A very interesting article from Politico.eu concerns proposals for using peat bogs as military defensive barriers in Europe. Reflooding former bogs along borders is a cheap way to create vehicle-stopping barriers, essentially tank-traps. It has a secondary benefit too.
The idea isn’t only to prepare for a potential Russian attack. The European Union’s efforts to fight global warming rely in part on nature’s help, and peat-rich bogs capture planet-warming carbon dioxide just as well as they sink enemy tanks.
[Bogs are] Earth’s most effective repositories of CO2. Although they cover only 3 percent of the planet, they lock away a third of the world's carbon — twice the amount stored in forests.
Bogs limit wheeled and tracked vehicles to hard surfaced roads that have been built across the bogs. Vehicles so constrained become sitting ducks for both artillery and air attacks. How effective are bogs in stopping military vehicles? See a sad NBC News story on 3 GIs who, earlier this year, drove an armored vehicle into a bog in Lithuania and died.
Many of Europe's bogs lie along the line separating Russia and its ally Belarus from the NATO countries (and Ukraine). During WW II both German and later Russian generals had to avoid large boggy areas that lay across otherwise direct lines of attack.
This proposal looks like a win-win for NATO, and a loser for Putin. It's even green.
