The Military, Not the White House, Is Readying for Climate Change

In the middle of March, Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, the U.S. Marine Corps’ top officer, issued a grim warning to the Pentagon on the state of his fighting force.

In a pair of memos addressed to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer and acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Neller outlined a series of unexpected demands that he said pose an “unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency.” Chief among them was President Donald Trump’s state of emergency declaration regarding troop deployments and wall construction at the U.S.-Mexico border. Those unplanned burdens, according to Neller, required an unwelcome shift in resources, forcing the Marines to significantly scale back and, in some cases, cancel outright critical training and exercises. That loss “will degrade the combat readiness and effectiveness of the Corps,” Neller wrote.

But it wasn’t just training that was affected. In an expanded list of “negative factors,” Neller also warned about the scarcity of Pentagon-allocated funding for rebuilding efforts after Hurricanes Florence and Michael, essentially arguing that unpredictable weather events and natural disasters pose as grave a danger to military readiness as the president’s erratic border deployments. Hurricanes Florence and Michael, the two most destructive storms of 2018, together accounted for 100 deaths and tens of billions of dollars in damages throughout the Carolinas and the Florida Panhandle. The storms also proved costly to Marine Corps facilities in the region. Camp Lejeune in North Carolina fared worst of all: Lejeune and its ancillary outposts incurred some $3.6 billion in damage, with hundreds of structures rendered uninhabitable for months.