Almost everyone wants to protect the environment and tries to comply with applicable laws and regulations. In fact, there are very few cases that involve intentional noncompliance. There are, however, a large number of environmental-enforcement actions based on mistakes or accidents. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Installations should ensure that their personnel are well informed and trained.
The most basic steps to environmental compliance are training and awareness. TRADOC is developing a training plan to provide all Army military and civilian personnel with adequate and applicable training courses that are consistent with federal, late, local, and HN regulatory requirements.
Although some environmental requirements prescribed in federal, state, or local regulations are equivalent to tasks the Army must train, they typically are stated in terms of the individual who performs them. Often the Army does not designate specific individuals who should perform specific environmental tasks. For example, ARs 200-1 and 200-2 refer to organizations that are responsible for performing regulatory tasks, as well as Army- or DOD-defined management tasks. Depending on the installation or facility, the person who actually performs these tasks might be a civilian in any number of job series or position titles, or a soldier in any of several MOSs, units, or command levels. Thus, unlike the typical military training process, in which tasks, performers, and numbers of performers that require training are well defined, the environmental program is at the early stages of this type of definition process. Therefore, the first effort for long-range improvement of environmental training in the Army is to define tasks in the context of who performs them.
