On the Correct Use of the Environment by the Army.
Since time immemorial, strategists have taken a keen interest in the environment, not to protect but to harm it. The major strategy theorists since Sun Tzu, who authored The Art of War in the fifth century B.C., have shown that a successful manoeuvre costs less when nature is exploited boldly. By contrast, the effect on the environment was given little consideration, if any at all. War and the environment are diametrically opposed in Western military culture. From 1965 to 1973, when the United States army waged its destructive war in Vietnam, it realized more and more that climate change and the full-scale exfoliation of the jungle could serve its tactical plans to thwart the Vietcong. However, it underestimated the effect the extensive degradation of the environment reported by the media on site and occasionally by geographers would have on a significant part of international public opinion. Starting in 1976, an awareness of the damage to the environment in time of war and the beginning, in 2000, of a common appreciation of environmental protection as well as the development of national sustainability strategies was growing. But this “correct use of the environment by the army continues” to be restricted to modern armies – in other words, to affluent countries – not so much for military as for political reasons. So what are these new environmental strategies – and how will they be implemented in an international context where the prospect of major ecological disasters happening during the next century is looming large?