When Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm, tore by way of Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base in 2018, it battered F-22 stealth fighter jets, destroyed tons of of buildings and churned up 700,000 cubic yards of particles. The whole value of the injury approached $5 billion.
Now, Tyndall is being rebuilt as a super-resilient “installation of the future.” New buildings sit greater than a foot above the bottom, to stay dry by way of 75 years of sea-level rise. Their roofs are designed to face up to winds of as much as 165 miles per hour. Manmade oyster reefs will defend coasts by breaking apart waves.
The huge venture will likely be 70% full subsequent yr, stated the officer main it, Col. Robert Bartlow, chief of the U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center Natural Disaster Recovery Division. “This is a first for the Air Force,” he stated, with large-scale, cutting-edge development going down “on top of an existing base, while there was a continued flying mission.”
Storms like Michael have gotten extra highly effective and damaging as the world warms, and lots of military installations are uncovered to them and different climate hazards. Still, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed final yr that the Pentagon wouldn’t do any “climate change crap” on his watch. Biden-era climate motion plans have been scrapped, and the 2025 National Security Strategy invoked climate change solely to label it a “disastrous” ideology. Hegseth canceled almost 100 analysis research associated to world warming and safety, which consultants say will compound the lack of climate data throughout the federal authorities beneath President Donald Trump.
“Because ‘climate’ is a dirty word, we’re not investing in that predictive capability,” stated Sherri Goodman, secretary basic of the non-governmental International Military Council on Climate and Security and, from 1993 to 2001, the U.S. deputy undersecretary of protection for environmental safety.
But as Tyndall exhibits, the Defense Department remains to be engaged on one entrance of the climate battle: steeling its bases in opposition to the consequences of a warming ambiance, such as increased seas, fiercer storms and deadlier fires. A brand new flood wall is rising on the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland; a low-lying Air Force runway is being elevated in Virginia; and tasks are underway to scale back wildfire threat round varied military websites in Hawaii.
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Work that was beforehand described as confronting the climate risk is now touted for making certain “resilience” and “readiness.” The semantics are a nod to necessity: At stake are tons of of billions of {dollars} of belongings and the flexibility to launch missions rapidly and easily.
“Ultimately, the military is a very pragmatic institution,” stated John Conger, a previous director of the nonprofit Center for Climate and Security and a senior Defense Department official through the Obama administration. “It wants to maintain mission capability. Whether we’re going to call it ‘climate,’ not ‘climate,’ whatever — if I can’t get to the base because the road is flooded, that’s a problem.”
Representatives of the Defense Department declined to remark.
Global warming impinges on American safety and military operations in quite a few methods. More climate-driven disasters means extra deployments to reply to them. Extreme warmth makes it tougher for jets to carry off and sickens troopers throughout coaching workout routines. Climate change additionally acts as a “threat multiplier” – a time period that Goodman coined – world wide. It can exacerbate drought situations, which can restrict water or meals in areas already primed for battle.
Much of the military’s resilience work started years in the past; development timelines are lengthy. The $900 billion 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump signed into legislation in December, contains measures that might be stated to come back beneath the umbrella of climate adaptation. The legislation bolsters the military’s potential to reply to wildfires; raises the associated fee restrict for changing constructions destroyed by disasters; and requires military leaders to establish the most important dangers to water safety on bases.
Congress has given the military “decades-long, bipartisan direction” to arrange for climate change, even at occasions when the time period itself was out of political favor, famous Will Rogers, a principal of Converge Strategies and the senior climate advisor to the secretary of the Army from 2022 to January 2025.
If climate preparedness is one other time period for environmental evaluation, “the Army’s been doing this regularly now since World War II,” stated Frank Galgano, a geographer at Villanova University who retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel in 2007.
The method could not have shifted, however the ambiance has. Extreme climate and disasters have prompted $15 billion of injury to protection services over the previous decade. In 2023 alone, Typhoon Marwar ravaged two bases on Guam, heavy rains swamped the campus of West Point in New York and a landslide blocked the principle highway at Camp Pendleton in California.
Close to $400 billion of federal authorities belongings, most of them belonging to the Defense Department, are at excessive threat of being hit by a serious coastal flood or storm in coming years, in line with a Bloomberg Law evaluation.
The Pentagon explicitly acknowledged the warming climate as a hazard for a few years. The 2008 National Defense Strategy flagged climate change as an rising threat, and two years later it was named a nationwide safety risk within the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review. After that, the Defense Department and the person armed forces put out a stream of climate and sustainability plans. (Some have now been faraway from authorities web sites.)
James Mattis, who served as protection secretary throughout President Donald Trump’s first time period, described climate change as a destabilizing drive in 2017. His Biden-era successor Lloyd Austin stated in 2021, “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”
Trump and Hegseth have made a pointy pivot. In a March 2025 memo to military leaders, Hegseth known as climate change a “distraction” from preventing wars, ordered that references to it’s faraway from mission statements and barred any environmental initiatives from being included within the Future Years Defense Program, a strategic plan.
Hegseth additionally included a caveat sufficiently big to steer an plane provider by way of. “Nothing in this memorandum,” he wrote, “shall be construed to prevent the department from assessing weather-related impacts on operations, mitigating weather-related risks, conducting environmental assessments, as appropriate, and improving the resilience of military installations.”
Days after Hegseth issued his memo, the Pentagon’s steering on grasp planning for bases was up to date. (By legislation, each main military set up should have a grasp plan.) In the older model from 2022, the phrase “climate” was used 54 occasions. It doesn’t seem as soon as within the new model, which nonetheless directs planners to establish and mitigate dangers from excessive climate.
Bartlow, at Tyndall, sees no contradiction between that venture and Hegseth’s steering.
The overarching objective at Tyndall, he stated, is “preserving lethality in a high-end combat capability. When we talk about resilience, it’s focused on preserving that combat capability.” If one other Category 5 hurricane hits, “there’ll be some interruptions, but the idea is you’ll be able to recover this installation quickly,” Bartlow stated. “You can make that direct link back to readiness.”
Hardening efforts proceed elsewhere however are falling brief. A February Government Accountability Office report discovered that the military has failed to trace all the prices from catastrophe injury and hasn’t totally integrated climate-change projections into facility designs, and that a lot of its grasp plans nonetheless haven’t been up to date to advertise larger resilience.
One constraint is funding. “Our installations are funded at about 80% of what they need on a day-to-day basis,” stated Rogers, the previous Army climate adviser.
The Iran conflict might apply extra stress. Defense officers “could use their reprogramming authority to pay for contingency operations in Iran” with cash meant for fortifying bases, stated Rogers. “I would be worried about that, depending on how long this goes.”
Although the Pentagon has maintained a concentrate on resilience, beneath Hegseth it has backed off efforts to decrease its emissions — the U.S. military is the only largest climate polluter within the nation — and develop inexperienced ships and tanks. The armed forces have in recent times explored utilizing hybrid and electrical tanks for tactical, not simply environmental causes: They cut back reliance on diesel provide traces, are quieter and are much less detectable to warmth radar. While the Army is shifting forward with its hybrid M1E3 tank, funding for such initiatives has declined, stated Rogers.
Of the research that Hegseth canceled, some centered on the Indo-Pacific, the place China has ambitions, famous Goodman. She stated the misplaced data and decreased funding for climate and climate analysis – not simply within the military however in companies just like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – might set again protection planning.
She supplied a hypothetical instance: With AI pushing the envelope in forecasting, an adversary might anticipate and benefit from a climate occasion to launch a cyberattack on the U.S. “And if we’re not understanding that,” she stated, “then we have become more vulnerable.”