Tim Gallaudet
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has expressed his commitment to include climate considerations as an essential element of our national security. This is not new to the DoD, and the recently released DoD Climate Adaptation Plan details the intended efforts by the Department to make the military more climate-ready. This is a wide-ranging plan, covering everything from training, installations, and supply chains. Unfortunately, the breadth and depth of the document dilute what should be its primary focus – warfighting. The topic is indirectly addressed in a Line of Effort on “Climate Informed Decision Making,” but the closest it gets is to direct the Department to incorporate climate change considerations in warfighting concepts and doctrine and develop appropriate decision support tools.
Much more needs to be said on these concepts, doctrine, and tools, especially in view of the move to distributed, all domain operations – which is not even mentioned in the document. Let’s take a look at these concepts, beginning with distributed operations. The Navy made the move to Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) in 2015 with Naval Surface Forces’ Distributed Lethality Strategy. At the time, I was in charge of the Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command, with the mission to provide the Navy’s operational forces with climate, weather, and ocean information to ensure their safety and effectiveness. We had the responsibility to prevent mission-kills from the environment in Naval strike warfare, anti-submarine warfare, Naval Special Warfare, Marine Corps ground force maneuver, and Joint intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Distributed lethality and later DMO required naval forces to shift to a more dispersed operational footprint over a larger geographic area. That meant my job got a lot harder because we had more microclimates and weather regimes to forecast simultaneously for any given operation. Now, the entire DoD has embraced a similar disaggregated operating concept called expanded maneuver.
The other side of the coin is all domain operations, which requires the ability to integrate and effectively command and control across all domains – air, land, sea, space, spectrum, and cyberspace – seamlessly. One scenario it envisions is where a submarine, a Marine Corps infantry squad, an F-35, an Apache gunship, a P-8 patrol plane, an orbiting satellite, and a Navy ship exchange and feed networked sensor data across a theater-wide area to any of their weapons to deliver the most efficient and lethal response to a threat. Thus, modern warfighting concepts have created the need to understand and predict weather and climate in the ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere (Arctic), and space – over wide areas and with precision. The Navy’s recent Large Scale Exercise (LSE) dramatically demonstrated this development recently across 3 Geographic Combatant Command Areas of Responsibility.
Meeting this need should be at the forefront of the Department’s Climate Adaptation Plan, and it can be accomplished far sooner than the numerous risk assessments, resilience plans, and infrastructure investments directed in the document. Here are three potential quick wins:
Expand the climate, weather, and ocean observing systems used by DoD. More satellite, in-situ, and autonomous systems and sensors will provide the necessary high-definition understanding of the physical operating environment, and there is no need to wait years for the traditional acquisition process because numerous, affordable Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions are readily available from in industry now.
Accelerate DoD’s application of AI-enabled environmental decision support tools. The military must move beyond area-wide forecasts and follow the example of countless businesses that use commercial, hyperlocal ocean, and weather intelligence solutions that can provide data, predictions, and insights tailored for specific DoD platforms, sensors, payloads, routes, and timelines.
Create a climate, weather, and ocean Common Operating Picture (COP) for DoD. To ensure effective interoperability, the services must consolidate their disparate display and decision support systems for environmental data – just as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is integrating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), command and control, and fire control systems.
As Russia amasses troops on its boundary with Ukraine and China becomes increasingly provocative over Taiwan, the U.S. military must mount a credible deterrence in two theaters on opposite sides of the world with widely differing climatic conditions. Preparing for this and other plausible scenarios requiring a distributed, all domain operational capability must be the DoD’s top-tier climate adaptation action. By expanding access to environmental observations, accelerating the application of predictive analytics, and standardizing the display and decision support tools used by the Joint Force for climate, weather, and ocean data, DoD can make our military climate-ready for what truly matters – modern warfighting.
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