A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today ruled 2-1 that the U.S. Army must complete a more comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before “planning its programs to modernize and streamline its forces, while simultaneously maintaining readiness.”
In Ilioulaokalani Coalition v. Rumsfeld, (Oct. 5, 2006), the two judge majority wrote:
[w]hile the metamorphosis of the Army and the strategic planning accompanying this transformation is the business of the Army, not the courts, the Army’s compliance with NEPA does involve us.
The case involves the transformation of the 25th Infantry Division’s 2d Brigade to a Stryker unit. Hawaii environmental groups challenged the Army’s environmental reviews as insufficient. While the Army accomplished environmental reviews, the Ninth Circuit held that these reviews did not consider “all reasonable alternatives to transform the 2d Brigade in Hawaii . . . most notably the potential for transforming the 2d Brigade outside of Hawaii.” The majority said the Army failed to answer the foremost question, “why Hawaii?.”
The dissenting judge stated:
In the name of environmental “concerns,” [footnote omitted] the majority would require the Army to consider what it has already reasonably rejected: whether it should consider moving Army units around the country for the new training — regardless it would cause delay in modernizing, lack of combat-readiness and entail prohibitive costs — because of possible environmental impacts training “in place” would cause.
The court remanded the case to the District Court, and required the preparation of a supplemental EIS, which could take two years.
