At the Pentagon, reality likely to trump rhetoric on climate change and national security

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In 2017, early in President Donald Trump’s first term, the Republican-led House of Representatives and U.S. Senate passed an annual spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or N.D.A.A., that declared “climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States.”

It said that each military service “must be able to effectively prepare to mitigate climate damage” at their installations. The new law required them to start by identifying ten military installations within each branch most vulnerable to climate-change impacts.

The language was approved by a voice vote in a Republican-majority House Armed Services subcommittee; during consideration by the full House, an attempt to strip it from the final bill was defeated with the votes of dozens of Republican members.

Fast forward to 2025. Early on the morning of January 28, the Department of Defense’s Climate Resilience Portal at climate.mil went dark, becoming as invisible to the Internet as a nuclear submarine gliding stealthily through the ocean deep.

A related website detailing the Pentagon’s efforts to incorporate climate resiliency across all elements of the military enterprise—and explaining why it needs to—also went offline. Gone missing, too, on February 6, was an in-depth DOD website presentation called, “Spotlight: Tackling the Climate Crisis.” In its place is a page that says, “404 - Page Not Found.”

All remain available at the links above only as copies hosted by the Internet Archive. Other resources and reports related to DOD’s work on the intersection of climate-change and national security, going back to 2014, remain accessible at defense.gov. But for how long is unknown.

None of this was a surprise. Since January 20, the Trump administration has moved quickly to remove or change thousands of government web pages related not only to diversity initiatives, which has received the most attention, but also many related to climate, environment, health, and science. (As of February 7, the climate.gov website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration remained online.)

In the sweeping “Project 2025” blueprint for a second Trump term, Russell Vought, the Trump advisor reinstalled this week as head of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote, “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”

That approach was quickly evident in the flurry of executive orders issued by the president soon after his swearing-in. Some of them rolled back former President Joe Biden’s far-reaching executive orders on climate—which rolled back some of Trump’s first-term executive orders on energy. (Some of those had rolled back former President Barack Obama’s executive orders. Rinse. Repeat.)

And during his confirmation hearing last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was quick to dismiss concerns about climate change and national security. “My secretary of the Navy, should I be confirmed, will not be focused on climate change in the Navy,” he said, “just like the secretary of the Air Force won’t be focused on algae-powered fighter jets, or the secretary of the Army won’t be focused on electric-powered tanks. We’re going to be focused on lethality and defeating our enemy,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth’s comments were also not unexpected or surprising: As a Fox News host, he mocked climate science as “a religion” and suggested it was an effort by liberals to “play God.”

For his part, the president has routinely labeled climate change a “hoax” and investments to reduce carbon emissions and advance clean energy a “scam.” He often makes false, outlandish, and inconsistent claims: In a single interview last year, Trump said, “The oceans in five hundred years will raise a quarter of an inch” and, also, that “the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years.” (During a speech at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, he said the oceans would rise “an eighth of an inch in two hundred to three hundred years.”)

In fact, average global sea level is already increasing by an eighth of an inch each year. Sea level on the coasts of the United States is projected to rise by as much as a foot by 2050, and, if carbon emissions are not dramatically curbed, by three-and-a-half to seven feet by 2100.

Not considering climate change as a national-security concern—publicly, at least—runs counter not only to the well-established science and ongoing work by military planners, but also to bipartisan directives from Congress, according to current and former Pentagon officials.

"Increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, and more frequent extreme weather conditions will affect basing and access while degrading readiness, installations, and capabilities … Insecurity and instability related to climate change may tax governance capacity in some countries while heightening tensions between others, risking new armed conflicts and increasing demands for stabilization activities."

—2022 U.S. National Defense Strategy

As summarized in a report last year by the nonpartisan Center for Climate and Security, in each year since that 2017 defense-authorization bill recognized climate change as a threat, the annual military-appropriations law has included provisions related to transitioning the military—as a single entity, among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world—to use less energy while adapting facilities, training, and security strategy to impacts like heat, rising sea levels, wildfires, and flooding.

Seven years earlier, in 2010, the Pentagon’s quadrennial defense review acknowledged that climate change was a national-security risk and threat multiplier—its view informed by assessments across the nation’s intelligence community. “Climate change and energy are two key issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment,” the report said, noting that, “although they produce distinct types of challenges, climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.”

And as far back as 2007, the N.D.A.A passed by Congress required upcoming defense strategy documents to assess the risks of projected climate change to the missions of the armed services.

Since then, facts on the ground have become impossible to ignore—in terms of disaster-recovery costs, effects on military readiness, and strategic considerations like new activity by Russia and China in a melting Arctic.

In 2018, Hurricane Michael—a Category Five storm with winds over one hundred and sixty miles per hour—destroyed seven hundred buildings and leveled the nearly thirty-thousand-acre Tyndall Air Force Base near Panama City, Florida. (A five-billion-dollar project to rebuild the base as the Air Force’s climate-resilient “installation of the future“ is underway.)

In March, 2019, a massive flood engulfed a third of the U.S. Strategic Command installation at Offutt Air Force Base, in Nebraska, partially submerging the runway and destroying a key nuclear command, control, and communications center. Repairs and rebuilding will cost more than a billion dollars.

And emergency and disaster responses to extreme storms by National Guard and active-duty military resources are increasing across the country and globe.

On resilience, information on climate.mil included details of the DOD Climate Assessment Tool, or DCAT, a web-based application that enables military leadership, defense planners, and others managing the department’s infrastructure—which includes approximately half-a-million structures on nearly twenty-seven million acres of land—to estimate climate-related impacts and vulnerabilities over the next sixty years. DCAT reports and analysis inform facilities-planning needs, long-term vulnerability assessments, investment priorities, and funding requests.

Perhaps surprisingly, DCAT was developed during the first Trump administration. It built on an earlier iteration created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The first DOD version was launched by the Army in 2020 and expanded with more data and features.

In 2023, customized versions of DCAT were provided to six U.S. allies: South Korea, Japan, Australia, German, Italy, and the United Kingdom to help them do similar vulnerability assessments of their national-security-related infrastructure. At the time, a Pentagon statement said, “Climate change will continue to amplify operational demands on the force and allies, degrade installations and infrastructure, increase health risks to service members, and require modifications to existing and planned military capabilities.”

A senior Defense Department official told me last week that the climate.mil website is being “reviewed and edited” to “assess alignment with the new administration’s direction.” But DCAT remains available to credentialed department employees and those six foreign partners, the official said, and will soon be shared more widely, with “three more in production to aid in strategic planning for areas facing conflict.”

That suggests Hegseth’s public comments are out of alignment with what’s ongoing at the Pentagon, in addition to being contrary to the views of a wide range of national-security experts and military officers. That includes those focused on the Navy: In addition to addressing sea-level rise and flooding at its coastal bases, climate change has already modified the global environmental conditions in which the Navy operates.

For example, there’s no dispute that oceans are warming and, as a result, their chemical composition is changing. That impacts how sound travels underwater. In general, the underwater world is getting noisier. Sonar profiles are more complex, and sound may increasingly travel faster and farther.

That means rethinking how submarines operate in this new age of greater “ocean transparency.” One former nuclear-submarine officer I spoke to in December told me it’s a significant concern—and one that directly impacts the Navy’s nuclear-missile-armed submarines. If they can be heard and located, he said, they can be targeted. And that threatens the so-called “second-strike capability” of the nation’s strategic nuclear forces—a fundamental element of nuclear deterrence.

Sherri Goodman, whose work on environmental and military policy goes back to the Clinton administration, where she served as the first-ever deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, told me last month that national-security policymakers have long advanced a robust response to climate change. “The military has to be resilient against all types of shocks, whether that’s a cyber threat, kinetic like a weapons attack, or a flood, fire or hurricane,” she said. “It’s got to be resilient and be able to operate in and through changing conditions.”

As an example, she pointed to the massive Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia, the largest in the world. It hosts facilities for all the armed services as well as a NATO command headquarters, a shipyard, and the largest concentration of U.S. naval vessels, at roughly seventy-five ships.

That means on-base and community resilience from extreme weather, flooding, and particularly the rising sea—which is today eighteen inches higher than 100 years ago, according to a tide gauge in place at the base for a century—are fundamental to protecting and supporting the Atlantic fleet and its mission.

Work to harden the Norfolk base and surrounding community to climate-related impacts like storm-surge flooding will likely go forward under Trump, Goodman said. But the language around those investments may change. “The focus on resilience and readiness for troops and military bases has garnered—for more than a decade now, including during Trump’s first term—bipartisan support,” she told me. “I expect much of that to continue, although it might not be referenced as ‘climate.’”

That rhetorical distinction may help move climate-related work forward, according to John Conger, a former Pentagon official who served in multiple DOD roles during the Obama administration, including as assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations, and environment.

In 2020, Conger, who is director emeritus of the Center for Climate and Security, helped produce a report that detailed threats to global security in various global-warming scenarios. Its conclusions were stark: “Even at scenarios of low warming, each region of the world will face severe risks to national and global security in the next three decades. Higher levels of warming will pose catastrophic, and likely irreversible, global security risks over the course of the 21st century,” the report said.

When we spoke last month, he told me that the language of Trump’s executive orders on climate is worth a closer look. “The significant thing is that they said, okay, we’re going to repeal all these Biden executive orders, which basically means this is not a priority anymore,” he said. “But it doesn’t say you can’t do it, just that it’s not our priority. That’s key.”

Like Goodman, Conger sounded a note of optimism, particularly if those working on these issues at the Pentagon frame them correctly. “There’s a bunch of different things that went on during the first Trump administration that that I would characterize as good work on the climate issue,” he said. “[But] if you look at climate as an environmental issue, you will lose in this administration.”

Navigating the new political landscape may require some nuance, he suggested. “Incorporating resilience requirements—in order to be able to emphasize mission assurance—is fundamentally different than somebody who walks in saying, ‘I want to make sure that we only buy electric cars,’” he said. “If the Defense Department approaches things that way, I think they will be more successful in continuing those efforts [on climate].”

“If you look at climate as an environmental issue, you will lose in this administration.”

—John Conger, former assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations, and environment

All of this suggests room for climate progress, even if it’s labeled something else because of political constraints. “Understanding and preparing for the physical environment in which we fight is a basic requirement of strategic and operational planning,” the senior defense official told me. “Resilience investments directly improve our warfighting capability and readiness, especially for base resilience, contested logistics, and battery and energy storage,” the official said.

It’s too early to know how current and future defense spending for climate-related investments may change—including any contracts with military contractors that have employees and operations in Berkshire County and across New England. (A spokesperson for General Dynamics Mission Systems, which has significant operations in Pittsfield, told me the company does not comment on government policy.)

But overall defense spending is likely to increase substantially: The new leader of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi, has suggested adding as much as two hundred billion dollars to the budget-reconciliation plan Congress will consider in the coming weeks. That could push annual defense spending above one trillion dollars.

(Wicker and other Republicans have also floated proposals to increase defense spending to five percent of the national economy; that would total $1.45 trillion per year.)

Goodman, who is currently a senior fellow at The Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign-policy think-tank, last year published, “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security.” Like Conger, she thinks that despite Trump and Hegseth’s rhetoric, work at the Pentagon to address climate change and its impacts will continue.

“I think it will seem like the focus has shifted,” she told me. “That said, I am reasonably confident that the men and women in our armed forces, and their leadership, and Congress, wants to ensure that our military is resilient to a range of risks,” she said. “Climate change isn’t going away … you can’t stop the climate from changing just because you put your head in the sand and pretend it’s not.”

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