Something in a FireDogLake post made me ask the question: is the Defense Department seriously including a Climate Change analysis in its published reports these days? Sadly, it is
true:
Across each of the three pillars of the updated defense strategy, the Department is committed to finding creative, effective, and efficient ways to achieve our goals and assist in making strategic choices. Innovation – within our own Department and in our interagency and international partnerships – is a central line of effort. We are identifying new presence paradigms, including potentially positioning additional forward deployed naval forces in critical areas, and deploying new combinations of ships, aviation assets, regionally aligned or rotational ground forces, and crisis response forces, all with the intention of maximizing effects while minimizing costs. With our allies and partners, we will make greater efforts to coordinate our planning to optimize their contributions to their own security and to our many combined activities. The impacts of climate change may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities, while at the same time undermining the capacity of our domestic installations to support training activities. Our actions to increase energy and water security, including investments in energy efficiency, new technologies, and renewable energy sources, will increase the resiliency of our installations and help mitigate these effects.
What a humdinger. Just count the buzzwords: creative, effective, efficient, goals, strategic choices, innovation, partnerships, paradigms, assets. Slip in a little something about climate changes increasing something or other, possibly. Can we suppose the author really had anything in particular in mind, or was he only checking boxes?
The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.
There must be people who spend their whole military career on this kind of thing, unless someone has had the good sense to farm it out to civilian content suppliers.
3 comments:
I would guess that there were both contractors and military officers -- quite a few of them -- engaged in constructing that paragraph.
But look on the bright side. Content free is the best you can hope for. If they came up with specific proposals, there's a danger someone would waste money trying to achieve them.
"There must be people who spend their whole military career on this kind of thing, unless someone has had the good sense to farm it out to civilian content suppliers."
You'd think you could use a computer algorithm to produce such nonsense.
You'd think you could use a computer algorithm to produce such nonsense.
Just for grins, I tried that algorithm, listing Jonn J'onzz as one of the authors (extra points for those who recognize that author). Not only did I get, lickety-split, a paper on Exploring Interrupts Using Atomic Technology, but J'onzz' 1999 paper on virtual machines was cited.
On the other hand, it's entirely reasonable for Defense (and State, come to that) to do long-range planning for climate change. The sun is warming, after all, and in the shorter term, it goes through cooling cycles, too, with one having ended just a couple of centuries ago, and another perhaps starting up. Such things affect migration rates and patterns.
But perhaps that planning should take a different tack than the one being pushed by our motor boat skipper who sits in State's chair and who makes a lousy checkers player over in Kiev.
Eric Hines
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