Colonel Robert Charette, Jr.

Transcription

1 293 Colonel Robert Charette, Jr. Colonel Ted Smyth s introduction proves that I am not an expert in energy but only an expert in burning energy. It is an honor to be here. This was one of the first forums I addressed Colonel Robert Charette, Jr., enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves in He then attended Officer Candidate School and was commissioned in He has a B.S. degree in chemistry from Delaware Valley College, a master of business administration degree from the University of Phoenix, and a master of national security strategy degree from the National War College. He has attended numerous major professional schools. He has served as the VMFA-235 Embarkation and Pilot Training Officer, Third Battalion/Third Marines Air Officer and Operations Officer, VMFA-312 Admin Officer and Pilot Training Officer, VMFA- 451 Aircraft Maintenance Officer and Operations Officer, Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron-1 FA-18 Instructor, Director of Safety and Standardization, Tactical Aircraft Department Head, I Marine Expeditionary Force G-5 CENTCOM Planner, Task Force-58 Air Officer, VMFA-314 Executive Officer, VMFA-323 Commanding Officer, Marine Aircraft Group-11 Operations Officer, Joint Staff J8, Chief Joint Requirements Oversight Council Secretariat, and the USMC Representative to the Joint Chief of Staff Working Group. He is currently Director, Expeditionary Energy Office. Colonel Charette participated directly in the following combat operations: Operation Desert Storm, Operation Southern Watch, Operation Deliberate Force, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. His personal decorations include the Defense Meritorious Service Medal with two gold stars, Air Medal with combat distinguishing device, Air Medal Strike/ Flight Award numeral six, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with combat distinguishing device and two gold stars, Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, and seven Sea Service Deployment ribbons. He has earned Top Ten honors with Carrier Air Wing 8 and Carrier Air Wing 9. He was awarded the 1996 Alfred A. Cunningham Award for being selected as the Marine Corps Aviator of the Year.

2 294 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 last year after getting my orders pulled to go to Miramar and fly again. So this reminds me of last year s horrible experience. But I will tell you, it has been a fascinating journey; it has really been about watching and helping develop cultural change in the Marine Corps. Commandant James Conway started the process a year ago, and Commandant James Amos has put the pedal to the metal and has continued it. It has been fascinating to watch what the Commandant s leadership can do. So what did the Commandant do? How did we get here? Several years ago, Commandant Conway, working with General Amos, at the time the Director of Combat Development and Integration down in Quantico, conducted the Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025 Study. They looked at the war after the next war, how we need to be positioned for it, and how it will be affected by resource constraints around the world. They considered the fact that a lot of people live near the world s oceans and the fact that a lot of people live in urban areas. The next war could well be over oil or it could be over water. The world is changing rapidly. Populations in Europe and Japan are decreasing, while those in Asia and Africa are increasing dramatically. The price of oil has once more begun to rise as you can see on the left-hand side of Figure 1. Figure 1. Rising Energy Demand: Increasing Fiscal and Combat Risks

3 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 295 If we have learned just one thing from the last 10 years of combat, it is that if one man can build it, another man can destroy it. You do not need a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) if you are not on the road. The impact of that, however, is that you cannot require fuel or water. So, that is the issue that the Commandant was looking at. There is an obvious danger in putting a fiscal concern next to a mortal combat concern; they are not the same. Obviously, the reason we are attacking this problem is to reduce the risks incurred by our Marines. However, the fiscal issue is also important. You can see that fuel prices spiked between 2000 and Congress passed an emergency supplemental during that timeframe that authorized $1.56 billion to account for the cost of fuel. The operation and maintenance (O&M) accounts in the Marine Corps and the other services had been totally disrupted. If we did not do something about that rise, the Marines would not have been able to train. When we lose money in our O&M accounts, we can have Marines at risk because they cannot complete the required training. So we have to address the fiscal issue head on. The bottom line is we cannot afford to do business as usual. It is not in our best interest fiscally, and it is definitely not in our best interest combat wise; that is what got us going. As a follow-up to Strategic Vision 2025, the Commandant set up my office and put this great team together over the last year. When you take a look at it in real terms, the Marine Corps is burning over 200,000 gallons of fuel per day (Figure 2). The price per gallon that we pay in the Helmand Province is $7 even. We do not pay the Defense Logistics Agency price of $2.80 in Afghanistan; we pay the NATO price of $7.05. What does that come down to? Well, it adds up to $1.4 million per day, or a little over $500 million per year. Right now it costs about a billion dollars to operate the Marine Corps for a year in Afghanistan. That is half of the Marine Corps entire annual procurement budget; so that is significant. Then you take a look on the right side of Figure 2. We have been running about 5 million barrels a year. Most of that is consumed by aviation, and as you have already heard, the Navy is working on

4 296 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 that challenge. There are things we can do in training and simulation that we are looking into. Figure 2. Marine Corps (USMC) Energy Use What we are really getting after though are the things that we can affect today on the battlefield. One of the principal components of Marine Corps battlefield energy consumption is batteries. The Marine Corps spends $22 million a year just on batteries, and a large share of those batteries power our radios. We do not need to get into the jammers that Marines carry, or the sights or night vision goggles. Let us just take a look at the number of radios in a Marine infantry company, like the one depicted in Figure 3. Prior to September 11, 2001, each of our infantry companies had a couple of radios, which required a total of about 160 watts of power. At that time, the total weight of the batteries required for a 3-day company-level patrol amounted to 122 pounds, and it only cost us about $4000. Today in Afghanistan, some 10 years later, that same company requires about 1255 watts of power because now every Marine has a radio. The batteries to provide that power weigh 586 pounds and cost $117,000. We just cannot afford to do business like this. We are going to price ourselves out of the warfighting business. General Joseph Dunford, the Assistant Commandant of the Marine

5 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 297 Corps, has told us that we are out of money. We have got to start thinking. Figure 3. The Company Pre-2001 versus The Company Today So General Amos has raised the bar in his latest planning guidance. He told us to do something about our energy consumption. Fortunately, we have had an 8-month head start. The Expeditionary Energy Strategy provides a baseline for our current energy use on the battlefield. [2] While the Marines are frequently deployed in different places around the world, we also spend a lot of our time at home, which means that Marines have to train and think at home so they are prepared to do the things they need to do when they get to the battlefield. Prior to the 1990s and I joined the Marine Corps in the mid- 1980s the Marines were very much a resource-limited force. When we landed an F/A-18, we called the radio room to find out how many flight hours we should log because we were concerned about fuel use. When we went to the fueling pits, we had shut down our left motor the right motor was connected to all the important hydraulics because we were worried about burning gas on the ground. When a Marine woke up in the morning on a patrol, he had two canteens and a couple of iodine tablets. You made do with what you had, but over the last 20 years, we have become resource spoiled. We now drink only bottled water on the

6 298 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 battlefield; Marines do not carry canteens anymore. They expect to have bottled water. I was a battalion operations officer (OPSO) some years ago. As penance for flying too much, they gave me an OPSO tour. I started as a forward air controller and then they made me the battalion OPSO. We went to Lowe s and bought a little Honda generator because we did not have a generator at the battalion headquarters. We ran it all night to power our stuff so we were not wasting money on batteries. If you go to Helmand Province today, you will find that there are generators everywhere. We have Marines starting up 60-kilowatt generators to charge their ipods. By the way, those kids have guns, so I am not going to say anything to them, but they need maybe a couple microwatts. We have gotten completely spoiled over the last 10 or 20 years because post-desert Storm, we stopped thinking about our fuel bill. We stopped thinking on the battlefield about water because water was always going to be there. Our logisticians have done heroic work supplying a battlefield where consumption is out of control. Figure 4. 35th CMC s Planning Guidance [2, 3] We have to turn the corner. Fast, lethal, austere those are the attributes of expeditionary operations. The infantry company that goes out today is magnitudes more lethal than an infantry company was in We have learned a lot. While we are definitely

7 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 299 more lethal, we still have to be able to fit back on ship. We have to be able to get back to our austerity and our speed. We have probably lost some of that, and so what we are figuring out right now in working with the Marine Corps Systems Command and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) is how we lighten our load and how we power that load in a smart way that is less costly. We have to think ourselves out of this. We are not going to be able to pay our way out of it. The triangle on the right-hand side of Figure 4 shows how we are going to compress ourselves back to the center. One of our goals is to end up getting some of our energy from renewable sources. As you will see shortly, we are well along the way to doing that. We are also going to increase the efficiency of our current gear as we reset and recapitalize. Then we have to make sure that our requirements documents capture that and move forward so when our requirements community sends a document to the Marine Corps Systems Command, it includes energy efficiency Key Performance Parameters (KPPs). I would actually like those KPPs to be designated energy performance KPPs, but we have not made that change yet; but I am floating that idea. More importantly, the anchors for our whole approach are leadership and training. We have to have Marines thinking about resource constraints. We need our Marine Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels and some of the old guys to think hard about this. Colonel Eric Smith, a friend of mine, just took over RTC-8 in Northern Helmand Province. He is working very hard to get his Marines off bottled water by the end of the year. They get it, and thanks to our leadership it is starting to echo throughout the Corps. Earlier this week, we sent a Marine out to Twentynine Palms to show an infantry battalion how to use one of the small solar blankets we have given them. Forty Marines and their Lieutenant Colonel sat through that training session. It is starting to spark; that ethos is going to be our biggest driver, and it does not cost us a lot of money. Today in Helmand Province we are burning about 8 gallons of fuel per Marine per day. In Vietnam I think we were using about a gallon or so per Marine per day. Moreover, we are projected to

8 300 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 continue this climb. The equipment we are buying is heavier, and it is more power dependent. Still, we have to turn the corner. Our plan calls for us to reduce the fuel required by that same force that is in Helmand Province by half by the year The only fuel that will be on that battlefield is that needed by mobility systems. Generators are going to disappear. We are going to have more power-efficient equipment. We are going to have Marines that think differently about their resources. We are going to harvest as much solar energy as we can. We are going to store it using some technologies we do not know about today, and we are going to use our vehicles in ways that we are not even thinking about. We are going to harvest energy from our vehicles, whether it is heat energy or kinetic energy. Our vehicles will micro grid and will become backup power sources. Figure 5. Strategy and Timeline Our strategy has been signed out (Figure 5). What is different about it is that we have backed it up with an official requirements document, which identifies 112 specific energy-efficiency-related shortfalls. We believe that that requirements document is the intellectual foundation for getting us where we want to go. It will inform both the acquisitions community and the training community. We have also stood up a new power-and-energy (P&E) future naval

9 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 301 capability (FNC); so we now have our own tier in the FNC process. That FNC will guide the work that is going on at ONR, with the other services, with the agencies, and with the labs. By having a strategy that flows through a requirements document, everyone will be able to understand what the end state is for the warfighter and see the linkages. We also hope that this approach will improve our ability to successfully transition programs from the research and development and science and technology worlds. We recognize, of course, that such programs involve risk, but we want to see if we can improve the transition rate. We believe that our requirements document will help us do that. We have also asked our operational analysis division at Quantico to build a methodology so we can figure out if making these investments makes sense. We believe they do, but we want to back it up with rigor. Figure 6. Expeditionary Energy Goals Breakdown Figure 6 shows the breakdown of that 50%. Figure 6 does not appear in our strategy, because we do not want anybody in the system gaming it. I do not want anyone to say that we can just get our 25% from the ethos change and that we do not need to build new solar panels. So, I am sharing it with you in confidence. The point is that when we wrote the strategy we invited individuals from academia and the venture capital community to come in and provide a red team review. Based on their feedback, we

10 302 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 ended up with the numbers I have shown above. We believe they are reasonable. We believe they are executable. When we briefed the Commandant on our strategy, he said that he wanted it faster. I said, Sir, right now we have over 112 things we have to get closed before we can get there, and that is going to cost a significant amount of money. We are going to get there, and we are dedicated to doing it, but it is going to take time. So let me switch gears from the strategic level where we have been focused down to the tactical level. Obviously our most important thing is to protect the Marines who are in harm s way. A year ago, Colonel David Karcher, Mr. Cody Reese, and I were in the field down at Quantico trying to figure out what we were doing with our Experimental Forward Operating Base (ExFOB). At the time, our charter was to develop and deploy an 80% solution vice spending several years working on the 100% solution. So, in January 2010, we went out to industry with a request for information (RFI) and asked for their best technologies in solar, water, and efficient shelter design. We ended up looking at products from over 200 different companies. Figure 7. The Ground Renewable Expeditionary Energy Network (GREEN) System and the SPACES System

11 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 303 We invited 16 of those companies to bring their products to Quantico, and we ended up buying about six of them. Figure 7 shows two of them. The solar panels that appear in front of these Marines make up what is called the Ground Renewable Expeditionary Energy Network (GREEN) System. On the wall is the SPACES system that we have been working on since Following our first two ExFOBs, we approached India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (3/5). In September 2010, they went into the Sangin Valley in Afghanistan s Helmand Province one of the hardest combat areas in modern history. We sent these solutions in with them. When we first approached them in June 2010, they wanted nothing to do with this gear. I begged them to take it. I told them that if they did not, I would be fired and that I really need this job because the economy s not good. So, they somehow found it in their hearts to train with these systems and carry them into combat. When they came back, they provided feedback on how they had used these items. In the process they told us things that we had not even thought about. As a result, we are now accelerating our effort to bring them to the rest of the Marine Corps. They are getting prepared to come home. We hope to have a couple of their folks come to Washington and talk about what they did in their own words. We are particularly interested in learning about their combat operations because they went into a tough area, and we hope to talk a little bit about how they used the energy efficiency systems we gave them. So what is the ExFOB team? It is organized under Lieutenant General George Flynn, the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration. The team includes the Marine Corps War Fighting Laboratory (MCWL), the ONR, the Marine Corps Systems Command, our Training and Education Command (TECOM), the Capabilities Development Directorate (CDD) from the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, and finally my Expeditionary Energy Office (E2O). We meet weekly; our Executive Board meets every quarter, and we run ExFOB annually. Our next one will be held August at Twentynine Palms.

12 304 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 The neat thing about this is we never intended for it to turn out this way. It was one of those things where you just rush to the field to get things to the front because we were told to do so. When the Commandant gets interested in something, we get rather fascinated, and so we ran to the field and did this. Along the way, we found that it became a process. The things we learned helped inform our requirements. We also started investing differently, and when we did our Program Objective Memorandum (POM) drill, we started changing investments around based on what we could get from industry and what we thought was possible. At the end of the day, we gained confidence that some of the stuff can actually work, and we built confidence in our young Marines by getting this new technology out to them. When I was in college if you talked about environmental stuff, you got beat up by guys like me, but today when you talk about environmental stuff with young Marines, they are all over it. Their school systems are apparently different than mine; they embrace this technology. So while it was confidence building with us old guys, the youngsters got it right away and ran with it. Figure 8. ExFOB Process

13 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 305 Figure 8 will just give you an idea of the scope of our efforts to date. We did Phases 1 and 2 at Quantico and in the process evaluated the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) options. Phase 3 was accomplished during the deployment of India 3/5. We conducted Phase 4 last August at Twentynine Palms; we are in the process of purchasing the solution concepts identified there right now. Colonel Karcher and his folks are doing tremendous work coordinating that. If those systems pass the evaluation that we have planned for this coming May at Twentynine Palms, we will take them to Afghanistan this summer. Now we are really amping up the ante. We are looking at getting a battalion-level Combat Operations Center (COC) off the net entirely if possible or, at the very least, saving a significant amount of fuel. When we conduct ExFOB 2011 this summer, we are going to look at concentrated solar power, and we are going to look at stationary vehicle exportable power. We are really trying to wrap our minds around how we can make our vehicles better. The RFI for bringing solution options to ExFOB 2011 closes at the end of April. The neat thing about ExFOB 2011 is that we have partnered very closely with the Army to do the evaluation. We really want to make sure that we share everything we are doing. Let us get into specific solutions from ExFOB, and the reason I want to bring this up is because I think it is fascinating. Figure 9 shows the SPACES system; it is a small solar blanket that you can roll up in your pack. It comes with an inverter that you can use to charge up a couple of batteries while you keep marching on patrol. The system was first tested by the Marine Corps in The requirements document was not written for it until It did not deploy to the field until At that point, it went viral. We have no more on the shelf. India 3/5 got it in their hands last October; they were the only battalion we asked to use this. We never mentioned it to the other nine infantry battalions or the Marine Expeditionary Units. The word went out virally. It went from Marine to Marine; we never advertised this. We were a little hesitant because we did not know how it was going with 3/5. Now, thanks to word-of-mouth advertising, we have no more left. We

14 306 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 are trying to get an additional $9 million to buy some more; hopefully we will get them soon. Figure 9. Fleet Demand for Renewable Energy Increasing The success of this system was demonstrated effectively during one of the unit s 3-week patrols. The platoon commander was very skeptical when we first gave him this gear. By accident, the Marines filmed a video following the patrol that has provided excellent advertis ing for the system; we had nothing to do with it. The platoon commander told Combat Camera that his patrol used no batteries whatsoever during the entire 3-week duration of their patrol. Instead, they used the SPACES blan ket. Normally, batteries for an infantry patrol have to be resupplied every 2 to 3 days. So, doing without that resupply is significant. It increased the patrol s operational reach. They were less at risk, and they were able to operate all their systems on the move. There is a link on our website at Marines.mil. A couple of videos are posted there, including the one with the platoon commander s comments. There are some limits to this system. Amorphous silicon does not do well in clouds and rain. We sent it to the Philippines recently to test it. It did okay when the sun was shining, but it did not do well in clouds and rain. We have provided three systems to the

15 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 307 Naval Research Lab so they can tell us how to make it better. We know this has applicability, but we need to make it better. Shown in Figure 10 is the complete set of capabilities that we provided to 3/5. I have talked about the GREEN System. The zerobased system was a commercial-off-the-shelf product we bought from Raytheon; it has done really well. The LED lights have done well; the Marines love them because it is really easy to go to blackout mode when necessary. Figure 10. ExFOB Capabilities Deployed with India Company 3/5 in September 2010 We also tested the solar shade and the solar light poles. We found that one of the issues with the solar shade on a forward operating base (FOB) is that the silicon is woven into the top. To keep it clean you have to send Marines up there once in a while. They had to get in full battle rattle and were sniper targets, so we withdrew it back to Camp Leatherneck, our major base in Afghanistan. We are not really sure what we are going to do with the solar shade idea; we are working our way through that. The solar light poles worked out okay, but the Marines on the forward edge did not like them because they obviously helped the enemy target the Marine position. So, we moved them back to Camp Leatherneck too. They may ultimately have some applicability.

16 308 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 The Marines set up two patrol bases that operated exclusively on renewable energy. I was a little concerned when I heard that because by then the gear had been out there for a while. Some of it was commercial off the shelf, and some of it was homemade stuff. When we tried to get it back a couple weeks ago, I asked my liaison officer in Helmand to bring it back, and he said: Sir, 3/5 will not give it back. All they have is renewable energy. I was really concerned that they were using gear full time that we had not fully developed. So, we have some generators moving out there to back it up. But, they have really become dependent on renewable energy. The Phase 4 options that are going to be deployed to Afghanistan this summer are shown in Figure 11. We have direct current (DC)- powered air conditioners and DC-powered refrigeration. We think we are going to make large cuts in the load at the company level, and we are adding the liners and the lights. Figure 11. ExFOB Phase 4 Follow-On Deployment for Summer 2011 So it is clear that our multifunctional team can move out quickly when we work together. The key is our written requirements documents. We did not just talk about it as a science experiment. We put our money where our mouth was. We have increased our

17 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 309 funding for these systems by over 67% from the President s Budget for FY2011 to the President s Budget for FY2012 and have the flexibility to get the right stuff in Marines hands. Figure 12. Key Technology Focus Areas This is what we are doing on the science and technology side (Figure 12). Figure 13. Changing Ethos

18 310 Climate and Energy Proceedings 2011 Beyond just buying better toys, we are working hard to get energy efficiency into the Marine Corps ethos (Figure 13). Toward that end, we have just added a liaison officer in our shop who works with the Marines Training and Education Command; I believe that organization is one of the keys to our success. If we train our young leaders, and if we train our young Marines, the rest of it will take care of itself. Figure 14. Nawa Renewable Energy Project: Providing Opportunities As my final point, I think it is important to note that we have not just been thinking about ourselves in this. We are also thinking about the local Afghanis; we have looked at a lot of different approaches for helping them. To be sure, not everything has worked. We could not get the Afghanis interested in biofuels, for example. While they do not have a lot of clean water or good food, they do have a lot of cell phones. When we went to their markets to see how we might help, we found out that they are very familiar with solar power; they use it to charge their cell phones. So, after a 6-month negotiation, we started a renewable solar-energy project that is under construction right now. Interestingly, there is a Nawa renewable energy company in Kabul, Afghanistan. We asked them to come out to Helmand and meet with the local shura

19 Chapter 9 Adapting Expeditionary Capabilities 311 in Nawa. So now, we have an Afghan energy company helping local Afghans (Figure 14). When it is completed, we will be providing renewable energy in a distributed environment; we will be helping the local Afghanis in the same manner that we are helping our Marines. The costs for transporting fuel and building infrastructure are simply too high for the local Afghanis. This approach will allow them to avoid those expenses. We really believe this has a lot of opportunity throughout Helmand Province. REFERENCES 1. Department of the Navy, Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025, Vision%20Strat%20lo%20res.pdf. 2. The Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Office, United States Marine Corps Expeditionary Energy Strategy and Implementation Plan Bases-to-Battlefield, cmc/documents/usmc Expeditionary Energy Strategy.pdf. 3. Department of the Navy, 35th Commandant of the Marine Corps Commandant s Planning Guidance, 2010, mil/unit/hqmc/cmc/documents/cmc 35 Planning Guidance FINAL.pdf.