Adapting Department of Defense Training Based on a Changing Climate

Climate change has become a key national priority and a vital consideration in a broad range of strategic documents. President Biden’s January 2021 Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, established an administration policy to regard climate considerations as fundamental to national security. In response, Secretary of Defense Austin committed to include the security implications of climate change in all Department of Defense (DoD) risk analyses, strategy development, and planning.[1] Following Secretary Austin’s guidance and using the best available climate science and modeling, this study by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) addresses a strategic challenge: how might military operations and training need to adapt in response to a changing climate? Using the best available global climate models, we created projections for heat, drought, and sea level rise around a near- (2030) and a medium-term (2050) time horizon. These results were then used to test the relationships between and among local conditions, equipment, and operations to identify the likely effect of a changing climate on mission-essential tasks and associated tactics, techniques, and procedures already recognized within military doctrine. The results of these analyses were used to describe potential implications for Service (i.e., Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, National Guard) or joint forces training, including how tasks, conditions, or standards might require adaptation to meet operational impacts driven by a changing climate. In addition to the specific findings of this study, we also created a rigorous, globally portable toolset and methodology for addressing critical DoD policy questions that might be affected by a changing climate. This methodological approach can be adopted for use by civilian agencies to better understand climate adaptation needs.

[1] Department of Defense, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Acquisition and Sustainment), “Department of Defense Draft Climate Adaptation Plan: Report Submitted to National Climate Task Force and Federal Chief Sustainability Officer” (Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., 2021), https://www.sustainability.gov.