The US military is mounting an offensive this year against an enemy within: the environmental regulation that, the Pentagon argues, constrains its training and affects military readiness.

The armed forces and their allies in Congress are all pushing for more exemption from environmental laws, arguing that some of them damage national security.

Ecologists and marine biologists, together with environmental groups, regard the laws as important tools in conserving the ecosystems on large tracts of land owned by the military, and in protecting marine wildlife from damage caused by war games. And although the Pentagon is yet to endorse any legal changes, it may be looking to the conservative administration of George W. Bush to create exemptions from laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Legal anchor: a leaked Navy document outlined problems linked to US environmental regulations. Credit: CORBIS

Last month, in a bid to expose this intention, an environmental group leaked a draft of a Navy document outlining problems that stem from environmental laws. The document, which has been in development since last December, describes problems such as the Navy's continuing struggle to test a sonar that might harm marine mammals (see Nature 410, 505; 2001), and lists ambiguities in current laws and their enforcement. It calls for more clarity in environmental laws, and for the collation and publication of data on their financial and operational impacts.

“This is what we would expect to see from the Bush administration in its attempts to roll back the environmental gains of the past 10 years,” says Dan Meyer, a former Navy lieutenant and now a lawyer at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Washington-based lobby group that released the document.

Doug Spencer, a spokesman for the Navy, says: “The military is not out to damage the environment.” He adds that it is against Navy policy to discuss working drafts, but that a final version of the paper is now complete and will shortly be sent to Congress.

At a hearing of a House Armed Services subcommittee earlier this year, Joseph Angello, a senior Pentagon official, said that unrealistic combat training had “cost us lives and equipment” during real wars, such as the recent conflict in Kosovo. He argued that environmental rules restrict military exercises, causing “a slow degradation in our ability to test and train effectively”. He also noted the irony that restrictions on base activities have increased as a result of the military's success in managing these areas — to the extent that some bases have become critical havens for endangered species.

The House of Representatives is considering a law that asks the Department of Defense to conduct national-security assessments on proposed operations, to accompany the environmental-impact assessments that are already required. Spencer says this would give a more balanced view of potential conflicts. “We have to look at the risks to national security,” he says.

James MacMahon, an ecologist at Utah State University and former president of the Ecological Society of America, says he can imagine few situations in which the military would be unable to achieve a given goal without affecting endangered species. Any exemptions should be based on a national-security assessment of the potential number of lives the activity could save, he suggests.