Last month, the Pentagon released a new report on climate change (PDF). In his foreword to the report, Defense Secretary Hagel cautions that a warming earth “will have real impacts on our military and the way it executes its missions”:
The military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities, and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters. Our coastal installations are vulnerable to rising sea levels and increased flooding, while droughts, wildfires, and more extreme temperatures could threaten many of our training activities. Our supply chains could be impacted, and we will need to ensure our critical equipment works under more extreme weather conditions. Weather has always affected military operations, and as the climate changes, the way we execute operations may be altered or constrained.
A WSJ op-ed responding to the report mocked Hagel’s characterization of climate change as a “threat multiplier” for the military:
The principal threats being multiplied here are hype and hysteria. Current fears about the Ebola virus notwithstanding, the last century of increasing carbon-dioxide emissions has also been the era of the conquest of infectious disease, from polio to HIV. No one has made a credible link between Ebola and climate change, though no doubt somebody will soon try.
As for terrorism, the Pentagon’s job is to defeat jihadist forces that are advancing under the flag of Islamist ideology. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did not murder his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood because the heat got to him, and Americans who might die at the hands of the Islamic State won’t care that Mr. Hagel is mobilizing against melting glaciers.
Scott Beauchamp criticizes the WSJ column for “willful misunderstanding of defense policy, faux pious indignation, and an appeal to irrationality that’s dressed up as common sense”:
Of course, Sec. Hagel isn’t sending Green Berets to the rain forest—at least not to save the trees. Most of the concerns that the Pentagon is trying to address in this report are kind of mundane issues here at home—things like management of all the land that houses military bases and training facilities. Hagel writes in the report:
We are almost done with a baseline survey to assess the vulnerability of our military’s more than 7,000 bases, instillations, and other facilities. In places like the Hampton Roads region in Virginia, with houses the largest concentration of U.S. military sites in the world, we see recurrent flooding today, and we are beginning work to address the projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years.
So, this plan is not really about mobilizing against melting glaciers; it’s more like making sure our ships have viable facilities from which to launch bombs against ISIS. And the report doesn’t just focus on home, though. It casts a wider eye towards how a changing climate will affect defense missions in the future. Here’s another excerpt:
The impacts of climate change may cause instability in other countries by impairing access to food and water, damaging infrastructure, spreading disease, uprooting and displacing large numbers of people, compelling mass migration, interrupting commercial activity, or restricting electricity availability.
Critics like the Journal’s editorial board may try to miscast this roadmap as partisan posturing, but it’s fairly obvious that the opposite is the case. The Defense Department has offered up a clear-eyed plan that both acknowledges the dangers that climate change poses to our military and extrapolates the changes it should make in response, all based on the most current and reputable evidence.
The Dish 