Biden’s ‘deepening climate emergency’ doesn’t require a Defense response

In anticipation of President Biden’s attendance at the just-completed COP-26 climate summit, the Department of Defense (DOD) issued a report to the National Security Council, the “Department of Defense Climate Risk Analysis.” The report follows a Climate Adaptation Plan that DOD submitted to both the National Climate Task Force and Andrew Maycock, the federal chief sustainability officer. The two reports highlight DOD’s contribution to the administration’s efforts to address what Biden characterized in the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance as “a deepening climate emergency.” 

In addition, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl announced last week that he will appoint a senior official to serve as an advocate for climate-related programs. “If we’re going to say that this is a national priority and it’s a priority for the department,” Kahl said, “… we’re going to be making some organizational changes in the coming weeks and months to make sure we have an organization that champions these issues and that it is resourced to champion these issues.”

Kahl’s reference to resources highlights a critical issue for the department. The administration’s fiscal year 2022 request includes $617 million for climate-related issues. The FY 23 request, the first that will fully fund the administration’s priorities, likely will allocate far more money to meet the climate challenge. Indeed, the Climate Adaptation Plan explicitly states that “the Department has taken a very expansive approach … intending to drive positive change across the largest federal resource-consuming entity in the nation.” To that end, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks has promised that the next budget will “further prioritize resilience to climate change … [that will be] clearly tagged out in FY-23 budget displays.” 

There is no denying that climate change has had a costly impact on America’s defense posture. As Gen. John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has noted, the DOD has spent billions of dollars to recover from the impact of natural disasters on its facilities. For example, Hurricane Michael destroyed or damaged every building on Tyndall Air Force Base, resulting in repairs costing nearly $5 billion. The DOD must draw down its operations and maintenance accounts to repair facilities such as Tyndall; that money otherwise would be allocated to readiness, training, exercises and the like.

While the DOD must fund the resilience of those bases that are most vulnerable to climate effects — like Tyndall, or Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska that suffered from flood damage — other DOD climate-related spending is more difficult to justify. For example, the Climate Risk Analysis points to droughts and flooding that could result in competition for scarce resources that would “increase the likelihood of migration, conflict and/or competitors using instability to expand influence.” Yet, such instability — and even conflict — may not affect the United States or its allies and friends, even indirectly. In any event, climate-related turmoil is hardly a recent development; over the decades, American forces have aided places that faced such challenges, such as periodic flooding in Bangladesh. 

Similarly, the report points out that shifts in agricultural production and droughts because of climate change could affect prices and cause protests and instability elsewhere in the world. Other departments, however — notably the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — have devoted themselves to ameliorating food production shortages worldwide. They are far better positioned to focus on these issues than the DOD. 

More generally, the challenge that climate change poses is not like that of China, Russia or some other potential adversary. It is diffuse and not directed specifically at the United States. Agencies in addition to USAID are as well-positioned as the DOD to take up the cudgels against climate change, whereas those other agencies cannot provide the military wherewithal if America finds itself at war.

The administration’s emphasis on combating climate change — which calls for spending hundreds of billions of dollars across the government — should not force the DOD to trade off critically-needed funds for acquisition and operations to fund ever larger climate-related programs. Yet that is exactly what might happen. The FY 2022 Defense budget request allowed for minimal real growth, despite the increasing challenges from what the National Defense Strategy has termed “peer competitors,” as well as from Iran, North Korea and international terrorism. Although Congress appears poised to add money to the budget, the actual totals are yet to be determined. In any event, there is little evidence that the administration is prepared to contemplate significantly greater real growth in future Defense budget requests.

The administration certainly can treat climate change as a challenge equivalent to those posed by hostile states. To that end, it should allocate more money to agencies other than DOD, however. And to the extent that it also sees the Defense Department as a major contributor to a government-wide effort to address climate issues, it should increase the DOD budget by amounts equivalent to those increases in climate programs that it contemplates for future budgets. 

In that way, it will ensure that even as the DOD continues to focus on the need to cope with climate change, it also will be able to increase the momentum of its modernization efforts to outpace the increasing threats that America’s adversaries pose to the nation’s security. 

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was under secretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy under secretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.