Increasing awareness of environmental issues related to product design, development, use and disposal is requiring that designers account for environmental issues that had previously been neglected. In the military, these requirements are being added at the same time budgets are being cut and performance expectations are being increased. A successful design must be able to incorporate a strategy that will satisfy cost, performance, quality, maintenance and legal criteria while also optimizing environmental objectives. To meet these objectives, a formal design approach or framework that considers a life-cycle evaluation of environmental requirements, cost and performance criteria is needed. A framework is developed which considers both the engineering design requirements for the physical system, as well as the political constraints that often impact system design but are rarely formally considered. The New Attack Submarine program is used as a baseline for evaluating political constraints. Applications of the analytic hierarchy process and multiattribute utility functions are used to convey unspecified constraints to system design engineers. A case study of the approach recommended is developed using the air conditioning plants designed for the new attack submarine to eliminate the use of R-114 refrigerant.