Last November, I heard Sherri Goodman, appointed in 1993 as the first-ever deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, speak about her new book, Threat Multiplier. After the event, one of her former DOD colleagues called Goodman “whip smart” and a “doer.” These qualities undergirded her efforts to move the Pentagon’s institutional behemoth toward investing first in environmental stewardship and, eventually, in climate action.
The task was, and remains, daunting. With a budget in 2024 of nearly $900 billion, DOD employs some 1.4 million active duty personnel and 950,000 civilians who operate at over 750 installations in the United States and across the globe. Its mission: “To provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of the United States.”
How Goodman helped introduce environmental stewardship and climate action into this ponderous institution presents lessons both in political craftsmanship and in creating conceptual linkages that affirm why environmental and climate action are integral to national security. Goodman’s task, as she saw it, was not primarily about saving the planet; it was about securing a nation and its people. In her view the effort was not, as some colleagues thought, mission creep.
Having come to DOD as a Clinton administration appointee from the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Goodman had deep knowledge both of military substance and political processes. She arrived at the Pentagon when most of the armed forces leadership thought of environmental investment as unrelated to security. How could she shift military awareness toward understanding that environmental stewardship is “not only good for trees and turtles” but also “good for the health and safety of our troops and the communities they served?”
Even before the effects of climate change had become apparent, Goodman had several immediate tasks in the 1990s. First, she had to ensure DOD properties transferred to other agencies and entities in the Base Realignment and Closure process were cleaned up and ready. Second, in an era of increasing focus on environmental protections and sustaining endangered species, she had to find ways to align such stewardship with the military’s security mission. Without such alignment, base commanders and DOD officials were likely to see such efforts as burdensome.
Goodman understood the importance of illustrating co-benefits—how measures to protect red-cockaded woodpecker habitat could serve as real-world landscape obstacles important to training exercises. She also understood the importance of collaboration, including with communities adjacent to properties being transferred under BRAC.
The shifting awareness of environmental investments as intrinsic to the defense mission was more than window-dressing. As Goodman recounts, cleaning up military waste is essential to the health of troops and their families. Sustaining clean water by shifting away from lead bullets helps maintain a healthy military. Eventually, in tackling climate change, Goodman and her DOD allies showed that reliance on fossil fuels in Iraq and elsewhere was both costly and put lives at risk—“one soldier was killed for every twenty-four convoys to resupply fuel or water” in Afghanistan. And costs were exorbitant. Getting fuel to remote locations in Iraq and Afghanistan for each gallon cost “a whopping $400 by the time the costs of transport and security were fully factored in.”
In the effort to shift away from fossil fuels, as with her other efforts, Goodman put a premium on data. One result: a study entitled “More Capable Warfighting Through Reduced Fuel Burden.”
Even with co-benefits, cost savings, and mission alignment, shifting an entire institutional culture is challenging. Though many military leaders began to embrace the linkages between the military mission, environmental stewardship, and climate action, embrace of this vision was neither immediate nor uniform.
During my eight years at the Department of the Interior, we sometimes struggled to come to agreement with DOD on “how clean is clean enough” in removing risks of unexploded ordinance on former military lands transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management. I recall BLM’s challenges at the transferred Fort Ord lands, arguing that firefighting on these lands required more extensive cleanup that the military was reluctant to undertake.
We faced DOD sluggishness in efforts to clean up lead paint devastating to Laysan albatross on Midway Island. I met with some military commanders that continued to see protections of endangered species as a distracting nuisance; others, as Goodman recounts, enthusiastically embraced environmental protections and found ways to make such protections, as in the case of the woodpecker, part of their training.
With the surge of climate change effects and despite deep partisan divisions on the issue, the case has become even more compelling for the military to invest in environmental protection, climate mitigation, and climate adaptation. Goodman has played a fundamental role in this evolution: climate change is a “threat multiplier,” a term Goodman invented that has been embraced not only by the U.S. military but by other nations, as well.
Goodman had ample direct evidence to substantiate this perspective. Laying out the case she articulated to military leadership both during and after her time at DOD, she recounts the effects of climate change on military installations, on other nations and the safety and stability of their populations, on geopolitical dynamics, and much more. Many of these effects were not hypothetical or the result of predictive modeling. They unfolded real-time.
Several dramatic events underscore threats to the military from climate change. Hurricane Sandy devastated Coast Guard Station Sandy Hook, rendering it inoperable. Goodman reports Admiral Phillips of the Coast Guard lamenting that “we were not able to execute our duties.” Contemplating the effects, Admiral Phillips observed: “It’s a series of cascading casualties with increasing significance over time, and we are behind the rate of change.”
Similar risks were (and are) evident elsewhere. Norfolk, Virginia, home of a large Navy base, faces the highest rates of sea-level rise on the East Coast, imperiling operations. Hurricane Michael decimated Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida in 2018. The list goes on, prompting former defense secretary Leon Panetta to opine, as Goodman recounts, that rather than wishing for the past, we need to prepare for a “future climate Pearl Harbor.”
Goodman’s threat multiplier framework extends beyond climate impacts to military installations. It extends to the nature of national security challenges. Goodman points to the Arctic, where melting sea ice “is the proverbial ‘canary’ in the earth climate system,” with significant geopolitical implications. Rear Admiral David Titley told Goodman, “We are witnessing a failure of imagination” in contemplating how climate change affects military readiness. Goodman suggests that “climate change has produced a different ‘battlefield’ for just about every scenario a planner can now imagine…altering the geostrategic landscape.” Chinese vessels now ply the Arctic; Russia and others eye potential fuels and minerals extraction on the Arctic seabed—all these activities in close proximity to the United States.
Goodman also points to natural resource conditions across the globe—whether in the form of chronic drought, extreme wildland fires, flooding, and more—and what she calls a “direct correlation between stability and access to natural resources.” These conditions make climate change “inextricably linked” to national security, as they can bring civil unrest and heighten risks of conflict.
Despite the fits and starts and uneven embrace of investment in environmental protections and climate action across a sprawling national defense system, Goodman’s message is optimistic. She is optimistic because of the intrinsic linkage of climate and environmental investments and national security. She is optimistic because the military is a force of innovation, as in its pioneering of new liquid fuels for naval and aviation operations that reduce greenhouse gases. She is optimistic because so many allies are cooperating on climate action. She sees investments in innovation as “opportunity multipliers.”
But Goodman is also realistic. The event at which she spoke about the threat multiplier of climate change took place November 6, one day after the election. With a new administration for which climate action is viewed with skepticism or hostility, what, asked the audience, are the prospects for continued progress by the military in advancing clean energy, climate-resilient infrastructure, and more?
Her message is twofold. First, current actions to invest in climate resilience, greenhouse gas reductions, energy efficiency, and more are fundamentally imperatives for national security. The nation simply cannot have its military installations regularly flooding, its electric power going out for days on end, or troops at acute risk in transporting fossil fuels to battlefields. Business as usual is simply not sustainable, as one Navy vice admiral told Goodman. Second, sometimes labels matter. Some DOD activities come under labels of water security, or energy efficiency, or electric power reliability. All of these endeavors are part of a climate action portfolio, but they do not require that label for their justification. They will, Goodman argues, continue.
Threat Multiplier, packed full of facts about military operations, is also a story of political acuity in which the author understood how to emphasize “mission first,” multi-benefits, collaboration, and innovation to drive change. Looking at the results of her efforts, Goodman embraces Madeleine Albright’s quip: “I’m an optimist who worries a lot.”
Lynn Scarlett was deputy secretary of the interior in the Bush II administration.
