Sometimes you've just got to shake your head and wonder just what the heck people are thinking.
We're on the verge of reshaping our armed forces back to what they should be: Lean, mean organizations, focused on warfighting, restoring the warrior ethos. The emphasis now is on recruiting, training, and retaining fighters and warriors. The United States armed forces are no longer to be a jobs program for anyone with the mental illness du jour who wants free medical treatment. That's how it should be; the military is like no other institution in the country. The mission of the armed forces is to protect the country, to close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect. Anything that helps that mission is good. Anything that impedes it is bad.
So, when climate scolds start wagging their fingers and chiding us that the newly-renamed Department of War should be adopting "green" technology to prevent them from warming up the planet by a fraction of a degree, they should be summarily dismissed as cranks.
Earth’s average temperature rose more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in 2024 for the first time – a critical threshold in the climate crisis. At the same time, major armed conflicts continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere.
What should be increasingly clear is that war now needs to be understood as unfolding in the shadow of climate breakdown.
The relationship between war and climate change is complex. But here are three reasons why the climate crisis must reshape how we think about war.
First, the climate isn't breaking down. There is no crisis. The climate is doing what it has been doing since the end of the last major glaciation, warming slightly and slowly. Sea levels are a moving target, but they haven't changed substantially. There have been cold spells and warm spells, but the trend has been towards warmer temperatures, since long before the Industrial Revolution. Yes, human activity has an effect. No, we don't understand precisely how much of an effect; our climate remains as it was, vast, chaotic, largely beyond our ken. There are vast cycles, planetary and solar, measured in tens, hundreds, and thousands of years, that have a far greater effect than we do.
But that's not what this latest lunacy is about. Now the scolds are calling for neutering our armed forces. And here is the crux of that lunacy:
Militaries are being confronted with a stark choice. They can either remain as one of the last heavy users of fossil fuels in an increasingly low-carbon world or be part of an energy transition that will probably have significant implications for how military force is generated, deployed and sustained.
What is becoming clear is that operational effectiveness will increasingly depend on how aware militaries are of the implications of climate change for future operations. It will also hinge on how effectively they have adapted their capabilities to cope with more extreme climatic conditions and how much they have managed to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
Not only no, but hell no. In peacetime, a modern military may have the luxury of screwing around with solar panels, windmills, and hydrogen fuel cells. But peacetime is just that, a luxury; we are forced to remember George Santayana's caution, "Only the dead have seen the end of war." The last major war the United States was engaged in was World War 2, and when we entered that war, we had some luxury of time to arm and equip our force. Two vast oceans, in 1941, formed an effective barrier, one that prevented our enemies from striking at our homeland and our industrial base.
That won't apply in any future war, where modern aircraft, missile technology, and so on are making those great oceans look, in comparison, like irrigation ditches. The onus is on us to be ready and to be ready now. That means fossil-fuel-equipped vehicles and aircraft. That means speed and efficiency, not "green" boondoggles. That means a high-density energy source for all of that equipment: Diesel fuel, aviation kerosene, natural gas, or nuclear power for electricity, and let's not forget the heavy reliance all of our technology has on byproducts of petroleum for plastics and a thousand other things.
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Watts Up With That's Eric Worrall makes a great point:
Imagine sending soldiers out to clear vast tracts of land, thinly scattering your forces to try to defend installations which could be wrecked by kids throwing rocks.
The reality of course is the greening of the military is one of those issues which exposes the absurdity of the climate movement. Nobody in their right mind would try to run a war which required massive transport of solar, wind and battery infrastructure, instead of transporting personnel, ammunition, food, fuel and military equipment.
That pretty much sums it up: Absurdity.
Our armed forces are getting back on track. We have a long way to go before it's back to the unstoppable juggernaut it was in 1945. But sidetracks like this don't help the mission. The mission is warfighting - not fighting against the climate, which, we must remember, has been warmer than it is now for the overwhelming majority of the planet's history.
