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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
1985. He then attended Officer Candidate School and was commissioned in 1986. 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, VMFA451 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.
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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
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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 2001. 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
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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
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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 mid1980s—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
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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 2001. We have learned a lot. While we are definitely
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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
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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 2025. 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
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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
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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
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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 1996.
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 11–19 at Twentynine Palms.
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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
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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 1996.
The requirements document was not written for it until 2004. It
did not deploy to the field until 2010. 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
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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 advertis­ing 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 blan­ket. 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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,
http://www.marines.mil/news/publications/Documents/
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, http://www.marines.mil/unit/hqmc/
cmc/Documents/USMC Expeditionary Energy Strategy.pdf.
3. Department of the Navy, 35th Commandant of the Marine Corps
Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 2010, http://www.marines.
mil/unit/hqmc/cmc/Documents/CMC 35 Planning Guidance
FINAL.pdf.