A dark horse has entered the Trump administration’s backward-running race to botch humanity’s response to climate change: the Pentagon. And the agency might just win simply by decreeing climate change unreal and “woke.” This would almost be amusing if it weren’t so wrongheaded and dangerous to U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and other service members.
In a February 19 statement, the Department of Defense’s acting deputy secretary Robert Salesses called for a $50 billion cut to the U.S. military, causing some consternation in Congress. Buried in its strange call to “revive the warrior ethos” of the DOD, the statement pointed to “so-called ‘climate change’ and other woke programs,” to garner its savings. The DOD’s 2024 budget request for climate adaptation was $3.7 billion, worth noting, less than 8 percent of what Salesses wants to cut.
But more importantly, the DOD pretending that climate change isn’t real is, of course, penny-wise and pound foolish. A 2018 hurricane leveled buildings and F-35 hangars at Tyndall Air Force Base, costing $3.7 billion to rebuild. Flash flooding at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2023 cost $200 million to repair. In the U.S. alone, weather- and climate-related disasters caused $746.7 billion in damages in the last five years, almost enough cash to float the Pentagon for a year.
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The statement’s sloppy language—what even is “woke” climate change?—points to a dangerous politicization of Pentagon thinking under the new Trump administration, and not just about climate. That trend promises nothing good for U.S. national security.
The DOD’s budget statement, which seems to promise another widespread culling of probationary employees along with climate and diversity cuts, accompanies climate cuts at EPA and the National Weather Service, and the withdrawal of U.S. scientists from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Program on Climate Change assessments. I asked the DOD press office to explain what is “so-called” about climate change, and how is it “woke.” But I didn’t receive an answer.
Instead I asked former deputy undersecretary of defense Sherri Goodman, who in 2008 first spurred the Pentagon to speed up its climate planning, what she thought of the call to cut military climate spending.
“America’s military must be able to defend and deter all threats to America’s interests and to ensure our force is lethal and can operate under changing conditions, including changing climate conditions,” said Goodman, who is now chair of the board at the Council on Strategic Risks in Washington D.C. Service members face a litany of threats from higher temperatures, extreme weather and disasters. Typhoons threatening Guam hamper a U.S. Navy facing an aggressive China. A melting Arctic opens approaches to the U.S., and prolonged droughts across Africa and Latin America, combined with more frequent and intense extreme weather events, threaten America’s strategic interests, Goodman said. “For these reasons and more, climate change is now widely recognized as a threat multiplier.”
There is nothing “so-called” about climate change, of course. It’s very real, documented in the scientific record, and analyzed down to the level of its quantum mechanics. This is well understood in military circles and has been for decades. The U.S Geological Survey possesses ice cores that detail the climate history of Greenland thanks to Camp Century, a military base built, and abandoned, there in the 1960s. The debate over nuclear winter in the 1980s triggered climate studies across the defense establishment from scientists like the Energy Department’s Michael MacCracken—many of whom later became leading figures in climate science. In 2009 a U.S. Navy Arctic Roadmap planned for an ice-free Arctic summers in the 2030s, now well on their way. Salesses is simply wrong and pandering to his ultimate boss, consequences be damned.
But what about using woke—which means “alert to injustice in society, especially racism,” per the Oxford English Dictionary—to characterize the agency’s efforts to adapt to climate change? Perhaps the Pentagon’s new brain trust simply made a grammar error, lumping atmospheric physics in with its vendetta against ending workplace discrimination. This is not impossible to imagine, as a few days after Salesses’s statement, Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The newly named DOD chief, Fox TV personality Pete Hegseth, had previously derided Brown, a decorated Black fighter pilot, as “woke.”
A 2022 Public Administration Review study offers a more scholarly answer, detailing how the term has traveled left-to-right across the political spectrum, from denoting awareness of racism to serving as “a simulacrum without a connection to reality; it becomes a cognitive shortcut that paints anyone perceived as ‘too woke’ as anti-American, socialist, and pro-social justice.” This “semantic broadening,” the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter has argued, simply reflects that “English vocabulary is in a kind of hypercharge of late, and this is why ‘woke’ has seemed to be such a slippery shape-shifter.”
Less charitably, this is simply another case of what Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Through the Looking Glass. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean,” said the anthropomorphic egg. “The question is which is to be master—that’s all.”
That’s the answer. Instead of meaning something, woke is doing something for the Defense Department, sociologist Todd Madigan of Coastal Carolina University told Scientific American in an e-mail. “When a [DOD] policy is deemed ‘woke,’ many more people will understand that ‘we’ must be against it (without, of course, ever really understanding why, precisely, the policy is ‘woke’ to begin with, because of course, woke doesn’t mean anything”).
So there you have it, a phrase mangled to slur antiracist activism now somehow is supposed to discourage raising sea walls and insulating buildings. September’s Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan, not exactly a social justice handbook, was a litany of such adaptations. Common sense, such as warning soldiers about heat stroke in a climate literacy education plan, is now suspect. This is the kind of wishful thinking that has lost U.S. wars for the last half century.
The DOD official credited with the budget-cut statement, Salesses, is not a scientist. But he holds a master’s from the U.S. Naval War College, which in 1990 published an early report warning about the effects of climate change for the U.S. Navy. They weren’t predicting anything beneficial.
He should probably give it a read, given that it’s hard to promote a warrior ethos in warriors who are prostrate from heat stroke or defending places about to disappear into the sea. He might even gain the awareness of the 61 percent of the American public already worried some or a great deal about climate change. If not, reality in the coming years will be sufficient to “wake” even the willfully blind.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
