Enhancing technology development through integrated environmental analysis: Toward sustainable nonlethal military systems

Abstract

New technologies are not only critical in supporting traditional industrial and military success but also play a pivotal role in advancing sustainability and sustainable development. With the current global economic challenges, resulting in tighter budgets and increased uncertainty, synergistic paradigms and tools that streamline the design and dissemination of key technologies are more important than ever. Accordingly, a proactive and holistic approach can facilitate efficient research, design, testing, evaluation, and fielding for novel and off-the-shelf products, thereby assisting developers, end users, and other diverse stakeholders in better understanding tradeoffs in the defense industry and beyond. By prioritizing mechanisms such as strategic life-cycle environmental assessments (LCEA); programmatic environment, safety, and occupational health evaluations (PESHE); health hazard assessments (HHA); and other innovative platforms and studies early within systems engineering, various nonlethal military technologies have been successfully developed and deployed. These efforts provide a framework for addressing complex environment, safety, and occupational health risks that affect personnel, infrastructure, property, socioeconomic, and natural/cultural resources. Moreover, integrated, comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and iterative analyses involving flexible groups of specialists/subject matter experts can be applied at various spatiotemporal scales in support of collaborations. This paper highlights the Urban Operations Laboratory process utilized for inclusive and transformative environmental analysis, which can translate into advantages and progress toward sustainable systems.

Green Defense Industries in the European Union: The Case of the Battle Dress Uniform for Circular Economy

“…From the CASP analysis, 43% of the articles published were Scopus Q1, while the average CASP score was 17 pts (Table S1), which means that the overall quality was good (on a four-level scale: excellent, good, moderate and poor). Only 18% of the articles scored as excellent [2,[40][41][42][43], while 61% scored as good and 21% were of moderate quality. The excellent articles focused mainly on topics such as open innovation [40], adaptation to climate change [41], reducing the environmental footprint [2], improving technological development in relation to the environment [42] and transition to green defense [43].…”

“…Only 18% of the articles scored as excellent [2,[40][41][42][43], while 61% scored as good and 21% were of moderate quality. The excellent articles focused mainly on topics such as open innovation [40], adaptation to climate change [41], reducing the environmental footprint [2], improving technological development in relation to the environment [42] and transition to green defense [43]. With the lowest score (21%), we found more technical topics related to finance [44], nanotechnology [45] and BAE systems [46].…”

“…New technologies are not only critical to supporting traditional industrial and military success, they also play a key role in advancing a sustainable development. Saulters et al [42] (p. 281) emphasize that the "proactive and holistic approach can facilitate efficient research, design, testing, evaluation, and fielding for novel and off-the-shelf products, thereby assisting developers, end users, and other diverse stakeholders in better understanding tradeoffs in the defense industry and beyond". Some authors go a little further, mentioning that for military organizations the process of organizational greening is a quantum leap, not only technologically, but also mentally [43].…”

Building Trust-Based Sustainable Networks

“…In particular, network centric operations often aim to develop sustainable systems to support multiple goals [17].…”