By Lieutenant General V. K. Saxena (Retired)

Last month, we celebrated Earth Day. A day dedicated to environmental protection, sustainability, and climate change. The salutary celebrations world over followed a predictable course – meetings, conferences, pledges, and an annual recall of known ‘offenders’: vehicular pollution, stub burning, unending construction activities, and more. Event gone; subject gone for a year!

Today, however, I wish to stay on the subject and draw your attention to a seemingly ‘new offender’ who has remained obscured from the public eye for years – the ‘Armed Forces’. Surprised! How come the sentinels of our national security are clubbed under this ‘not-so-honourable’ heading?

The reason is that to keep the evil designs of the enemy at bay, the Armed Forces must train relentlessly day and night. What does this training involve? It involves the plying of hundreds and thousands of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, heavy artillery pieces, air defence guns, missile systems, and more. This heavy combat equipment mostly runs on fuel-guzzling generators burning monumental quantities of diesel.

What is the result? The seemingly innocent and rather inevitable training drills send out into the atmosphere huge quantities (lakhs of kg) of hot gases, mainly carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. These gases pollute the atmosphere to no end. There is a term that clubs all the polluting gases together; it is called GHG or Greenhouse Gases. This term denotes the entire group of gases that trap the heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, which is responsible for causing global warming.

If the above strikes a cautionary note, wait! I have still not introduced the ‘biggest offender’ of all. It is the firing of live ammunition by the Armed Forces. How serious this one is, one may ask.

Well, dangerously serious! Let me elaborate. A finished, ready-to-fire ammunition consists of four major components: 1. Casing (that holds the contents and gives it form); 2. Propellant (which, on burning, produces enormous amounts of gases, creating the ‘push’ which takes the round from the weapon to the target; 3. Primer (which, on ‘initiation,’ ignites the propellant), and 4. The Projectile (the payload carrying the warhead that finally lands on the target).

In the entire process of manufacturing the ammunition, many metals and chemicals are used. Besides the complex alloys containing lead, tin, copper, zinc, brass, aluminum, etc., used for the casing, the propellant and the primer are basically chemical compositions using Nitrocellulose, Nitroglycerine, Diphenylamine, Graphite, Potassium nitrate, Charcoal, Sulphur…I could go on.

When this ‘deadly combination’ gets fired in scale, large quantities of GHG are emitted into the atmosphere. How much, you may ask?

Well, a single round of a 5.56 mm rifle produces some 216 mg of GHGs. That’s small, isn’t it? What about when lakhs and lakhs of rounds are fired each year? And I have still to talk about the ‘big boys’…huge tank ammunition, artillery ammunition, air defence ammunition, and more. Just to give some idea, one single air defence gun-missile system (Schilka weapon system) fires a whopping 3,400 rounds every single minute, and its engines consume a ‘mere 90 litres’ of fuel every single km!

Firing of live ammunition is, in fact, the biggest culprit in polluting the atmosphere.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the government has come out very strongly in reducing this catastrophic pollution cycle. In September 2021, it promulgated a policy titled ‘Framework of Simulators in Armed Forces’.

Why simulators? Simply because, training done on simulators not only saves hugely on time and cost, but it also significantly dwarfs the need to ply hundreds and thousands of combat vehicles for conventional training, and most importantly, it drastically reduces the need to fire lakhs and lakhs of live ammunition rounds. Basically, live fire will be required for validation of the trainee skills honed on simulators.

In the above policy, the government has stated unambiguously that it wants to implement simulation-based training across all military domains, be it combatants, leaders, or maintainers, and as if walking the talk, the policy lays down a clear framework for synergised and enhanced exploitation of simulators by the Armed Forces.

The good news is that the Indian defence industry today is fully capable and ready to meet every demand for simulators by the armed forces. Take, for instance, the Hyderabad-based listed company called Zen Technologies Limited. This company is the market leader in the field of simulators and anti-drone systems, with more than 1,000 solutions deployed globally. Standing firm on its self-funded Research and Development, the company has to its credit more than 170 patents and counting. Other players in the simulator field are Tata Advanced Systems, Alpha Design Technologies, Zeus Numerix, etc.

The point is simple: the need of the hour is to reduce the footprint of conventional field training, which is a huge environmental polluter, and shift a portion of the same to simulator-based training. Why only a portion?  Because some percentage of ‘on-ground training’ will remain inescapable for validating the combat worthiness of the force.

 In this context, it is heartening to note that simulator-based-training is, which is rightly being referred to as Green Training, is getting great visibility and traction in the Armed Forces.

This theme was picked up by NITI Aayog, which featured it as a separate session in their Consultative Workshop on Strengthening Sustainability Initiatives of Indian Armed Forces. This event was attended by the key leadership of the Indian Army under the Vice Chief of Army Staff, besides all the stakeholders in the sustainability domain, media, industry, think tanks, and academia.

Independent research work by TERI, a national-level not-for-profit research organisation working in the field of energy, environment, and sustainable development, has shown the ‘impact’ of green training on environmental protection. For assessing this ‘impact’, the quantum of savings in the emission of GHGs has been assessed in crores of Rupees.

The research shows that even if only 15% of Infantry weapon training is shifted to simulators, it will result in an annual savings of INR 461.20 crore for India’s armed forces, while the total capital investment required to set up the required simulator base and support infrastructure will be only INR 221 crore.

Along similar lines, a mere 15% shift of air defence gun-based training to simulators will result in savings of INR 101.08 crore, while the capital investment required to generate these savings will be INR 45 crore. The research goes on to show that a similar shift in tank training will produce the annual savings of INR 1,123.04 crore at a capital investment of less than INR 100 crore in simulators.

That much for the impact!

And, therefore, when I see nations celebrating World Earth Day, my appeal to them is … ‘celebrate the world simulator day’ as well, by recognising how much pollution caused by the Armed Forces can be saved if only a bit of field training is shifted to simulators.

Kudos to the Government of India as well for coming out so strongly in ushering a simulator culture in the armed forces, a need of the hour to save our planet. The armed forces should make a visible shift to simulators.

(The writer is a former Director General of Army Air Defence, Indian Army. Views are personal.)

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