US military takes an abrupt turn after decades of climate change research

US military takes an abrupt turn after decades of climate change research

Every other winter, the U.S. military gathers with allies on the Arctic for Operation Ice Camp as the warming region becomes increasingly accessible, raising concerns about borders and peace.

At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, a $37 million sea wall project was finished last year to keep out the rising tides now flooding the base 30 to 40 times a year.

When a worsening drought and warmer-than-normal temperatures fanned the California wildfires in January, the Air Force, Navy and National Guard all responded to help.

The nation’s warfighters – sworn to protect the nation against enemies both foreign and domestic – increasingly serve on the front lines of the battle against the impacts of climate change. And the department has been active in documenting the risks and impacts for decades.

However, the new administration, under Pete Hegseth, secretary of the department of defense, has stated several times it won't be focusing on climate change, in what appears to be a departure from the department's stance in the past.




A Pentagon spokesman, John Ullyot, told CNN that “Climate zealotry and other woke chimeras of the Left are not part of" the department's core mission.

In March, Hegseth shared a post about those comments on X, stating the department "does not do climate change crap."

In a video, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department was eliminating “woke climate change" programs.

Since 2022, the U.S. military has been deployed to more than 170 climate-related events in the U.S. and other countries, according to a tracker kept by the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit research institute.

While climate change doesn’t cause extreme weather events, scientists say it makes naturally occurring events more intense in terms of rainfall, drought and convective storms, as well as higher tides.

The recent comments by the defense department surprised some national security experts and climate scientists.

“I have found the Department of Defense to be incredibly enlightened on climate change,” said Robert Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University and director of its Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. “Any role that anyone would play in not allowing the DOD to adapt to the changing natural environment at military bases at home and abroad is going to be detrimental to our ability to maintain national security.”

Climate change is “a fundamental force,” said Tom Ellison, deputy director of the Center for Climate Security. “It really affects everything the military has to do, from the very smallest thing to very long-term strategic planning, Ellison said. For example:How to train troops when it’s dangerously hot
How changing ocean chemistry affects submarine sonar
How to keep airfield runways from melting in extreme heat

“These are all things that are already happening,” he said.

Military bases flood during rainfall events supercharged by warming oceans, relocate fighter jets ahead of more intense hurricanes and face heightened climate-driven security risks in the Pacific Ocean.

On his first day after being assigned to the Norfolk Naval Station in 2012, Mark Nevitt, a former Navy JAG and Navy environmental attorney, now a professor at Emory University School of Law, couldn’t get home because a high tide had flooded the road.

“It was routine that I couldn't get to base or could not get home from work,” he said. “That’s only getting worse.” Federal data from the nearby tidal gauge in Sewells Point, Virginia, dates back to the 1920s and shows sea level has risen six inches at that spot since 1990.

Nevitt has called climate change “a ‘super wicked’ problem that exacerbates and accelerates already existing threats.”
'Training and warfighting'

Even before his appointment, Hegseth had a history of downplaying climate change.

In a Fox News clip in 2020, he called concern about the climate threat “a religion” and criticized Senator Bernie Sanders for calling it a “major national security issue.”

His March remarks came after the department announced it would stop funding 91 studies, including research on climate change impacts and global migration patterns, which experts identify as a growing security risk for the nation and its allies.

Canceling the research would save more than $30 million in the first year, about .03% of the department’s $850 billion annual budget, the department stated. It reflects a "commitment to fiscal responsibility and ensuring every dollar invested in defense generates the greatest possible return for the American people," the department stated.

In the X post, Hegseth wrote: “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

The department did not respond to a request for comment on what Hegseth meant by the post or provide a requested list of the cuts.

The cuts parallel a playbook suggested by experts associated with the Heritage Foundation in a document called “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise.” Commonly called “Project 2025,” it recommends prioritizing the “core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change.”
Decades of military research

U.S. intelligence and military assessments of the security dangers from climate change go back nearly four decades, said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow at Pacific Institute, a climate think tank. Gleick has studied the military’s strategy for decades and maintains a timeline of dozens of the department’s intelligence and defense assessments of climate change.

The growing body of work includes analyses from every U.S. defense, intelligence, and security agency and the White House, he said. Reports document the vulnerability of bases, as well as security issues related to the impacts of climate change in the Middle East, Africa, Arctic and Pacific.

Republican and Democrat presidential administrations alike have advanced the national security implications of climate change, Nevitt said.

Under the late President George H.W. Bush, a Republican who worked as a businessman in the oil industry, the Navy War College found in 1990 that naval operations could be “drastically affected” by global climate change. The following year President Bush said climate change respected no international boundaries and was already contributing to political conflict.

After General Jim Mattis was appointed defense secretary during President Trump’s first term, the retired four-star general who commanded Marines in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, one of the regions warming faster than others, said: “Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today.”

Security experts describe several key areas where climate change plays a role in national and international security.
A new frontier - the Arctic Ocean

Given the melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Strait is gaining strategic importance and demands a stronger U.S. presence, according to numerous reports by and for the military.

The Arctic presents a whole new potential, Nevitt said. “Natural resources open up for extraction and Russia is heavily militarized in the Arctic, much more so than we are,” he said. “Russia has more military bases in the Arctic and more capacity there than the U.S.,” he said.

Even though the Arctic is warming enough that a security presence is required, Ellison said conditions are still dangerously cold for troops who must survive there.
Threats in the Pacific

Some vulnerable U.S. allies in the Pacific “already consider climate change their number one national security threat,” Ellison said. “Are we not going to engage on the priorities of those allies?”

Countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu could lose their statehood if their physical territory is underwater or uninhabitable because saltwater gets into freshwater drinking supplies, he said. “People who have lived there for millennia could no longer live there.”

An even bigger issue is when the U.S. military is called to respond when natural disasters strike in countries in the Indo-Pacific region. If the military stops responding, he said, “there’s a concern that there could be other nations that would fill that gap role if the U.S. military was not doing that. The most obvious would be China.”
Threats to bases and troops

Defense department property holdings around the world are valued at nearly $1.2 trillion, according to a 2019 Governmental Accounting Office report.

One 2018 federal study found a three-foot rise in sea levels by 2100 would threaten operations at more than 128 of those U.S. military sites.

Guardians of the sea for more than 200 years, the U.S. Navy already increasingly battles the ocean. Sea level has risen 1.06 feet at the Naval Academy at Annapolis since 1929, according to federal data, and the department has projected it could rise at least another foot by 2065 and more than two additional feet by 2100.

At Sewell’s Point, 150 miles to the south, the sea rises even faster and could rise more than a foot by 2050, according to Navy projections. Like Nevitt, for years now, people traveling to the bases during high tide events have had to take alternate routes.

“Climate resilience for our bases has been an issue of bipartisan support for more than a decade, including during the first Trump presidency,” said Sherri Goodman, who served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security in the 1990s and wrote the book “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.”

It doesn’t make sense for the Department of Defense “to ignore a clear, evident risk,” Goodman said. “If we fail to manage risks that impose burdens and costs on our military, we will suffer the consequences, and the Chinese will benefit from it.”

After Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida’s Panhandle was ravaged by Hurricane Michael in October 2018, Goodman said the Florida congressional delegation was “very clear they wanted that base to be built back better.”

Now it’s “the Air Force resilient base of the future,” she said, with “hangars able to withstand the highest wind speeds.”

Climate change also affects the individual safety of members of the military, whether it’s extreme heat in the middle East or extreme cold exposures while establishing a stronger presence in the Arctic.

“What the Secretary of Defense is doing now is putting our troops more in harm’s way,” Goodman said. “If we don’t make our troops and infrastructure and bases more resilient, we’re just giving it away to the enemies.”

The military could call climate change whatever they want to, Young said. “Talk about heat, talk about flood, talk about erosion, but for goodness’ sake don’t hamper DOD’s ability to protect their infrastructure.”