Midwest floods expose national security threat
OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. — The Missouri River floodwater surging on to the air base housing the U.S. military’s Strategic Command overwhelmed round-the-clock sandbagging by airmen and others. They had to scramble to save sensitive equipment, munitions and dozens of aircraft.
Days into the flooding, muddy water was still lapping at almost 80 flooded buildings at Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base, some inundated by up to 7 feet of water. Piles of waterlogged corn cobs, husks and stalks lay heaped everywhere that the water had receded, swept onto the base from surrounding fields.
“In the end, obviously, the waters were just too much. It took over everything we put up,” said Col. David Norton, who is in charge of facilities at the base. “The speed at which it came in was shocking.”
Though the headquarters of Strategic Command, which plays a central role in detecting and striking at global threats, wasn’t damaged, the flooding provided a dramatic example of how climate change poses a national security threat, even as the Trump administration plays down the issue.
It is also a reminder that the kind of weather extremes escalating with climate change aren’t limited to the coasts, said retired Rear Adm. David Titley, founder of both the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change and the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State University.
In a reference to President Donald Trump’s proposal to take money from the military construction budget to fund his proposed wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, Titley said levees “are the kinds of walls we need.”
The late-winter floods that have swept over Plains states starting earlier this month — breaching levees, halting Amtrak trains, and killing at least three people — are also the second major inundation in less than a decade to hit the air base outside Omaha.
It would take weeks or more to determine if the Plains flooding was caused or worsened by climate change, which is occurring as emissions from coal, oil and gas alter the atmosphere. But federal agencies and scientists around the world agree that climate change already is making natural disasters more frequent, stronger and longer.
The military has warned in a series of reports under past administrations that climate change is a security threat on many fronts. That includes “through direct impacts on U.S. military infrastructure and by affecting factors, including food and water availability, that can exacerbate conflict outside U.S. borders,” the federal government’s grim climate report said last year.
But Trump has belittled his own government’s warnings.
During a January cold spell, he tweeted his wish for “a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming!” In response to security warnings on c l i ma t e change, the Trump administration has allowed a physicist who rejects scientific consensus on manmade climate change to start organizing a White House panel to make its own determination.
The White House’s National Security Council did not directly address whether the administration sees climate change as a national security threat, but said it takes the issue of climate change seriously.
But the Trump White House’s national security strategy mentions climate only in the context of “countering an anti-growth energy agenda” for fossil fuels.
Department of Defense spokeswoman Heather Babb said the department “works to ensure installations and infrastructure are resilient to a wide range of challenges, including climate.”
“DOD will focus on ensuring it remains ready and able to adapt to a wide variety of threats — regard- less of the source — to fulfill our mission to deter war and ensure our nation’s security,” Babb said.
Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon has offered little public comment on climate change as a security threat. The Pentagon’s guiding star of defense planning, known as the National Defense Strategy, also does not mention climate change.
That leaves it to former military leaders to raise the alarm about how climate change could affect national security. Retired Brig. Gen. Gerald Galloway said that worsening bouts of weather — floods cutting off troops’ way in and out of bases, high waves complicating landings, heat waves depriving aircraft of the lift they need to fly — are all problems the military could be dealing with.
Military bases are launch platforms and you “can’t fight a war unless you’ve got a place to leave from,” said Galloway, a member of the Center for Climate and Security’s advisory board.
Titley predicted Offutt Air Force Base would prove the latest military installation to have racked up $1 billion or more in damage. Hurricanes struck North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune in September and Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida in October.