of a Cold War proxy ground in Congo thereafter) and the downwinders of nuclear testing,” wrote Knight. If those stories are left out, Oppenheimer will have missed a tremendous opportunity to tell the fuller story of the bomb.

Shirin Jaafari dredged through the grim water reports coming out of Iraq. The Tirgirs and Euphrates rivers that run through Iraq to the Persian Gulf are foundational to agriculture in the region and have been one of the most continuously farmed places in human history. Now, however, the water is becoming less usable, and there’s real concern that the rivers will be dry by 2040. Climate change is exacerbating this, as are the construction of dams outside the country, and the lingering effects of Saddam Hussein’s drainage of marshes in southern Iraq.

If your war crimes are sciencey enough, your adopted country may make you a little booklet about how you escaped justice.

I’m at the reviving a toy brand, I’m at the reasserting femininity of women under arms, I’m at the combination military Barbie campaign of the 1990s.

A towering inferno.

What’s it called when the state outsources a civil function to a theocratic body, it certainly doesn’t sound like freedom.

Everyone remembers that Merle Haggard classic, an Okie from Grozny.

The frame in Spain is difficult to obtain.

Yeet wave.