Contributor(s): Professor Neta C. Crawford | The Pentagon was a leader, in the 1980s and 1990s, in the United States in recognising climate change as a looming security concern. The US Department of Defence has thus prepared for climate change with plans for responding to climate caused disruption to operations. The DoD is also predicting and preparing for climate change caused war. What are the security threats that will flow from climate change? Is ‘climate war’ inevitable? The DOD is also the US government’s largest fuel user and perhaps the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter — with annual emissions larger than the annual emissions of many countries. Tracking the causes and trends DOD fuel use from 1975 to 2018 and linking it to military doctrine shows a strategic disconnect: the Pentagon’s fuel use and military doctrine undermines its security objectives. What explains this? Neta C. Crawford is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston U
