Dan Benton and the DOD Loophole That Shielded Military Emissions

By Roy Castellano · September 11, 2026

Environmental groups pushed for transparency in 1999, but the Pentagon's carbon footprint stayed hidden behind national security exemptions kept secret for decades.

The cost of a hidden carbon footprint is paid in degrees of warming and the steady erosion of international trust, a price borne by populations who have no say in the Pentagon's fuel budget. When the United States government promises the world it will curb its emissions, it does so while maintaining a shadow ledger for the machinery of war.

What survives of this era is a curated archival description of a 1999 memorandum, rather than the original pages of the correspondence. But the description is enough to map the architecture of a deception. The record focuses on a July 29, 1999, memorandum from Duncan Marsh, who managed the transmission of responses to environmental groups, to David B. Sandalow, then a member of the NSC Council on Environmental Quality and now a Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

A Loophole for the Pentagon

At the center of the dispute is "bunker fuel," a term the public record defines as various fractions obtained from the distillation of petroleum, including heavy fuel oil, marine fuel oil, and diesel. These fuels power the global shipping and aviation fleets, and they are among the filthiest residuals of the petroleum process. While the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which coordinates shipping emissions, and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the UN agency managing international air navigation, worked to reduce and report these emissions, the United States military carved out its own space of invisibility.

The record establishes that the US Climate Action Network, a global coalition of over 1,800 environmental NGOs, identified and targeted an "international bunker fuel loophole." This was not a technical oversight. The record is explicit: the loophole refers to "military exemptions gained by DOD at the third Conference of Parties."

By securing these exemptions, the Department of Defense ensured that the carbon emitted by the global movement of the US military—the tankers, the transports, the logistical spine of American power—did not count against the nation's climate commitments. The military was, in effect, operating in a carbon-free vacuum, legally decoupled from the environmental obligations of the state it defended.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Architects of the Shield

The mechanism for maintaining this loophole was managed by a tight circle of diplomats and strategists. The record names Frank Loy and Roger Ballantine as the authors of a summary regarding these national security exemptions. Loy, the chief US negotiator for climate change who served as Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs under Bill Clinton, provided the diplomatic cover. Ballantine co-authored the summary that formalized the exemptions.

Loy and Ballantine did not write these summaries for the public or for the NGOs. The record shows their memorandum was delivered to Dan Benton, a representative of the DOD. The line here is clear: the State Department’s climate architects were not challenging the military’s emissions; they were codifying the legal shield that allowed those emissions to remain off the books.

This relationship created a closed loop of information. The DOD secured the exemption at the conference; Loy and Ballantine summarized the justification; Benton received the confirmation; and Marsh was tasked with figuring out how to tell the people who were actually noticing the gap. The policy was not being debated; it was being managed.

The Clearance Process

By July 1999, the US Climate Action Network had caught the scent. They were no longer asking for data; they were demanding that the government close the loophole. The memorandum from Duncan Marsh to David Sandalow was not a request for a policy review or a reconsideration of the DOD’s exemptions. It was a "Clearance Request on Draft Response Letters to NGO."

This is where the record earns its irony. The government was not concerned with the volume of fuel oil being burned by the fleet, but with the phrasing of the letters used to dismiss the concerns of environmentalists. The NSC’s involvement via Sandalow indicates that the bunker fuel loophole was not merely a technical DOD preference, but a matter of national security clearance. The State Department could not even tell the public why the military was exempt without the NSC signing off on the narrative.

The Missing Metrics

If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the focus on "clearance" for "response letters" is a diversion. The record mentions the existence of the Loy-Ballantine summary on pages 3 and 4, and the NGO complaints on page 11, but it is conspicuously silent on the actual numbers. There is no mention of tonnage, no mention of barrels of fuel oil, and no mention of the actual metric tons of carbon dioxide shielded by the DOD's exemptions.

The desk's reading is that these metrics were omitted not by accident, but by design. To quantify the loophole is to quantify the hypocrisy. If the government had admitted the exact volume of emissions the DOD was shielding, the "national security" justification would have shifted from a legal technicality to a political liability. The pattern suggests that the DOD's internal assessment of risk was not about operational secrecy—the world knows where the aircraft carriers go—but about the legitimacy of US leadership in international environmental law.

Furthermore, the multilateral nature of the Third Conference of the Parties suggests a mirrored reality. The desk's reading is that the US was not the only power securing these shadows; the record's focus on the US-centric clearance process hides the likelihood that other treaty-member military powers secured reciprocal exemptions. The "loophole" was likely a gentleman's agreement among the world's largest militaries to ensure that the cost of global hegemony never appeared on a climate balance sheet.

Ultimately, the Loy-Ballantine summary was a tool for pacification. By framing a permanent strategic requirement—the ability to move a military globally without carbon constraints—as a temporary or technical "exemption," the administration could maintain the appearance of climate leadership while ensuring the Pentagon's operational reality remained untouched.

The desk's reading is that a full release of the missing pages would reveal a staggering gap between the public targets championed by the Clinton administration and the actual atmospheric cost of the US military's global posture. The still-withheld pages are protecting the specific volumetric data of the loophole, because that data is the only thing that could turn a "clearance request" into a scandal. The military paid for its invisibility with the atmosphere, and the diplomats paid for the silence with a series of carefully cleared letters.

Dan Benton and the DOD Loophole That Shielded Military Emissions

A Loophole for the Pentagon

The Architects of the Shield

The Clearance Process

The Missing Metrics

Sources