The Pentagon Has Decided Climate Change Security Risks Are ‘Woke’

In the years since that 1990 report, the Pentagon has repeatedly and urgently described climate change as a “threat multiplier” or otherwise underlined its potential to increase security risks or make the military’s job more dangerous. George HW Bush’s national security strategy in 1991 included warming as a potential threat. A 2003 “abrupt climate change scenario” report commissioned by the Pentagon imagined how rapid warming might “potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints.”

This went on: A 2007 Center for Naval Analyses report said that “climate change can act as a threat multiplier.” A 2010 DoD report to Congress ranked the problem as a destabilizing force. The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review noted the potential global impacts on water scarcity, sea level rise, and more, all things that should be considered “threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.”

A “worldwide threat assessment” released in January 2019 — remind me, who was president then? — found many ways warming could destabilize the planet and increase security risks. “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”

And now, with perhaps the least qualified Secretary of Defense to ever hold the post, the Pentagon will apparently try and eliminate any climate-related activity that aimed to reduce or manage those long-recognized risks. “The time for preparation is over,” the statement from Salesses said, apparently without irony. “[W]e must act swiftly to deter current and impending threats and make the best use of taxpayers’ dollars in doing so.”

Who knows what this nonsense actually means. Will they stop trying to raise piers and otherwise protect Naval Station Norfolk, the largest such base in the world, from sea level rise? Will they ignore the trajectory of melting sea ice in the Arctic, with all the changes to military security that entails? Will they just scrap a 2024-2027 DoD Climate Adaptation Plan, in which former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote: “Climate change fundamentally alters the conditions that shape military operations at home and around the world”?

Though the military is far from some activist organization, it has generally had the benefit, even under Republican administrations hell-bent on denying climate science and burning every fossil fuel in sight, of a sort of clear-eyed realism. Climate change is obviously destabilizing — you could see it coming for decades, and in recent years you can simply watch it happen out the window. And now they will try to undo those decades of planning and awareness, for no reason that wouldn’t be laughed out of the room when adults were in charge.