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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the military will trim 8% from its budget in each of the next five years. Jay Price of member station WUNC reports on one target that's already been named.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: It was the first thing, in fact, that Hegseth mentioned during a recent news conference when asked about the cuts.
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PETE HEGSETH: Look at a lot of the climate programs that have been pursued at the Defense Department.
PRICE: The way he sees it, that's not part of the mission.
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HEGSETH: The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat. We're in the business of deterring and winning wars.
PRICE: But that business of deterring enemies and winning wars means the military has to plan years, even decades, ahead - decades in which climate change is expected to swamp some coastal installations, increase the number of days it's too hot to train outside, force changes to ships and military equipment and shape the nature of combat and where conflicts occur. That's why Pentagon leaders have long incorporated climate change into their planning.
TOM ELLISON: There's essentially nothing that the Department of Defense is doing related to climate change that is only a purely environmental purpose.
PRICE: Tom Ellison is with the Center for Climate and Security in Washington, D.C. He says Congress has long supported the military's need to plan for climate change, what he calls a rare bipartisan bright spot on the topic. That's because for the military, it's an immediate, practical matter.
ELLISON: If you want a capable and healthy U.S. military and fighting force, you need to understand things like how is extreme heat and pollution affecting the health of your troops? When climate change changes the chemistry of the ocean, how is my submarine's sonar going to work differently? You know, how will changes in humidity affect the lift capacity of my transport aircraft, right? How will climate change affecting crop yields cause food price spikes and instability?
PRICE: He says even things like making military vehicles more fuel efficient are about war fighting.
ELLISON: That's something that has environmental benefits, right? But when you had troops in Iraq and Afghanistan getting killed delivering fuel supplies to forward operating bases - if you use less fuel, you have less of a need for that.
PRICE: Also building resilience into the military's infrastructure planning has become critical. Increasingly common and more powerful storms have caused billions of dollars in damage to installations. Some key coastal bases already experience regular flooding, so new barracks, say, or piers for ships must be designed for higher sea levels. And experts say some, like the Marine Corps' iconic Paris Island, will eventually have to be abandoned and their missions shifted elsewhere.
It's early in the budget-cutting process. But one sign of what might come is the disappearance of an official online portal that helped military leaders plan for a changing climate. Caroline Baxter, now retired from the Defense Department, oversaw the portal's creation.
CAROLINE BAXTER: That portal was meant to give people resources and one place to go for those resources that they can then use to figure out, all right, I'm a logistician. What do I need to know about changing sea level rise? How do I make a decision about that? I'm an installation manager. How is sea level rise going to affect any expansion of the installation that I'm supposed to manage?
PRICE: The Defense Department didn't respond to a request for comment, but Baxter says dropping climate initiatives would come at a cost to military planning and national security.
BAXTER: There is a math and physics about climate change - and that has been true for decades - that has made what they do harder and will continue to make what they do harder. Norfolk flooding, Annapolis flooding 40 times a year, wildfires taking the Kentucky National Guard off mission - stuff like that.
PRICE: In the real world, she says, heat and sea level rise and storms are increasingly destructive forces that the U.S. military must deal with - enemies that can't be ignored. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina.
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