Storming the Wall. Todd Miller
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to prepare for the future dislocations of people, global instabilities, and threats to U.S. political and economic interests due to climate destabilization. Indeed, Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, according to Politico, may “turn out to be the greenest person in Donald Trump’s cabinet.”3 And DHS secretary John Kelly, in charge of policing U.S. borders, is also a climate security hawk. On top of that, the Trump administration already works under the the climate security doctrine’s core assumption, that migration is a threat.
Two questions I wanted to address by going to the conference were how did business as usual continue in the United States as climate change came to be identified as a top national security threat, and how did acknowledgment of this threat impact the border enforcement and homeland security regime? As I sat in meetings and workshops for two full days, it became quite clear that while military analysts were superb risk assessors who regularly do threat projections well into the future, their findings were not being used to ensure that the necessary changes would be made to prevent large-scale ecological crisis. Instead, as the world became shaken to its core with potential catastrophe, the security apparatus worked hard to keep things the same in terms of economic, political, and social centers of power.
Indeed, the massive adjustments were like a climate adaptation program for the rich and powerful. Those enriched by the politics of fossil fuel, money, and weapons seemed to want solutions, first and foremost, for how best to keep a world of more and more impoverished people either working for them or out of sight altogether. As environmental destabilization wields tremendous pressures on these people to survive, investments pour into weapons and surveillance systems as a way of perpetuating the current economic-political order (even as the order attempts to “green” itself).
To understand how ingrained the climate security nexus is—in the context of fringe, yet powerful, climate denialism in some Washington circles—it is best to turn to Brigadier General Stephen Cheney—a panelist at the same conference as Watson. In response to the man who earlier accused the military of climate denial, Cheney said, “The lance corporal in the forward operating base doesn’t really care much about the wind or the sun or the drought. He wants his bullets and he wants his food and he wants his water. The mid-level guys and gals—the majors—go to West Point, and the lieutenant colonels go to the War College, and they all are learning about climate change and understand the impacts . . . and how it’s driving international conflict.”
And it is generals like Cheney himself, the higher-ups who implement policy and strategy, who most directly impact climate security. In January 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense issued Directive 4715.21: “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience.” According to Foreign Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed “one of the potentially most significant, if little-noticed, orders in recent Pentagon history. The directive told every corner of the Pentagon, including the office of the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs of staff, and all the combatant commands around the world, to put climate change front and center in their strategic planning.”4 And now, with “Mad Dog” Mattis at the helm of the DOD, this not-widely-known yet game-changing directive has not been, and is unlikely to be, removed—even as the Trump adminstration attempts, including via a marathon of executive orders, to roll back Obama’s legacy on climate.
Climate change, according to analysts Caitlin Werrel and Francesco Fermia of the organization Climate and Security, has reached a level of strategic significance that “can no longer be ignored.”5
THE OVERWHELMING WINNER
“I want to explain up front I’m a Marine,” said Brigadier General Stephen Cheney as soon as he stepped up to podium. “Thirty years of experience. Marines like pictures. They don’t like PowerPoint. So I’m going to show a couple of pictures up here. And we like to talk about war fighting.” On his right a slide flashed on the screen that said “Hot Spots: The Middle East.” To his left, up on a stage, his fellow panel participants sat at a table from which hung a banner that read “Defense, National Security, Climate Change Symposium.” Cheney, who was CEO of the American Security Project, a nonpartisan national security think tank formed in 2005 by then-senator John Kerry, said, “I’m going to walk around the world a little bit. Talk about conflict and climate change.”
Cheney’s gruff, confident voice fit the portrait of a soldier who had spent years on distant battlefields. “No surprise to anyone here: extreme weather presents a direct threat to U.S. homeland security. Around the world this has a tremendous effect on our forces and our allies. And definitely our enemies.”
Everyone in the audience seemed intent on Cheney’s words. He came across as a straight shooter. At one point during his talk, a younger man from Lockheed Martin, the Fortune 500 military manufacturer that was on the “cutting edge” of climate change, spilled coffee all over himself and the white tablecloth on the round table where he sat with four colleagues. Lockheed Martin had long ago leaped into the middle of the climate battlefield. In 2015, its CEO, Marilyn Hewsom, after winning an award for business management, said that the company “will continue its endeavor to create an environment-friendly world by combating the security and stability threats generated through climate change.” Also, as the Washington Post reported, the 112,000-employee corporation known for unleashing “cataclysmic fury on America’s enemies,” was partnering with a small Hawaii fish farm so that, according to the farm’s chief, Neil Sims, they can grow fish with “literally no imprint in the ocean.” The massive border surveillance market has not eluded Lockheed Martin either; in 2013 it was recognized as one of the top 15 companies to profit from “border security” based on multimillion-dollar contracts for aircraft and data processing products.
Nobody noticed when the coffee spilled, except for a server dressed in a white shirt and black pants who beelined to the table to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, Brigadier General Cheney was speaking at the podium about how an unprecedented drought from 2006 to 2010 had helped fuel the current conflict in Syria. He talked about Nigeria, Lake Chad, migration caused by water scarcity, and the Boko Haram terrorist group that formed in the region. And right when the coffee hit the white tablecloth, Cheney was talking about what he called the “poster child” of climate and conflict—Bangladesh. He talked about the 2,000-mile iron wall along the Indo-Bangladeshi divide, and said that Indian border guards have “shoot to kill” orders. Indeed, from 2001 to 2011 the Indian border forces killed 1,000 people, turning these borderlands into, according to Brad Adams in The Guardian, “South Asian killing fields.”6
Cheney said that current studies project that 5 million Bangladeshis will be displaced due to sea-level rise, but according to generals he has talked to, it may be more like 20 or 30 million people. When the young man from Lockheed Martin bolted for the bathroom, I couldn’t help but notice the stark and racialized divide between the servers and the conference participants. Although I couldn’t say for sure, it occurred to me that many of the servers at the conference, like the man who was scrubbing away the coffee, might have been from Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Tunisia, or from any one of the very climate-stressed places that Cheney was talking about right before my eyes. It was entirely possible, if not probable, that climate refugees, the very people that countries were building walls to stop, that Donald Trump travel policies were designed to ban, places where Lockheed Martin was unleashing its “cataclysmic fury,” were also at the conference serving coffee to the mostly white, middle-to upper-class conference participants.
“There is no doubt,” Cheney said as the young Lockheed Martin employee returned to his seat, “that climate change is going to increase the demands on military personnel. You’re going to see more humanitarian interventions, more peacekeeping, and certainly more conflicts.”
“Our military is preparing for climate change,” Cheney said; it is a “stressor,” a “threat multiplier,” an “accelerant of instability.” At first the words themselves were difficult to understand. Yet they were part of the growing vocabulary of military generals and Washington officials that named emerging aspects of the current ecological crisis. And there were other surprising twists to older concepts. For example, I had never heard the expression “military environmental industrial complex.” This came not from an activist,