What if cutting greenhouse emissions could also save the lives of soldiers in Iraq, where fuel-laden convoys make them targets? The U.S. Army says it is happening now in a push to reduce its carbon “bootprint.”

From forward areas like Iraq and Afghanistan to training ranges in the United States, the Army has been working to limit its use of fossil fuels and make its operations more environmentally sustainable.

The goal is to bring Army emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide down by 30 percent by 2015, said Tad Davis, deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety and occupational health.

“What I’m interested in doing is finding out what the greenhouse gas emissions, this carbon bootprint, are for the Army in two to three years at the latest,” Davis said by telephone. “We want to emit less that do that, hand in hand with reducing energy consumption from fossil fuels.”

The Army has pushed for environmental sustainability at all of its bases, starting with the giant Fort Bragg in North Carolina in 2001, Davis said.

In practice, that meant changing the way training ranges were set up. Fort Bragg has long been the site of mock towns and villages used for combat training.

Each village used to cost up to $400,000 to build. Now they are made of recycled truck-sized shipping containers at a cost of about $25,000, Davis said, and the shipping containers stay out of the solid waste stream.

In the first years of the Iraq war, the long supply chain stretching from Kuwait to the battlefield put convoys at risk from makeshift bombs called IEDs. Much of the cargo was fuel, Davis said.

The more vehicles in the convoy, the more soldiers were vulnerable so it made sense to cut down on the amount of fuel required on the front line.

“If we can reduce consumption on our forward operating bases by using renewable energy, let’s say wind or solar instead of a diesel generator outside the tent … then we can reduce the number of these supply convoys that need to come forward that are getting hit by these IEDs,” Davis said.

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