Reference Terminology: Sustainability, Armed Forces, Operational Capability, Warfighting Capability, Sustainable Development Goals, Circular Economy.
Abstract
Introduction
Sustain because it must be accompanied by the fact that to maintain such a force, there is a requirement of the availability of financial resources, which amounts to an overall substantial investment. For Greece, this means that in order to maintain an adequate deterrence doctrine, a significant part of the country's expenditure consists of military expenditure.
Current status
The airport's failure to secure resources such as land, energy and water, which prevents them from growing from an operational perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate an airport's potential footprint within these three fundamental pillars of sustainable development.
It is needless to mention the benefits of such activities for the local communities, who will and must contribute to such an effort, providing waste energy that thus covers the plant's needs. Especially for such complex projects as transforming an existing naval base, a functional to a sustainable infrastructure paves the way from "damage avoidance".
Transformation of the Armed Forces – Stance towards sustainability of the Armed Forces in Greece towards sustainability of the Armed Forces in Greece
More importantly, the dramatic increase in electrical systems in use on military platforms (vehicles, ships, aircraft, etc.) is driving the electrification of the battlefield. The aforementioned increase in demand for electrical systems and the need to reduce the logistics footprint are creating demands for distributed and mobile power generation, smart power grids, improved energy storage, and wireless power transmission.
Energy challenges
They can potentially operate in parallel with the local network and as such reduce the operating cost of the facility. It can operate as an "island" mode, which is an autonomous function with the grid interrupted, and as such, along with its ability to store energy, it can also provide essential operational services to the base. This hurdle can be easily overcome if the Ministry of Defense creates a Memorandum of Cooperation (MoC), together with the MoD, that contains all this vital knowledge and also leverages assets from national academia and the private sector.
A number of MoE's collaborations with national industry will allow the Mod to participate and use these installations for testing and design optimization processes of the microgrids. The aforementioned practice will further involve the MoDG in terms of developing cyber security techniques and software to produce a secure microgrid operating environment with the other two departments.
Digging deeper into the research, there are a number of benefits that arise from the possible MoE – Mod collaboration. Finally, microgrids are built to cover the annual peak load of an installation. With that in mind, its ability to plug in excess generation is always available either by a stand-alone generator or by the electric company's available power resource.
The only drawback to which the microgrid is exposed is actually the wiring with which they are connected for the distribution of electricity. As such, if this wiring is unreliable, the power quality will not be required.
Nevertheless, wiring integration (due to the generally short distance between the microgrid and the basic infrastructure) is always a feasible and cost-effective option. Another feature that contributes to a microgrid's resilience in terms of safety is load management. When operating delicate equipment that provides critical elements and resources on the battlefield and simultaneously supporting it with equally delicate power equipment that has zero tolerance for exceeding limits, proper management of the supported loads is essential to network integrity.
This type of threat can have a broad impact on the operation of a microgrid that supplies power to essential equipment, as the entire monitoring and control of the industrial equipment is software and hardware based.
Although and in line with the trend of a sustainable organization, the above adoption will certainly refer to an intermediate action with a far more adequate planning in relation to the modification of the armed forces' vehicle fleet. Most internal combustion engines, including thermal turbomachinery, in the armed forces use diesel fuel or equivalent distillers as their work to produce fuel. This means that the introduction of biodiesel as a fuel in the armed forces can definitely be implemented.
Biodiesel is widely used in the armed forces (especially by the US Navy) (SECNAV, 2009), for experimental to early adoption methods. According to further reports15, biodiesel in a calculated mix can easily meet the needs of the armed forces, with little or no modification to the application.
Expeditionary Military installations
This has the significant operational advantage of not requiring fossil fuels, so it needs to be constantly replenished, and it is also noise-friendly. Add to this the resistance to decay and also the cost of replacement is considerably reduced along with the availability of customization for the customer in terms of shapes, patterns, camouflages etc. Which brings us to the next step of our study in this chapter regarding expeditionary waste management.
This means identifying potential partners and/or stakeholders within the waste management cycle chain that can quickly deliver their product to and from the warfighter. The part of the organization of the waste management in the expedition camp, the expedition collection and the delivery back to the camp, certainly depends on the Mod processes.
The sustainable Warfighter
For the modern armed forces, significant demands have been placed on the development of a uniform that will meet all terrain and weather aspects in the most demanding operational environment. The US Armed Forces and HM attempted to meet these standards. Moving forward to the rest equipment required of the soldier in the modern age of massive information and its pure real-time distribution to achieve a thorough and up-to-date decision-making process by operational personnel, communications stand out.
Everything can also be easily charged via a home socket or a large power bank in sufficient quantity. To overcome this obstacle, the solution is the portable solar power plant that is available in the market.
The first two phases help us define the context and address the challenges that will ultimately lead to the planning face of sustainable cybersecurity operations. The crafted plan will provide an accurate path for the coherent implementation of the cyber-secure practice. After that, the implementation of the entire designed architecture will take place and the environment will begin to take shape.
The second step of the implementation phase will be the construction of the Cyber Security Warfare Center – CWOC. This will actually be the command and control element of the entire network, which will facilitate operators monitoring cyber operations, ongoing operations and communications between headquarters and tactical operators, and vice versa, throughout the chain of command (tactical – operational - strategic).
As the transition occurs from trial to full operational deployment, feedback should be constantly provided to the developers to resolve any discrepancies noted. The main advantage of this option is that the buyer leaves the performance, maintenance and operation services to the third party who only meets the requirements and is subject to any costs. A significant amount of energy is lost due to the operation of a stand-alone generator or to a lack of consistency in power supply management.
A thorough energy efficiency plan will provide the necessary information to build the correct microgrid in terms of energy security, thus securing investment funding by reducing costs to the appropriate amount. On this occasion we are not mostly referring to the infantry operators who will participate in large numbers in conflicts and deploy from organized camps or forward bases, rather the operator who must be trusted to carry out a special or even "black" operation.18 that example , where the soldiers want.
Milestone setting in achieving SDGs
To achieve the above objectives, the necessity of an all-inclusive approach must be satisfied. Either RES or PVs in relation to power supply and storage are key components in providing energy diversity to the enabler as well as assurance in achieving the goal of transitioning to sustainable armed forces. In addition, the overall involvement of interested Army stakeholders in those objectives must be addressed, as their involvement can significantly affect their successful performance.
It is imperative for such an organization to reach out to the industry and negotiate sustainable procurement, not just to keep up with the general trend.
In addition, there must be periodic on-site monitoring and evaluation of progress by the aforementioned committee to ensure that the organization is on track. It is indeed a fact that most of the productive functioning of the armed forces cannot be considered 'green' or sustainable. Standardization within the military was addressed to ensure that all those different backgrounds would achieve a certain level of competence, knowledge and operational awareness.
But as technology advances, and at the same time resource reduction is very evident, the economy within the military must be driven in the direction of sustainability and innovation. This requires modern and adaptable behavior on the part of the staff who today are eager to perform that way.
As we move on, the graph below compares the evolution of the total defense expenditure of EU member states from 2005 to 2018 and the total GDP. In the graph below we have the trend of these investments, that despite experiencing an increase again in recent years, they are still justified to expand further to achieve the best possible result dictated by the European ''Green'' Deal. Finally, in the last graph we can clearly see that most EU countries actually have a long way to go towards innovation, as their budget for R&T within their armed forces is at rock bottom.
Conclusions
As we complete the circle of this pragmatic visionary paper, salient proposals emerge for what might help the nation's armed forces prioritize toward achieving sustainability. Armed forces installations relating to remote locations and operational centers should be converted to energy autonomy using RES and/or solar PV systems that still maintain grid redundancy. Energy autonomy in remote locations and expeditions will provide energy security and withdrawal of energy focus on the grid provider.
Waste management in raw material that due to the decommissioning of military equipment is projecting on sufficiency, can be an area for a broad spectrum cooperation between the Armed Forces and the private sector. Warfighter resiliency is a critical issue for mission success, and guidance to achieve this may be an interest of a new, unexplored collaboration between academia and the Armed Forces.
Epilogue
Bibliography