With the World in Turmoil, Biden and Harris Focus the Defense Department on . . . Global Warming

F aced with volatile situations and violent conflicts around the world, the U.S. Department of Defense under the Biden-Harris administration is focusing its resources on global warming and environmental protection. The decision to direct military resources toward environmentalist priorities, such as species conservation and electric vehicles, seems to be coming not from soldiers but from partisan Democrats masquerading as bureaucrats.

“The Department of Defense now sees combating climate change as central to its mission,” said Sherri Goodman — the former deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security and the current secretary-general of the International Military Council on Climate and Security — in a podcast with Columbia University in which she promoted her new book. Goodman has helped develop Democratic administrations’ emissions-reduction plans to meet the military’s “clean-energy targets.” She was listed as a major endorser of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

The interview reveals how the Biden-Harris administration is reorienting the military to fight not America’s foreign adversaries but global warming — and in the most absurd ways possible.

Consider, for example, how Goodman describes the U.S. Army’s Abrams battle tanks as “an oil spill waiting to happen” and pontificates about converting the American jet-fuel-powered armored corps into a fleet of electric vehicles. There are many reasons no army on Earth uses electric tanks. Jet A, the standard kerosene fuel that Goodman is worried could spill out of America’s tanks, has an energy density of 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. In comparison, a top-of-the-line Tesla 4680 lithium-ion car battery has an energy density of just under 233 watt-hours per kilogram. Russia and China would surely appreciate a forced redesign that makes America’s tanks more than 50 times less efficient and more vulnerable!

“Terrible idea. Battery tech is currently too unreliable, doesn’t work in a broad enough temperature range, and would prove exceptionally risky for a vehicle that is going to be shot at,” an engineer familiar with the matter, who asked to remain anonymous, told National Review. “If you want to replicate what Russian tanks currently do when they cook off, but with batteries instead of rounds, then sure, but I don’t think we should be entering the turret-tossing league.”

Batteries such as the ones used in electric cars could cause American armored vehicles to catch fire in a way that is virtually impossible to extinguish without extremely specialized equipment, leading to devastating consequences for U.S. soldiers. Even if they didn’t present a direct hazard to U.S. personnel, electric vehicles would make soldiers sitting ducks for America’s enemies.

“My concern about a heavy combat vehicle that’s purely electric is that it’d be a sitting duck for far longer while it’s recharging. Dumping in diesel doesn’t take as long. Even as up-armored as tanks are, rapid mobility at a moment’s notice is still an important tactical and operational necessity,” a former staff weather officer (SWO), who deployed to Iraq in 2003 with an armored division, told National Review. “Never volunteer to tie a hand behind your back when fighting an enemy. Bring all options to the table.”

“If the higher-ups wanted me to reduce emissions, I’d do it by reducing the emissions of enemy vehicles to zero by eliminating them.”

Electric armored vehicles would not only be dependent on a much more vulnerable logistical chain, they probably wouldn’t even lower carbon emissions. “What part of the tank’s carbon emissions has it actually solved as related to climate change?” the retired SWO asked about the hypothetical redesign of American tanks, stating that no form of portable electrical power capable of charging an armored vehicle exists, even if the intense difficulties of reengineering all of America’s tanks could be solved. “All it’s done is transferred the tank’s carbon footprint to another vehicle and not necessarily reduced the tank’s total carbon footprint.”

Still, Democratic environmentalist donors would no doubt appreciate getting a piece of the military budget, which is currently $10 million per tank, roughly $3.7 million of which was spent on research and development for the existing design, . . . which would have to be done all over again for the new vehicle Goodman envisions. But from her perspective, that’s probably a plus, as make-work for Democratic cronies seems to be a key financial incentive for “greening” the DOD. Given that the Harris campaign has already received $55 million from environmentalists, it would be a win-win for both groups: Politicians get more donors, and said donors get big military contracts. The only people who lose are America’s soldiers and taxpayers.

Goodman has never served in the military, but she did work for former Democratic senator Sam Nunn (Ga.) before she became an environmental lawyer and served as the first deputy undersecretary of defense in an environmental-security role created by the Obama administration. (The Biden-Harris DOD maintains similar roles, such as the deputy assistant secretary of defense focused on the environment, who is responsible for the military’s “green/sustainable buildings,” “strategic sustainability planning,” and, for some reason, “the DoD Native American program.”) During her appearance on the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast, Goodman recounted her experience of “saving a few good species” of bird by halting training missions near the Marine base at Camp Lejeune and the Army base formerly called Fort Bragg (renamed Fort Liberty by the Biden-Harris administration in 2023). America’s strategic superiority in woodpecker conservation undoubtedly keeps the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping up at night.

The former deputy undersecretary of defense also noted that the U.S. military is responding to global warming by “mainstreaming the understanding of climate into all aspects of defense strategy.” She isn’t the only Democratic official trying to justify the diversion of military resources toward environmentalism. “Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. 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,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin said in 2021. A proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia appears not to have met Austin’s threshold of an existential threat, as earlier this year he took an extended and secretive leave of absence without informing his deputy or the president of the United States for three days.

The Defense Department’s complex and expensive plans to address global warming are a dangerous distraction from America’s real adversaries. Soldiers, such as oceanographer and retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet, who served as the director of the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, are often exceedingly skeptical of the eco-bureaucracy’s goal of using the DOD to fight global warming. Citing rising risks of a Communist Chinese invasion of democratic Taiwan, Iran’s intensifying conflict with Israel, and recent escalations in the war between Russia and Ukraine, Gallaudet noted that the Biden-Harris administration’s focus on global warming was a “costly unforced error” enacted on the basis of shoddy and heavily politicized science.

“Now is not the time to rebrand the military as a ‘climate force,’” Gallaudet wrote in August in the Hill. “In fact, I have already detailed multiple times how the Defense Department climate plans praised by the author are not only misdirected but a dangerous distraction from the urgent deterrence necessary to address current threats.” Given that American taxpayers already fund the Environmental Protection Agency to the tune of $9 billion dollars annually, it is indeed unclear why the country needs the Department of Defense to function as a second EPA.

Previous Democratic, green DOD programs accomplished little more than lighting a lot of greenbacks on fire. When the Obama administration demanded that the U.S. Navy fuel its fleets with algae, it cost taxpayers up to $424 per gallon and fell far short of expectations. The development of huge wind turbines ended up presenting an “unacceptable risk to national security” by disrupting military aviation and interfering with radar. The DOD’s first-of-its-kind “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap,” issued in 2012 under Obama, was meant to respond to global-warming-induced “conflicts over basic resources like food and water,” yet research suggests that the planet was over 500 percent more resource-abundant last year than in 1980, despite the popularity of resource-scarcity apocalypticism. Active threats, such as the risks from multiple escalating conflicts across the globe, should perhaps take precedence.

Shifting the Department of Defense’s focus to environmentalism at a time of heightened international tensions makes American soldiers more vulnerable, costs immense amounts of money, and benefits no one except eco-bureaucrats and environmentalist-funded politicians.