For example, adding a climate lens might reveal the tension between the adversary’s need for regional legitimacy and its demand for water, which it secures by building dams on shared water sources. The dams severely limit water supplies to neighboring nations, worsening the impact of shifting rain patterns. With that tension understood, military IO messaging could help influence the regional population to see the adversary’s actions as self-centered and outside international norms.
A climate lens can support operational effectiveness as well. Changes in sea level will significantly alter the number and location of sites suitable for large-scale amphibious attacks. By projecting future sea-level trends, the US military can help partner nations concentrate defenses such as anti-ship missiles in areas most vulnerable during the window of attack.
A sole focus on resilience can deter progress
Adding a climate lens to operations can introduce new requirements, new costs, and new frictions to military processes. But looking at climate solely as a resilience issue won’t help improve mission effectiveness and may hinder progress on climate goals as well.
Resilience is a necessary goal, of course. Hurricanes and severe storms, for instance, routinely damage coastal military bases, rendering them inoperable for long periods and causing billions in damages. In 2018, Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base was hit by Hurricane Michael, which damaged or destroyed numerous structures on the base and left hangars shredded and roofless.7 And such damage isn’t limited to coasts; in 2019, floods destroyed a third of Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The reconstruction will take years to complete and is expected to cost nearly US$5 billion.8
This explicit link between adverse weather events and mission assurance has led DoD toward a resilience framework intended to protect its installations and weapons systems against extreme weather, secure supply chains, and build a “climate-ready” force.9 The Air Force, for example, has developed a geospatial supply chain risk identification and monitoring (Geo-SCRIM) tool that monitors adverse weather events such as wildfires or hurricanes and alerts organizations in their path.10 DoD’s 2023 budget request includes more than US$2 billion to improve the resilience of military installations, with US$553 million of that intended to help bases weather power disruptions via microgrids and renewable energy and US$322 million to help them survive extreme weather events.11
But while resilience is critical, it shouldn’t be the sole focus of DoD’s climate action. Instead, it should be the first step toward making DoD a climate-forward agency that can use climate change to its advantage.
If climate isn’t a fundamental part of the operational environment, it can be difficult to see sufficient mission benefits to justify the investments needed to scale climate solutions. Consider aviation biofuels, for example. Both the Air Force and Navy are at the cutting edge of biofuel use in jet engines.12 Yet, more than a decade into their efforts, the adoption rate is still slow, largely because biofuels are more expensive than traditional fuels, and in shorter supply.13 The expense of biofuel use could be justifiable if they improved mission outcomes, but jets fly just as far and as fast on conventional fuel but at a lower cost and greater ease of access.
The military has produced important climate-related innovations but has seen relatively slow adoption of them. To reduce its reliance on diesel generators for power—and the often-targeted fuel convoys that feed them—the Marine Corps has moved into the forefront of tactical solar power generation. In 2018, the Marines even fully fielded a mobile solar power array designed to power an entire battalion command post.14 In the absence of an operational focus on climate, however, progress has been slow; the program required nearly a decade to move from first experiments to full fielding.15 Compare this with more obviously operationally relevant tools such as metal detectors. At about the same time as the first battalion-level solar experiments, improvised explosive devices using little or no metal began to emerge in Afghanistan, making their detection extremely difficult.16 But while it took nearly a decade to field the solar experiments fully, it took mere months to get thousands of new combo-metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar units in the hands of troops.17
The clearer the connection between an activity and an operational outcome, the faster organizational processes work. To improve progress on climate projects, DoD must begin to see mission opportunities in climate and embed them in training, planning, and acquisition. In a recent speech at the Naval War College, Kristina O’Brien, principal deputy director of the joint chiefs’ Strategic Logistics J-4 organization, spoke about “operationalizing” climate factors: “There are opportunities that go along with these challenges, but very key here is how do we need to be considering this in our operational plans, into our campaign plans, and into our logistics plans.”18
Threats and potential innovations both offer motivation
The effort needed to change how DoD creates plans can be significant, and benefits to mission effectiveness may not be enough to overcome bureaucratic inertia. In such cases, adversaries’ actions and new innovations both may offer additional motivation.
Adversaries are already adapting
Our adversaries will use whatever leverage is available to achieve purely military goals. Since climate change is an extremely important issue for China’s neighbors and adversaries, for instance, it has become a key factor influencing Chinese decision-making and actions. In 2022, a Chinese influence campaign unsuccessfully attempted to mobilize US protests against an Australian rare-earths mining company planning an expansion in Texas, in an effort to defend Beijing’s dominance of the market. The campaign deployed various social media accounts, some implying they were owned by locals, to claim that the Texas facility would cause environmental damage.19
Yet our adversaries also are vulnerable to climate issues. A recent trade and security cooperation pact between Pacific islands and China was derailed over the island nations’ concern about climate issues.20 From dirty coal plants in Africa to water shortages created by the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s security goals are often complicated by its own actions.
Like any other part of the operational environment, climate is a contested space with both opportunities and vulnerabilities. Keeping climate action outside the operational sphere and limited only to resiliency comes with significant risks. To ignore the military implications of climate change is to cede control of that part of the environment to adversaries.
Military innovations can catalyze economic transformation, which builds military power
Adding a climate lens to military decision-making also can spur economic growth. It can create operational needs such as new algorithms to crunch massive climate data, new materials to reduce corrosion due to sea-level rise, and new means of generating power for small teams at advanced bases. The cost-benefit analysis for developing solutions and even completely new technologies for military applications is fundamentally different from that for the commercial sector. As the military works with industry to create these solutions, new breakthrough opportunities can emerge that wouldn’t have been developed by the private sector alone.
In the past, military-specific innovations often have had significant impact on the broader economy. The global positioning system (GPS) is an excellent example. The impetus for early GPS research was the Navy’s need to provide accurate locational information to Polaris missiles aboard constantly moving ships.21 Similar requirements among the Air Force and Army led to the development of GPS in the late 1970s. At the time, commercial industry hadn’t expressed any analogous need.22 Yet, once the technology became commercially available in 1983, it had a transformative impact, spawning new uses and even entirely new industries.23
The economic impact of GPS is hard to overstate. Researchers estimate that it has contributed more than US$1.4 trillion to the US economy alone since its release for public use.24 Given the scope and scale of climate change, climate-related technology may have an even greater commercial impact.