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BIDEN VS. THE PENTAGON. President Joe Biden surprised some observers this week when, addressing U.S. military forces at the Royal Air Force base in Mildenhall, England, he said that the nation’s top military leaders told him the “greatest threat” facing America is global warming.
Biden described going to a meeting in 2009 — he had just been elected vice president — in “The Tank,” which is the super-secure Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting room in the Pentagon. “And this is not a joke,” Biden said. “You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming.” Biden said that was because warming would cause “significant population movements,” leading to “fights over land.”
Given the actual military threats the United States faces today from China, Russia, North Korea, and a host of other bad actors around the globe, Biden’s statement seemed crazy. Is the new administration really so woke that it in a military setting — speaking to U.S. troops — the president would say that global warming (Biden used the older term rather than the more commonly-used “climate change”) is the greatest threat facing the United States? The answer is yes. And Biden’s remarks were consistent with those of Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a recent commencement speech at the Naval Academy placed climate change — along with pandemics and hacking — as the threats today’s military must deal with.
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Biden’s remarks sent the nation’s top generals and defense officials scrambling to explain. As it happened, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testified a short time later at the Senate Armed Services Committee. Asked about Biden’s remarks, Milley tried to argue that there was no inconsistency between what the president said and what the U.S. military’s mission actually is. But Milley, when asked about the greatest threats the U.S. faces, clearly was not buying the global warming argument.
“The president is looking at it from a much broader angle than I am,” Milley testified. “I’m looking at it from a strictly military standpoint. And from a strictly military standpoint, I’m putting China and Russia up there.”
Austin was also questioned about the military’s priorities. U.S. military strategy puts great value on “lethality,” for obvious reasons. Indeed, Milley wrote a few years ago that the Army’s modernization strategy “has one simple focus: make soldiers and units more lethal.” So Republican Senator Dan Sullivan asked Austin, “Mr. Secretary, in your opening statement, you mentioned climate change 15 times and lethality twice, which I think is a bit of a mismatch.” Austin tried to backtrack a bit, questioning whether he had really mentioned climate change 15 times (he had), before answering that, “Lethality is important. This is the most lethal force that has ever occupied the planet, and it will remain so going forward. And that’s what we remain focused on in the Department of Defense — defending this nation.”
Of course, that’s not what the president said. It’s not what the vice president said. Addressing military audiences, both Biden and Harris placed climate change at the center of the American military agenda. (In his Mildenhall speech, Biden at least celebrated past greatness, citing the Britain-based U.S. military’s heroism in World War II, while Harris, in her Naval Academy address, neglected to mention any wars the Navy or Marines have fought or may fight.)
This is not a defense issue. It is a political issue. Civilian control of the military is a bedrock principle of the United States government. The president is the military’s commander-in-chief. If he orders U.S. forces to place climate change, or global warming, at the top of their agenda, what are they going to do? The debate that Biden’s and Harris’s speeches should set off is a political one: What does the nation’s civilian leadership want the military to do?
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