Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted last year that on his watch, the military would ignore the climate crisis, which the former Fox News host derided as “crap.” Unfortunately, he meant it: At Hegseth’s behest, the Pentagon scrapped several dozen research studies related to global warming and removed references to climate change from the 2025 National Security Strategy.
The trouble is, U.S. military officials can’t simply pretend that the effects of the climate crisis aren’t real simply to satisfy the secretary’s ideological crusade. To be effective, they have to deal with reality as it exists, not the one Hegseth imagines.
And so many military officials are, in fact, taking steps to prepare for the effects of the climate crisis, even as they avoid using the word “climate.”
Bloomberg reported, for example, on preparations underway at Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base, which was severely damaged by a hurricane in 2018 and will soon be home to new facilities designed to anticipate sea-level rise as global temperatures continue to climb. It’s not the only effort of its kind. From the article:
[A]s Tyndall shows, the Defense Department is still engaged on one front of the climate fight: steeling its bases against the effects of a warming atmosphere, such as higher seas, fiercer storms and deadlier fires. A new flood wall is rising at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland; a low-lying Air Force runway is being elevated in Virginia; and projects are underway to reduce wildfire risk around various military sites in Hawaii.
Those involved in these projects can’t admit that they’re preparing for deteriorating climate conditions, so their official line is that they’re ensuring “resilience” and “readiness,” which are not words that trigger objections from the Republican administration.
John Conger, a past director of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Security and a senior Defense Department official during the Obama administration, told Bloomberg, “Ultimately, the military is a very pragmatic institution. It wants to maintain mission capability. Whether we’re going to call it ‘climate,’ not ‘climate,’ whatever — if I can’t get to the base because the road is flooded, that’s a problem.”
Political figures have the luxury of ignorance. Military leaders, however, tend to focus on solving problems, not scratching ideological itches.
The Pentagon has recognized the underlying problem for a while. Bloomberg’s report noted, “The 2008 National Defense Strategy flagged climate change as an emerging risk, and two years later it was named a national security threat in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review. After that, the Defense Department and the individual armed forces put out a stream of climate and sustainability plans. (Some have now been removed from government websites.)”
This continued into Donald Trump’s first term. In 2019, the Republican administration continued to identify climate change as a global security threat, and then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, agreed that climate change remained a national security threat.
“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,” Coats said in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment” report. “Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security.
Coats added, “Extreme weather events, many worsened by accelerating sea level rise, will particularly affect urban coastal areas in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Western Hemisphere. Damage to communication, energy, and transportation infrastructure could affect low-lying military bases, inflict economic costs, and cause human displacement and loss of life.”
The threats haven’t changed, but the politics in Republican circles have. U.S. officials have been forced to adapt accordingly.
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