A soldier tries to beat the heat. Image source: Daily Mail
Although the U.S. military typically refrains from making public comment on politically sensitive topics, a report made public last August, published by the Army War College and written jointly by the Army, the Defense Intelligence Agency and NASA, makes the military’s view on the topic quite clear.
The report calls the military “precariously underprepared” to address the national security implications of global warming and goes on to state that a failure to meaningfully address these problems could lead to the collapse of U.S. military capability within 20 years.
The report details the threats that global warming poses to national security, which are by now well-known and have been reported at length. They include: severe weather events, mass migration, diminishing global freshwater supplies, changing disease vectors, Arctic competition, stress on the U.S. power grid and nuclear reactors, and sea-level rise.
The issue of declining freshwater supplies gets special attention.
The need to drink more water in hotter weather, coupled to more intense droughts and saltwater contamination of coastal freshwater sources point towards a higher demand for freshwater right when it is becoming a scarcer commodity. Although global warming also leads to more intense rainfall during storms, little of this water is captured for human use.
As the report states: “The US Army is precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in contested arid environments.”
Structural and societal challenges in response to global warming are occurring at a time when the military is almost constantly engaged overseas, while simultaneously being called upon to respond to domestic crises.
Internationally, melting ice caps are already leading to new territorial disputes, which have clear potential to result in violence. Violent civil unrest revolving around freshwater access has already broken out in Bolivia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, eastern Africa and beyond. All of these conflicts involve long-term structural disputes that in most cases carry the potential for triggering war.
Domestically, the US Army is frequently called upon to assist in storm recovery and border security. At the border, soldiers have been deployed to bolster efforts to contain the influx of people participating in mass migration. While the current wave of mass migration along the US southern border is not a direct result of water scarcity, the report concludes that such scarcity is due to trigger migrations that will dwarf the size of the current one in a matter of only a few years.
The military’s ability to effectively handle any domestic situation – and to some degree foreign ones as well – will depend heavily upon having a reliable national power grid. Currently, the grid is already stressed to breaking, as evidenced by emergency blackouts in California in response to worsening fire seasons. Energy demands will only increase as the nation and the planet continue to heat up.
American politicians have shown little to no willingness to devote resources to, or to write legislation in support of, meaningful improvements to the nation’s energy grid. There is little reason to believe that this situation will change proactively.
To prepare for a hotter world, the report makes several recommendations.
One is the development of advanced technologies to capture water from ambient humidity and to better redistribute, reuse and recycle water from current resources.
Among the other recommendations is the fostering of a better “culture of environmental stewardship” among military personnel, more comprehensive access to quality climate-related intelligence, improved coordination of climate change related responses and the inclusion of climate change considerations in long-term operational planning.
Within a national context, the report recommends making vast improvements in the nation’s power grid and nuclear infrastructure. The last point reflects the reality that nuclear reactors are necessarily build near bodies of water, many of which are rising.
The one topic that the report touches without mentioning explicitly is that our dependence on fossil fuels is the primary driver of the global warming that the military seeks to guard against. No recommendations on how to overcome such dependency are made.
Within the report’s conclusion is an elegant assessment of our current state of climate readiness: “When the facts do not match our strong theories for how the world works, we prefer to change the facts.”
If we keep trying to change the facts regarding global warming, we will have only ourselves to blame for suffering through an avoidable calamity.
For a more detailed write-up of the report, check out this great piece by Vice.