Sustainability and National Security

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populations. This impact to stakeholders is a second
order effect that results in the non-quantifiable ben-
efit of reinforcing supportive relationships with the
population, which becomes a third order effect. These
types of second and third order effects can potentially
expand exponentially for larger initiatives and so will
the corresponding non-quantifiable benefits.
Of note here is the emerging concept of Ecosystem
services. The Army manages over 13 million acres of
land in the United States. Ecosystem services can be
described as “the benefits of nature to households,
communities, and economics”(Boyd and Banzhaf
2006, 1). They include recreation, agricultural irriga-
tion, wetlands banking, water purification and may
soon include greenhouse gas credits for forested areas.
Much work is being done in the public and private
sector to identify numerical values for various ecosys-
tem services. However, until those values are further
developed, these services should be considered under
the non-quantifiable benefit category as appropriate
for CBAs which involve changes to Army real estate.


Fully Burdened Cost


As mentioned at the onset of this paper, sustain-
ability can often equate to survivability. Significant
work has been done to quantify the key factors in-
volved in delivering fuel and water to end users on
the battlefield, including force protection. This is
referred to as the “Fully Burdened Cost” typically of
fuel (FBCF) or water. The concept of FBCF received
strong attention from the Defense Science Board Task
Force when they were tasked to study the Depart-
ment’s dependence on liquid fuel and its impact in an
operational environment. The Task Force conducted

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