The recent intervention of the Polish Ombudsman ("Commissioner for Human Rights") in the matter of female soldiers’ brassieres in the Polish army made the sceptics aware that the armed force is changing. The fact that we live in the XXIst century means that we have (or are supposed to have) better tanks and that defence ministers have to grapple with problems that their predecessors would have deemed unworthy of a real leader's consideration.

These bras are, of course, to draw attention, and I'd like to point out right away that I don't find this case funny in the slightest way. If the allocation of a soldier’s equipment is due, then a female soldier also deserves it. Right? And because the times of wraps and rugs are over, you have to adapt yourself and refrain from kicks-and-giggles.

I would have solved this issue differently, giving the women in the service appropriate funds rather than buying them underwear, but who knows, maybe some regulations (European? Departmental?) do not allow it. And then the ministers have to explain themselves amid glares and twisted grins. What a fate …

But enough about that. With attention caught appropriately by the text and image of military bodices, let us move on to those other things that Alexander of Macedon and Marshal Radetzky would agree to consider as non-military. Well, the modern army is supposed to fight not only the enemy but also the climate change. The general public may not have noticed this because there are issues that we used to ignore for years, like those debts that we have to pay sometime in the distant future. And when this distant future comes unexpectedly, we are suddenly surprised to see a creditor standing at the door with a smile on his face, holding a request for payment in his hand. Roughly, this is what it looks like.

The moment when the creditor (or the executor) knocks on the gates of our barracks is to take place in 2050. Is that long enough? Approximately the lifespan of one generation that is - in no time. We - the society and the parties involved – are faced with a seemingly impossible task.

So let's say it again: by 2050, NATO armies intend to achieve the so-called climate neutrality, i.e. lead to a situation in which their net greenhouse gas emissions will equal zero. The modern army - which is part of the largest in the world’s history, military alliance - (as we used to call NATO), has recently been about not only how to defeat Russia/China/Iran (delete as appropriate) but also how to do it without harming the climate.

The question that yet no one has given a good answer to is: how to reconcile reducing CO2 emissions to zero with carrying out any combat activity? Of course, it would be best to equip armies with laser cannon posts and lightsabers powered by atomic micro-piles, but such a task can be difficult for two reasons. First, a less important one and relatively easy to overcome, is that there are no such possibilities on the scientific and technological horizon. And the second and foremost reason is that German environmentalists would not agree to this solution. After all, this is nuclear power. So, what are we supposed to do? It is easiest to start with changes in those areas where the modern army most closely resembles a modern corporation. The British Army - which, by the way, is a master at dealing with ecological Public Relations - recently boasted that it had exceeded the paper-saving plan and produced fuel from its own plastic. The Director Army Basing and Infrastructure, Major-General Richard Clements, in an interview with representatives of the renowned military think tank RUSI, (Royal United Services Institute) boasted that he grew his own vegetables and was an "obsessed recycler". That is a good way to follow, and it makes much sense. So eco-army?

Yes, to some extent, as part of a major PR campaign. After all, who is supposed to plan and carry out serious operations if not the military? When you look at the NATO Secretary’s General report entitled “Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment”, issued last summer, one can get the impression that the military people are trying to deliberately introduce confusion in order to - like seasoned smoke specialists - make the real problem, not a problem, which could be visible to the outside observer. This way, everyone is happy because the elephant in the room will calmly stand there and wave its trunk.

Had it not been for the Alliance's logo, someone might have mistaken the report signed by Jens Stoltenberg for one made by some environmentally-minded NGO: it is full of pictures of natural disasters and people in uniforms struggling with them; in the background there is the obligatory motif of cracked earth, and at the end, we have infographics with icons, the overwhelming majority of them straight from the corporate imaginary - only in two cases some amusing planes, a small submarine and a cute little tank were shown.

So we are back to the issue of the army as a corporation. Even in our peace-loving societies, armies are the biggest emitters of pollutants and gases. The US military forces emit more than a medium-sized European country like Hungary or Finland. The above-mentioned "obsessed recycler", General Clements, reported that the military sector is responsible for about half of the UK’s government sector emissions. In addition, just the army itself produces only 19% of this half, so there is a lot to cut without any fear that there will be nothing to shoot with.

Although the question arises about the limits of the changes - because while transferring officials of the Ministry of Defence from combustion cars to electric ones (and by the way, depriving them of paper on which they could write some nonsense) is probably correct - funding electricians for military logistics, for example sections bringing ammunition to the battlefield, could be a little risky. When planning an attack, commanders presumably would have to be guided by the geography of charging points in the enemy’s territory.

And what if the army wanted to clash with an enemy representing a backward country? The region where – to our horror! – only gas stations would exist? Probably some unique ecological military doctrine should be dealing with such cases…

And again, leave jokes aside; it can be seen that the field for "greening" the military sector is large. So the question arises again: what comes next? How to move on to the main point, i.e. making the army an institution that emits nothing? How to fire with no powder gases escaping? However, glancing at the Secretary-General's report, the document assures us that the question is fundamentally wrong. First, we need to address the climate challenges that are already there and will be even more of a nuisance in the future. For example, power engineering.

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  Some analysts, such as the expert of the Pulaski Foundation and a former Polish diplomat Marek Ziółkowski, consoles that the transition to green energy technologies has unexpected advantages from a purely military point of view. Namely, a military base powered by energy from solar panels or windmills is more resistant to a cyber-attack because its energy is produced locally, and destroying the installation with rockets is also more difficult. You would have to destroy many elements instead of hitting one transformer.

It makes a lot of sense; the thing is, you wouldn’t really know what to do when it was night, the wind had just stopped blowing, and the enemy was right approaching. Perhaps, then it could be necessary to fire up the diesel generator kept for a rainy day, hoping that the enemy will come sooner than the authority keeping emissions in check…

Commanders of nuclear-powered ships probably feel relatively most confident. Supposedly, the aircraft carriers and submarines will survive in the eco-army and should be even its pride. The problem is that aircraft carriers themselves are not of any great value. Only planes and missiles are on board to win wars.

And the electric combat aircraft is a grim joke. So is the rocket. They wouldn't be able to lift their batteries. The use of special ecological fuel for military aircrafts is widely discussed, but fuel that burns without any gas emission is probably only an awesome dream.

I have the impression that the armies of democratic countries have played a certain game with the public opinion. They have pledged themselves to an impossible goal and pretend it is a real one; They inform the community about how “greening” the army is going by cutting emissions the same way that other corporations are doing. After all, from the immortal introduction of C.N. Parkinson to his memorable book "Parkinson’s law", we know that regardless of whom we want to be and what we want to do, our career ends up behind a desk. It doesn't matter if that desk is at a nuclear testing site or at a toy factory.

Shrouded in mystery, the Pentagon is after all nothing more than a gigantic office - and without any particular harm - this office can be made less polluting. In other words, there is no rational reason why it should be treated differently than any other place of work.

Further, the military officials are spreading visions of a climate catastrophe known to us from elsewhere, showing that not only we - the society - but also they - the military - have to deal with this disaster. Again, this makes a lot of sense, because global warming forces the army to take a different approach to equipment and logistics. At the end of the day, you need to fight differently in a desert than in the Arctic fields.

When the anti-Saddam coalition deployed its equipment in the Iraqi desert in 1990, the American and British soldiers realised that desert dust was fouling their tanks’ barrels and threatening to destroy the vehicles if someone decided to shoot. Therefore, the tank-operating boys behaved creatively and secured the barrels with condoms, which were supposed to be perfect also for this purpose. So you can imagine how proud those soldiers were who provided condoms to protect the highest calibre barrels...

Generally speaking, this military adaptation to climate change is about not having to use condoms. Alternatively, each cannon should be assigned its own, of the correct size. But, there is another kind of objective in showing that armies are subject to the same kind of climate challenges as everyone else. That is very attractive to PRs, who somehow must sell this transformation to any potential demonstrators who might want to stick to their tank armour in protest. It's about telling them, they're all in the same boat, everyone's rowing together as hard as possible, and no one is lazy. If this allows the army to do its job properly, I fully support it.

Finally, after all the PR meanders and turmoils, after the whole journey through corporate savings and showing how we all (maybe except submarines) suffer together from heat or heavy rains, we come to the point that seems impossible to overcome. Indeed, both NATO and all other military officials make it clear that - as the Secretary General's report puts it - "military effectiveness in achieving NATO's essential objectives remains the primary objective."

On the one hand, citizens who want armies to simply defend them can breathe a sigh of relief: we are not threatened by tanks made of the hardest polished wood, powered by the muscles of the strongest athletes and equipped with catapults that throw eco-stone balls. On the other hand, the military people know we've just hit the wall. Because every shot will increase emissions. And if, God forbid, it hits something and it catches fire, then it’s too bad! Zero emissions will go to hell.

So the game is still on. In 2050 we should have the inspection, and either lightsabers and zero-emission eco-ray blasters will be invented by then, or the date will need to be postponed.

Or will the climate change give up by then? After all, we've been fighting it for so long…

– Robert Bogdański

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

– translated by Katarzyna Chocian