Jim Goudreau first used the term “sustainable national security,” my immediate assumption was that he was referring to the U.S. military and Homeland Security’s goal to reduce their massive level of greenhouse gas pollution, including the U.S. Army’s goal to get to net zero emissions (quite a spectacular one given that the Department of Defense was the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the United States, by far) and Custom and Border Protection’s goal to reduce emissions by 28 percent.
But there were much deeper implications, I soon saw, to Goudreau’s use of the term.
“When people typically hear the word sustainable, they automatically jump to an assumption that it’s hugging a tree, it’s saving the world, [but] it’s more than the environmental piece. It’s an absolutely legitimate and important piece from the environmental perspective, but there’s an economic perspective to sustainability, there’s a political perspective to sustainability, there’s a cultural aspect to sustainability—we have to approach all of those.”
And sustainability’s most important piece, Goudreau explained, is military-tactical. As he said it, I couldn’t help but think of the countless surveillance towers dotting the Sonoran desert in the U.S. borderlands, powered by solar panels. Sustainable, renewable energy resources would not only cut down on emissions, Goudreau said, it would make the military “more lethal.”
“We’ve always designed our systems to achieve victory. Not by small margins. But to crush the enemy . . . I never want to be in a close fight. I don’t want it to be an even fight. I want to be,” Goudreau stressed, “the overwhelming winner.” Sustainable national security no longer seemed so pretty.
It was the same point that U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis famously made when he was commanding troops in Iraq during the Bush era: “Unleash us from the tether of fossil fuel.”7 Mattis’s wish has been coming true: Between 2011 and 2015 military renewable-energy projects tripled to 1,390, producing an amount of power that could supply electricity to 286,000 average U.S. homes. This has continued: on February 3, 2017 SunPower landed a $96 million contract with the Trump administration to power the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California until 2043. Indeed, the Department of Defense will “forge ahead under the new administration with a decade-long effort to convert its fuel-hungry operations to renewable power,”8 senior military officials told Reuters in March 2017.
“We know for a fact,” Cheney continued with momentum back at the podium in Washington, “that [climate change] is already driving internal and cross-border migration. We know that it is opening new missions and responsibilities for the military. Just look at the Arctic and the potential up there. We know that it is going to destabilize unstable states and societies.”
If there are problems anywhere, Cheney said, environmental crisis is going to exacerbate them.
“There will be more demand for already existing missions such as peacekeeping, conflict prevention, war fighting. . . . It will heighten tension between states. And it is going to draw us into wars that we don’t want to be in.
“Fortunately, if there is any good news to this story it’s that the military is really good at risk management and preparing. . . . So the U.S. military plans for the worst, plans for the most likely, and then hopes it is over-prepared.” Thus, in an age to be defined by decreasing amounts of clean water, breathable air, and food-producing land, the United States, with the help of companies like Lockheed Martin, aims to be the well-armed, well-fortified, “overwhelming winner.”
“IT WILL AFFECT EVERYTHING YOU DO IN YOUR CAREERS”
On a beautiful, breezy day in May 2015, President Barack Obama stepped up to the podium to give a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. It was the first time a U.S. president emphasized climate change in a keynote speech. Before Obama got to the crux of his message, in which he would stress that “climate change refugees”9 would become a significant part of the Coast Guard’s future, he spoke to the cadets of the importance of guarding U.S. territorial borders and interests—underscoring an important yet often overlooked point about his presidency: the continued expansion in policies and practices of an already historic U.S. border enforcement and deportation regime. Obama stated that the Coast Guard will start patrolling in faraway places such as the Caribbean and Central America, in the Middle East alongside the U.S. Navy, and in the Asian Pacific. Obama said that the new patrol missions were meant “to help partners train their own coast guards,” and “to uphold maritime security and freedom of navigation in waters vital to our global economy.”10
Obama spoke about upgrades to Coast Guard fleets such as Fast Response and National Security cutters, “the most advanced in history.” These cutters were a part of a $25 billion program to replace much of the Coast Guard’s equipment, known ominously as the Integrated Deep Water System Program.
“And even as we meet threats like terrorism,” Obama said shifting to his main point, “we cannot and we must not ignore a peril that can affect generations.”
It was quite a remarkable moment. The president of a country that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol—the 1997 treaty in which countries pledged to reduce greenhouse emissions—was about to lecture Coast Guard cadets about the perils of climate change.
“Our analysts in the intelligence community know that climate change is happening. Our military leaders, generals, admirals—active duty and retired—know that it’s happening. Our Homeland Security professionals know that it’s happening and our Coast Guard know that it’s happening.
“The science,” the president said, “is indisputable.”
Obama told the cadets that the heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher than it has been in 800,000 years. He said that 14 of the hottest 15 years ever recorded have already happened this century. He told the cadets that NASA reported that the ice in the Arctic was breaking up faster than expected and the world’s glaciers were melting, pouring water into the oceans.
“Cadets,” Obama said, “a threat of a changing climate cuts to the very core of your service. You’ve been drawn to the water. Like a poet who wrote, ‘The heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me,’ you know the beauty of the sea. You also know its unforgiving power. Here at the academy, climate change, understanding the science and consequences is part of the curriculum, and rightly so. Because it will affect everything you do in your careers.
“You,” Obama said, “are part of the first generation of officers who begin their service in a world where the effects of climate change are so clearly upon us. It will shape how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip, protect their infrastructure, their capabilities, today and for the long term.”
Obama addressed the future of conflict and instability. He talked about rising seas swallowing portions of Bangladesh and Pacific Islands. He talked about similar “vulnerable coasts” in the Caribbean and Central America. When he talked about people forced from their homes I imagined, for a moment, that he was talking about that father and son on that Marinduque coast.
Obama’s clear articulation of climate security doctrine, however, didn’t come out of the blue. More than 20 years before he spoke to the cadets, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” by Robert Kaplan. Usually a single article, especially with such a loaded mouthful of a title, wouldn’t be worth discussing as a historic event, but The Coming Anarchy was immensely influential to the policy that led up to the Obama administration’s 2010 assessment that climate change posed a direct threat to national security. Obama’s speech was a sign that Kaplan’s 1994 article had finally arrived in the foreground of U.S. foreign policy, even in the context of possible Trump-generated speed bumps.
Kaplan predicted that the environment would be the “national security issue of the 21st century.”11 At one point in the piece, he described an apocalyptic future from the vantage point of his taxi window in West Africa, a world where “hordes” of young men with “restless, scanning