OPINION: It’s Time For the Military to Confront Climate Change
Carly Glickenhaus (COL ‘20) is a guest writer for the Caravel's opinion section. The content and opinions of this piece are the writer’s and the writer’s alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.
U.S. soldiers train beside a mountain in Afghanistan. (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction)
The United States military will be remiss in its mission to protect the present and future security of all U.S. citizens if it does not start to frame climate change as a top priority for defense policy and spending.
Today’s climate discourse compartmentalizes the environmental crisis into its own political category: electoral campaigns treat climate change as an isolated topic on a laundry list of hot voter issues that fall under either “economics” or “security” tags. According to a CBS News poll, climate change is certainly an issue that energizes voters.
Instead of discussing climate change in isolation from national security, U.S. policymakers must acknowledge that climate change will exacerbate existing security threats and create unforeseen ones. Tomorrow’s climate discourse needs to label climate change as a national security threat if we want to act with the urgency needed to avert disaster.
Historically, a sense of urgency to thwart what we perceive as existential threats to our way of life has fueled public support for the military. Climate change is as much, if not more, of an existential threat to our way of life as terrorism and war. By this logic, the U.S. needs to address the climate crisis with some of the military resources we allocate to other security threats. The unparalleled reputational currency of the U.S. military would be a formidable force in facing the new enemy we have created. Since the U.S. played such an undeniable, major role in creating this enemy, it is morally reasonable to expect the global hegemon to leverage its resources to fight it.
Right now, the scant military attention to climate change has primarily focused on infrastructure vulnerabilities exposed by flooding, drought, desertification, and wildfires, but it has neglected large-scale geopolitical vulnerabilities exposed by unpredictable weather anomalies, sea-level rise, and accelerated infectious disease outbreaks.
The Department of Defense (DoD) Report on the Effects of a Changing Climate claims that the effects of climate change are a national security issue with “potential” operational impacts, which clearly misses the bigger picture. The DoD must include these major systemic threats in its discussion of climate change in order to make climate a priority and thus attract the necessary funding.
Why is climate change a national security threat? For one, the melting Arctic has reshaped the threat landscape across the Far North. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea ice coverage in the northern hemisphere has plummeted along with a rise in surface temperatures. These geographic changes have created a more hospitable environment for business operations in the Arctic by lowering cost and risk barriers for companies, attracting new commercial players and creating a vicious cycle in the region.
The tension between the U.S. and its primary geopolitical adversaries, Russia and China, informs the DoD’s priorities in the national defense strategy. Therefore it is imperative to include climate security in defense policy as these countries increasingly compete for natural resources and dominance of emerging trade routes in the polar region.
Even if we establish a consensus that climate change is a national security threat, how do we treat it as such? The Intelligence Community’s 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment acknowledged that global environmental degradation and climate change are “likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent” but does not go any deeper than simply identifying a predicted association. The assessment certainly does not propose any potential solutions.
National security is the state defense of the civil freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. If the Constitution extends national security powers to the state, then the military has an obligation to preserve the security of vulnerable constituents. The DoD offers a vague promise of security in exchange for unquestioned power and authority; this is an ethical failure to fulfill its duties. U.S. citizens need to hold their representatives accountable and call out the authorities committed to defending us.
The U.S. population can start by demanding that our elected officials offer tangible policies that deem climate change an imminent and persistent threat. Specifically, the DoD ought to create civilian DoD positions for climate security analysts in order to integrate climate science into the threat landscape. World-class military intelligence needs to account for the forces shaping our world tomorrow and ten years from now. The climate crisis is already here, and it is already changing the way the world looks, thinks, and acts in ways that are clearly critical to military operations.
Ultimately, by framing climate change as a national security threat in the media and national conversation, citizens can convince policymakers to finally prioritize climate change with the urgency that a looming, life-threatening danger deserves.
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