War Runs on Fuel: First Standardized Method Puts a Number on Warfare’s Material Footprint

Modern war is often described in terms of casualties, territory and political stakes, but a new study argues that it should also be understood as an industrial process — one that consumes fuels, metals, explosives and construction materials on a scale rivaling entire national economies. Researchers at Utrecht University’s Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development have developed the first standardized Material Flow Analysis (MFA) framework designed specifically to quantify the material footprint of active warfare, and their results reveal staggering magnitudes that have never before been systematically measured.

The study, published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology by Hessel Roodenburg, Ernst Worrell and Javanshir Fouladvand, addresses a striking gap in the scientific literature. While the humanitarian and economic costs of war have been extensively documented — armed conflicts caused more than 100 million deaths in the twentieth century, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates that a war-affected country’s economic output falls by roughly 30 percent within five years — the underlying material basis of warfare has remained empirically unquantified. Previous environmental studies documented consequences such as habitat destruction, deforestation and heavy-metal contamination, but never traced the causal flows of materials that generate these effects.

The framework borrows its structure from military science itself. The researchers organized warfare using the doctrinal warfighting functions defined by NATO and US Army doctrine, focusing on the four physically resource-intensive functions: Movement and Manoeuvre, Fires, Protection, and Sustainment. Command and Control, Intelligence and Information were excluded because they lack direct material throughput. Material inputs were then categorized using the NATO and US Army Classes of Supply taxonomy, covering fuels, fortification materials, ammunition, repair parts and medical supplies, all organized across air, ground, naval and defensive domains.

At the heart of the model lies a deceptively simple multiplicative equation: the mass of each supply class consumed equals the number of deployed platforms of each type, multiplied by a standardized monthly intensity per platform, multiplied by a logistical factor accounting for fuel self-consumption in distribution. Intensity values were derived using a quartile-based approach, with the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles of compiled datasets representing low, medium and high operational scenarios. Where data were scarce, a multiplier approach scaled baseline consumption by factors of 0.5, 1 or 2. Platform losses were estimated at 6.5 percent of deployed platforms per month, based on observed conflict data.

The framework was tested against two contrasting case studies: the Russia-Ukraine war, a prolonged high-intensity conflict with a 950-kilometer active frontline and more than 1.1 million frontline personnel, and Operation Desert Storm of 1991, a short but high-tempo 43-day campaign dominated by air and naval operations. To enable direct comparison, the researchers constructed a normalized two-month scenario in which all parameters remained case-specific but the time horizon was standardized.

The results are striking. Within a two-month window, total carbon dioxide emissions reach approximately 6 megatonnes for the Russia-Ukraine war — comparable to the monthly emissions of Denmark — and 28 megatonnes for Desert Storm, equivalent to the monthly emissions of the entire Dutch industrial sector. In mass terms, the model indicates that 8 to 10 megatonnes of fuels and ammunition are mobilized over two months, comparable to the global monthly cement trade or Sweden’s annual steel output. Fuel accounts for 70 to 80 percent of the total mass flow, with ammunition dominating the remainder and fortification materials adding hundreds of kilotonnes.

The case studies reveal fundamentally different material signatures. Over the full 43-month modeled period of the Russia-Ukraine war, fuel consumption is estimated at 13.1 billion liters for Ukraine and 32.9 billion liters for Russia, generating 36 and 90 megatonnes of carbon dioxide respectively. Residual ammunition mass totals 5.85 megatonnes for Ukraine and 10.77 for Russia, with unguided missiles alone accounting for more than 6.21 megatonnes on the Russian side. The model also estimates roughly 14.5 million unexploded rounds across the war, corresponding to 39 megatonnes of TNT-equivalent on the Russian side and 17 megatonnes for Ukraine — a legacy of contamination that will persist for decades.

Desert Storm tells a different story. Despite lasting only 43 days, the Coalition consumed an estimated 6,652 megaliters of fuel, with fuel transport and logistical activities accounting for roughly three-quarters of the total. The campaign produced 2.27 million unexploded rounds and destroyed thousands of heavy platforms, generating 24 kilotonnes of non-recoverable debris for the Coalition and 12 for Iraq. The comparison between the two conflicts illustrates a key insight: high-tempo air campaigns amplify jet-fuel emissions, while sustained ground warfare accumulates fortification debris and mine-related outputs. In the Russia-Ukraine case, sandbags and concrete dominate fortification consumption, together representing about 90 percent of the total mass.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns logistics. In the Russia-Ukraine case, approximately 72 percent of fuel-related emissions arise not from combat platforms but from fuel transport and logistical fuel — the energy cost of moving energy itself. Platform fuel and ammunition contribute smaller shares. This decomposition demonstrates that logistics, not combat, is the primary driver of warfare’s emissions profile, a structural dominance that had previously been suggested but never quantified within a standardized framework. Capturing only the active warfare component, the study estimates that 126 megatonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted in the first three years of the Russia-Ukraine conflict — roughly half of broader estimates that include infrastructure destruction, fires and displacement.

The authors are careful to frame the work as a foundation rather than a definitive account. The system boundaries exclude upstream manufacturing, peacetime military activity and post-war reconstruction, meaning the true footprint of any war would be significantly higher over a full life cycle. Data limitations forced reliance on proxies, such as a spare-parts ratio based on a single US Army maintenance guide, and no formal uncertainty analysis was conducted, so results should be read as order-of-magnitude estimates. Nevertheless, the framework provides something previously absent: a reproducible, transparent method for converting diffuse military resource use into traceable parameters. The researchers emphasize that the goal is not to make war more environmentally friendly, but to raise awareness of its material costs — offering policymakers, humanitarian organizations and researchers evidence-based data to assess warfare’s place within broader climate and resource governance, and to inform post-conflict recovery planning.

Subject of Research: Quantifying the material and carbon footprint of modern warfare using material flow analysis

Article Title: Material footprint of warfare: a systematic framework and empirical analysis

Article References: Roodenburg, H., Worrell, E., & Fouladvand, J. (2026). Material footprint of warfare: a systematic framework and empirical analysis. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00130-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00130-z

Keywords: material footprint, warfare, material flow analysis, industrial ecology, Russia-Ukraine war, Operation Desert Storm, military logistics, carbon emissions, fuels, ammunition, environmental impact, sustainability