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The Lawfare Podcast
Lawfare Archive: ‘Threat Multiplier,’ Climate, and the Military with Sherri Goodman
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Sherry Goodman
We will answer your call as soon as we can.
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Isabella Roy
Rated Rio I'm Isabella Roy, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare archive for November 1, 2025. On October 28, Hurricane Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in Jamaica, the strongest storm ever recorded on the island. Since then, the storm has moved across Haiti and Cuba, killing dozens of people and causing flooding, landslides, and widespread devastation. Climate experts have linked the sheer force of Hurricane Melissa to the unusual warmth of the water south of Jamaica and warned that climate change's effects on sea surface temperatures are likely to make weather events like Melissa more frequent and more devastating. For today's archive, I chose an episode from August 27, 2024, in which Tyler McBrien sat down with Sherry Goodman, former deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security, to discuss the nexus between climate change and national security. Goodman's efforts to articulate the role of climate as a threat multiplier at the Pentagon, the pillars of effective Climate Action and more.
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Tyler McBrien
It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, with Sherry Goodman, the Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate and Security and the First Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental security.
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Sherry Goodman
Yes, you have to have military readiness, absolutely is fundamental. But how you achieve that readiness, you have to think about what are all the components that go into it. And it's often the case that environmental stewardship and climate security can be a piece of enabling that readiness.
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Tyler McBrien
Today we're talking about Sherry's new book, Threat Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. So, Sherry, many of our listeners will be familiar with you and your work as a pioneer in the field of climate security, but many may be surprised to learn that you didn't start your career in environmental issues, nor did you even start it at the Pentagon. So you start the book at the Senate. So I want to start there. Could you just sketch out a bit of, you know, your early career with the Senate and how it transitioned into the issue that we're going to talk about today of climate?
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Sherry Goodman
Well, thank you, Tyler, and it's a pleasure to be with you and the audience. Listener AUDIENCE today. I started in the Senate Armed services Committee in 1987 as a professional staff member working for the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Sam Nunn. I was also one of the first female professional staff members on that committee. I was assigned the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons complex as my portfolio. I had worked on nuclear weapons and arms control prior to that, both in my graduate studies and earlier at a defense consulting firm. And it was the height of the Cold War, and I was overseeing nuclear weapons research, development, tested production, like the storied National Lab, Sandia, Los Alamos and Livermore, as well as the weapons reactors and nuclear processing plants where throughout the Cold War, we produced plutonium, tritium and uranium for use in for the fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons.
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Tyler McBrien
Yeah. And as you say in your book, your career went from weapons to waste. So I think, you know, there's a, there's an obvious connection there to environmental protection in terms of cleaning up some of the waste caused by the military and in the name of national security. So can you just lay out the popular discourse at the time, in the late 80s and early 90s with regard to environmental protection and climate change? Is climate change even an anachronistic term to use there in terms of the late 80s, early 90s? Can you take us back to those years? What Was the national conversation like then?
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Sherry Goodman
Well, first just to scene set with listeners. When I went to law school and public policy school in the mid-1980s, there weren't even any courses on environmental law or environment and public policy. Maybe there were natural resource courses, but there weren't courses for national security nerds about environment or climate change. That connection had not yet been established. And so I studied what was then sort of the, you know, considered to be the exciting parts of national security studies, which was nuclear weapons, arms control, how to manage a relationship with the Soviet Union, transatlantic relations, NATO. Those were all sort of the exciting, you know, subjects where you thought you could sort of walk America, walk the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. So, you know, in my earliest years, right after college, working for saic, which was then called Science Applications International, we used to manage projects about how many targets you would need to hold at risk with various nuclear weapons. From massive old spreadsheets that were printouts. You know, think back to the early runs of the, with the little perforated pages on the side, you get these printouts of longitude, latitude, coordinates, and you'd be looking at, you know, could you hold this target at risk in the Warsaw Pact? Okay, that's now outdated science, but that was nuclear weapons planning in the earlier days of the Cold War. And then I had written my, actually my college senior thesis on the neutron bomb, A Case Study in Alliance Politics, where I examined the failed decision in the Carter Administration to try to deploy a low yield tactical nuclear weapon in Europe and why the Germans in particular, but also the Brits and most of the NATO members did not want to have a weapon that killed people but left buildings standing, as they said. So that was nuclear deterrence theory. They wanted to hold the capitals of Moscow and Washington at risk, and not Bonn at the time, which was the German capital, and Paris. So from there it seemed logical to continue working on nuclear weapons. And when I got the portfolio to oversee the nuclear weapons complex, these plants at first were chugging along. But within about a year, they all began to fail for environment, safety and health lapses. Because at the same time, and this is sort of the thesis of my book, which is the convergence of environment and climate security with traditional national security over the last several decades, because environmental awareness and environmental laws brought new critiques to the operation of these plants as well as the end of the Cold War meant we didn't need as much to produce as much. Secretary of Energy had said, we're awash in plutonium. And within a year all the reactors, processing plants shut down for these environment, safety and health lapses. And so then we were converting those vast facilities from a production operation to an actual cleanup and environment, safety and health management operation, which continues in many places today, like Hanford, is a vast cleanup site. Rocky Flats outside of Denver, a plant I visited just before the FBI conducted criminal investigation and shut it down. Where they told me, ma', am, are you of childbearing age? And when I answered yes, because I was in my 20s at the time, they said, well, maybe you shouldn't go in that glove box building over there where they were using the glove box operation to manipulate and manage plutonium pits that would go into nuclear warheads. So those types of operations ended. Awareness of the need to both particularly protect the safety of workers at facilities, but also to manage the waste associated with the nuclear weapons complex really led to a whole new era. And it was at the same time that the enforcement of environmental laws passed mostly in the 70s and the early 80s, like the clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Superfund and other hazardous waste laws really came into enforce around federal facilities. And so that created a whole new set of what we might call in the national security work requirements to address those environmental considerations and become better stewards of the environment.
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Tyler McBrien
Yeah, I really enjoyed the early chapters. It's such an interesting time for the world, but especially for U.S. foreign policy. It was also really interesting reading. The. It was just a small bit of you witnessing probably one of the last underground nuclear tests the country had and this falling out of love with nuclear energy. But I want to now kind of transition from your work in the Senate to the pentagon. So in 93, I believe, you were appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for environmental security. You have some great passages in there about what it was like going into the military kind of environment after the Senate, especially as a woman in a very male dominated field, I think it's safe to say, especially at the time. So just talk a bit about that, that transition from the Senate into the Pentagon at that point in your career.
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Sherry Goodman
Well, thank you. Yes. In 1993, I was appointed the first Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for environmental security, which was like the chief environmental officer at the Pentagon. And it was the beginning of the Clinton administration and there was an intent to elevate attention to environment safety and occupational health throughout the Department of Defense and really throughout the administration. Al Gore was the Vice President at the time. He was in many ways sort of the environmental, early environmental conscience of the administration. And again, I was in A small group of women at the Pentagon. But it was a very exciting time. It was very exciting because we were very aware of the opportunities, the opportunities to sort of reset American national security policy, to address the challenges that we face sort of coming out of the end of the Cold War. I mean, there were a lot of complex challenges, both in transatlantic NATO relations with the emergence changes going on in Russia and really throughout the world at that time. And so it was also an exciting time to really bring the outside in, sort of create new partnerships across the Department of Defense with communities particularly. We were closing a lot of military bases in those days. It was the end of the Cold War. There was excess infrastructure. And Congress had managed to pass a very important set of bipartisan legislation called BRAC, Base Realignment and Closure Commission, which mandated, across four different time periods from 1988 through 1995, four different rounds of base closure that would be selected by an independent commission where the President had the choice either to approve or disapprove the entire slate he couldn't cherry pick. The whole purpose of the design of the legislation was to take some of the local politics out because members of Congress and including the administration, would always be reluctant to put any one particular base on a list or to take it off, because nobody wants to lose jobs in their district. So when President Clinton was faced with the 1993 round of base closures early in his administration, with a lot of closures in California, which had been a very important state to his election, this was a very hard decision for him. And I say in my book, we could sort of hear the echoes reverberating from the White House back to the Pentagon, like, why are you making us do this? But we didn't have a choice. This was an independent commission. So I was tasked early on in the administration to develop an affirmative plan that would help the President be able better to communicate and convey to communities affected by closures what the administration was going to do for them. And it was very much associated with jobs, sort of recreating good jobs and also cleaning up at the military bases. And so we created a whole set of programs which in the Base Closure Commission were called sort of fast track base closure language, fast track cleanup. But your listeners and all the lawyers know that usually there's not much about cleaning up that is fast because you need a lot of approvals. And so efficacy always, you know, usually trumps efficiency in these worlds. But we needed to, you know, we needed to meet the needs of local communities. So it was an time to sort of bring all of that together. We work very closely and in partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency and also state and local EPAs to design programs that would work for communities so you could address real needs, you could get communities heard. We even created something we call Restoration Advisory Boards. They were community advisory boards designed to bring communities in and hear their concerns about the cleanup projects at various spaces around the country. And so we, we really kind of put our pedal to the metal to where to cooperate. I even transferred some funding to the EPA so that they would have enough staff to move at the pace that the administration wanted on these cleanup programs. And that enabled us to accelerate the return of property to communities for reuse.
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Tyler McBrien
This is a great opportunity for me to ask a question I wanted to ask later, which is actually about collaboration between the military and civilian, either government agencies or civic organizations. So you mentioned early on in the book, this early collaboration you witnessed between the Air Force and the EPA with regard to the ozone issue as a sort of aha moment. And then even earlier than that, I think in the, you know, you talked about the importance of Senate committees. You know, single decision could then have reverberations across the entire military. You talk about how there's a Wall Street Journal op ed that drove some conversation. So could you just give your view on the importance of not just the military, but these collaborative relationships that you've seen throughout your career?
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Sherry Goodman
Yes, of course. I mean, on the community partnerships. I made a very deliberate attempt when I came into office to bring into our conversation the environmental critics of the Department of Defense and to reach out to them. And I brought in some environmental NGOs, and many of them said, well, we've never been in the Pentagon before, nobody's ever invited us in, you know. And I found that by reaching out to people, creating some trust, creating a relationship, and also explaining what we were doing. Because to many people on the outside, that Department of Defense, the Pentagon seems like a big black box. You know, it's hard to get in, it's hard to figure out how to talk to if you don't know people, how to get on their schedule. And often just by building that trust, you know, that could change what had been become an increasingly adversarial set of relationships around environmental issues. At the time, I mean, there were many environmental organizations just suing the Department of Defense because they felt they had the law on their side and they couldn't get heard. And this was the best way to get in. But often by creating those relationships Both with the NGOs, and particularly with the affected communities. So you had to deal with, you know, you had to sort of reach out to the effect go to, you know, I spent a lot of my time visiting military bases and then listening to communities. What are the needs? And then trying to make sure we had a process within the Department of Defense to be responsive to those needs. Because the normal process in the Department of Defense that builds a budget, develops a program and executes it, develops it based on the requirements as seen through the lens of the people in the Department of Defense. And often that's very good. But for certain programs like environment, you need to also consider the needs of people outside the fence line. Military families today is sort of the same way. They're not necessarily employees of the Department of Defense, but they're very much part of the defense, larger defense community, and their needs need to be considered, so they need to have their voices heard. So today they're like, you know, there's great organizations like Blue Star Families that enable military family voices to be heard and also aligned. So we did some of the same things creating those kind of groups that could be aligned and voices to be heard within the Department of Defense, particularly around closing bases, around natural resources, around cleanup, any of the issues where voices outside the Department of Defense, and then also creating the relationships with Congress. I mean, sometimes, as your listeners know, the relationship between the executive and the legislative branch can be testy, and sometimes it can be smooth. And, you know, I grew up in an era of bipartisanship on the Senate Armed Services Committee. My boss, Senator Sam Nunn, worked very closely with his. His Republican counterpart, who at the time was Senator John Warner and then later John McCain. And they all worked hand in glove on almost all issues. And where they didn't agree, they identified those areas of disagreement. But the staffs worked very closely together, and we tried to bring some of that into the pentagon. In the 1990s, we did a lot of congressional outreach. And because myself and some of the other senior leaders in the department at the time all had had this experience, congressional experience, it was a natural act for us. We would never think not to pre brief, not to give members of Congress an opportunity to weigh in on our issues, because I knew how important even just a small phrase or word in the markup of some defense bill could have on the Pentagon. It was very clear once you got into the Pentagon how much power the armed Services, the authorization and defense appropriations committees wielded. And so you needed to understand how to work with them. They were so important to your Work we used to bring the members in on various issues. The Secretary of Defense would meet regularly with the chairman of the. Of the Big eight. We saw the Defense Authorization Appropriations Committees. And that's a very important part of how work gets done.
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Tyler McBrien
Reading your book, there were so many trends that you traced so well, and one of them that I think trended, unfortunately in the negative direction is partisanship and the hyper politicization of an issue like environmental protection and climate change, which affects everyone. But I want to march through the chronology just a bit to 2006, and if you need to back up to the Kyoto Protocols, we can do that, because in 2006, I see this as sort of an inflection point in the book. It's where the title comes from. But you said that you were realizing, I guess, in the late 90s and the early aughts that you needed to address what was an elephant in the room in Kyoto, which was what are the national security implications of climate change? So walk me through that thinking. And then the planning and execution of the report that gave birth to now the famous phrase in the title of your book, threat multiplier.
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Sherry Goodman
Well, thank you, Tyler. Yes. You know, the through line here is that. And we should really go all the way back to the Montreal Protocol in many ways in 1987, when an international treaty on managing and reducing ozone depleting substances was signed. And that was really, in many ways the early predecessor, kind of an aha moment for the military. And one of my close colleagues and Air Force Officer Tom Morehouse was very central to that story. He was working at an Air Force lab at the time. And an EPA official said, your chemicals are damaging the ozone layer, and these are chemicals used in firefighting. So a very important fundamental mission for the military. And that set in motion a whole way of rethinking about what chemicals you needed to manage firefighting, and could you do it with chemicals less damaging to the ozone layer? And so Tom Morehouse and Steve Anderson of EPA formed a fast partnership and they work very closely together, with Tom Even attending the 1987 Montreal Protocol, some of the negotiating meetings. And that set the groundwork, I think, for. For the military to begin to understand better how its activities might have damaging global environmental impact. Now we're moving away from sort of the local hazardous waste cleanup, but more to things that have a global, you know, atmospheric impact in Kyoto Protocol was in the Kyoto negotiations occurred. That was Cop 3. People are going this year to Cop 29. Okay, so Cop 3. 1997 was the first and I've been in office since 1993, but it was the first time that there was an effort to develop an administration wide approach to greenhouse gas emission reductions. But it was well before we understood what you just said. I can't. The elephant in the room, the national security implications of climate change. We weren't yet thinking about that. It was presented to us more as, okay, what happens if we have to manage emissions for military operations and installations and then how does that affect our energy use? So that's really one side of the equation. We didn't yet understand what the national security implications of climate change would be. So when we focused it on that way, and really before the energy transition, that led to one way of thinking, but it really begged the question, what should our climate change strategy be? So Kyoto Protocol never went into force because the Byrd Hagel resolution, which was focused on not having the US do anything unless China did approximately the same thing. And China was a developing country which wasn't subject to any emissions reductions. And that was passed 95 to 0 in the US Senate, led by Senators then Byrd and Chuck Hagel, who later became Secretary of Defense and then a climate champion when he was Secretary of Defense. So many tables turned over the years on this subject and I'd say, so it left me with the question when I left office after eight years at the Department of Defense and then joined the center for Naval Analysis. Okay, well really, what are the national security implications of climate change? Because all you national security nerds listening to this podcast know that you always want to understand the geostrategic implications of something that's going to have operational impact. Okay, so that's what we set out to do when we convened the first group of generals and admirals to examine the national security implications of climate change. We under want to understand first from scientists, what does it mean that the climate is changing? You know, what is. And we at that time, we called it predicted climate change because we weren't yet experiencing, for example, every summer being hotter than the summer before, and you know, the Greenland ice sheet melting at such a rapid rate. We experience that today every day. But back in 2006, we weren't there yet, but we could see the trend lines. The trend lines were clear. And so after a year of study with national security and intelligence professionals in the UK and the US we wanted to explain the national security implications of climate change in a geostrategic sense, how it would affect us around the world in addition to how we would manage our energy. That's where the phrase threat multiplier came from as a way to convey that a destabilized climate, destabilized earth and natural systems would add instability to other threats we face. And you know, national security is often all about stability. How do we achieve stability in a certain situation? Also of course, without compromising our democratic values. But those, there's that natural tension there. So when you also now have weather and earth systems just destabilize and you can't rely on the past to predict the future, you know, you've entered sort of a whole new world. So that's. We characterize climate change as a threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions of the world. And that would affect even stable regions. And we've seen all of that unfortunately come true today and even more as the risks of climate change have accelerated. The other really important piece of this that is enduring to today is, is characterizing climate change basically as a risk management issue. Okay? It's not, it's not a, it's not a question of belief systems, it's not a question of politics. I mean, you know, military leaders, military warfighters plan against all range of threats and they assess the risk and then they decide what level of risk they're going to assume in any particular operation or even with any budget request. You know, how much risk can I assume by only buying X number of submarines instead of Y? Because you'd always like an infinite amount of everything and you can't have it. So you have to decide what risk you're going to accept. In the Cold War, we talked about the risk of a Soviet nuclear attack as being a low probability but very high consequence eventually for which it was worth investing billions of Americans GDP to defend. And in the climate era we have climate now a very high probability and in many cases high consequence event. So then the question is what investments, you know, what kind of investments do we make to protect ourselves from it? And as General Sullivan, the former Army Chief of Staff who was the first chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board said, you know, we don't wait for 100% certainty because if you wait for 100% certainty, you know something bad is going to happen on the battlefield. You've got to plan against those risks.
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Sherry Goodman
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- [34:18]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the quote by General Sullivan, because it did seem like such an aha moment, where this convergence of military thinking and climate security thinking, where, as you said, when he said that, I think he wrote it almost was like tablets falling from the sky, it was so on the nose because militaries make decisions in the fog of war all the time. They never have certainty. And if they wait, as General Sullivan said, bad things will happen. So, you know, when you heard that and then you saw the ripple effect of the report and you saw the gradual uptake of the term threat multiplier, you know, what was going through your head? Did you feel that there was some sort of sea change happening within the military and its thinking, you know, with regard to climate change? Were you hopeful at that point? Walk us through, you know, the after effects of the report.
- [35:09]
Sherry Goodman
Well, yes, it did get a lot of uptake for report because many reports just become, you know, book stops, or they sit on the shelf, you know, door stops, or they say, or they sit on the shelf. But the timing for the release of this report in April of 2007 was just prior to the first UN Security Council discussion on climate insecurity. And so its framing was even used by the British foreign minister during that. And then it also occurred right before the markup of the Defense authorization bill in the Senate Armed Services Committee that year. And so, in a bipartisan amendment led by John Warner and Hillary Clinton at the time, they put the first recommendation of our report, which was to require the President's national security strategy and DoD's national defense strategy, and then what we call the Quadrennial Defense Review, all to assess the national security implications of climate change in those annual documents. That's how you begin to mainstream something, a new concept in the Department of Defense and in the Intelligence. We also called for an intelligence assessment to be conducted, and that occurred. That's how you begin to mainstream something in the national security community. You have to get it sort of embedded in the doctrine and the docum that are prepared annually. It's not enough to just be carping on the outside. You know, you have to get the institution to begin to embrace it in its own terms. And so that's what happened. The institutions of the Department of Defense then began to examine it on their own, produce their own studies and analysis their own reports. And you can, you know, you can trace over the years how climate change as a national security threat and threat multiplier have been included and expanded from climate to include water, then energy, now food and health security. So you can see the growing assessments that have been done across these documents and others, and then from the strategic then down to the operational, ultimately tactical level.
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Tyler McBrien
Before we move on, I have to ask whether you were surprised with how well the phrase threat multiplier caught on. I mean, I just did a quick. I'm very familiar with the term, and I just quickly Googled it before we sat down. And it's used commonly by the UN it's used all over the place. So I don't know. Were you surprised at this uptake and just how broadly it's used today?
- [37:58]
Sherry Goodman
Yes, frankly, I was. I was surprised. And I used to joke like, I should have trade more, marked it so I could get like a quarter for every use. But, you know, it's a privilege and an honor. But also it's. I'm glad that it's helped convey a concept and help move people because, you know, communications is so important and people have to be able to understand how to think about, you know, think about something. You know, I think there was some hope at the time that it could end the politicization of the subject of climate change. And unfortunately, that part did not happen. But maybe that was too much of an ambition for this. But it really has helped, I think, not only the national security community, but many others, both in foreign policy and elsewhere, really rethink this. And in a way that also creates community and partnership even now around the world, where we think about the need to address so many important things with our allies and partners globally. This is a piece of it.
- [39:09]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk about one of the, I think, main arguments in the book which you make, I think quite convincingly, that the US Military made this transition, I think, in no small part thanks to a lot of work that you did from environmental laggard to sort of climate leader. But it's a complicated history. The military is at once one of the first government agencies to actually recognize the threat of climate change, and yet it's still the largest institutional emitter of carbon gas. How do you think about this apparent contradiction? Maybe what is the case for the military as a climate leader today?
- [39:50]
Sherry Goodman
Right. Well, good framing, Tyler. So, you know, there's. First of all, there have been many people who have been involved in this, and the leadership, you know, of people like General Gordon Sullivan and General Anthony Zinney and Admiral Preyer when he was commander of pacom, and then later Admiral Locklear as commander of PACOM and many others, has been so central to this because that's how you move institutions. But there are many unheralded leaders at all levels of command and office, and often many local, many even enlisted officials who really shine in undertaking what goes beyond maybe their assigned duty because they want to protect the environment, because they see the military as being able to lead by example in a larger sense, and they want to be stewards of the natural resources that we've inherited and be able to pass that along to their children. So our military is all about protecting Americans. And if we're going to protect America and our heritage, we want to protect all facets of our heritage, including our natural heritage. If you think back to even of our famous songs from sea to shining sea, we care about our natural resources and we want them to be preserved. Now, the military also has had the opportunity to operate in the US in many places that because they're not subject to development, many of our military bases have become islands of nature. So when you have many endangered species, from bald eagles to endangered desert tortoise, to, you know, red cockaded woodpecker that are protected on bases across the US and those are areas of that are important to the military and the families who live around there. So stewardship has been a natural part of that heritage. Often these protections, sometimes there's two steps forward, one step back. And so it's not a linear role of progress. But if you look at transitions and you look at kind of social transitions across American history, there's sort of two important trend lines here. One, I would speak to the transition of racial integration in the military, which when it happened then really marked a substantial turn. You know, after the end of the Cold War under Truman, again, integrating gender integration also came, you know, women in combat didn't come so quickly. Gays in the military often, you know, a step forward, maybe two and a half steps Back and then forward again. Okay. But also. So you've had that reflection of progress in the US Trace throughout progress. It can be seen in military progress. And at the same time, if you look at energy use, what's really interesting is energy use in the military, from coal to steam to oil to nuclear and now beyond. So, you know, that also reflects the transition in energy use in the US and at many points in the, you know, in that journey, people said, oh no, you can't do it, you know, but where would we, you know, no one thinks we would have, you know, the most powerful military in the world today if we didn't have nuclear powered, you know, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. And so of course, the energy, we have to always be at the forefront of technology and technological design and uptake of technology. The interesting thing that has occurred in my lifetime on technology, which is an important very piece of this story, technology innovation, is that after the Cold War, we really thought about defense research and development spending, defense R and D spending, as being beneficial not only to our military, but also spinning out. Think of GPS and the Internet, you know, and the technologies that were invented in defense and then became, you know, widely adopted in commercial society. But now that's flipped and now often technology is invented in the commercial sector and spins in to defense because the share of defense R and D in comparison to commercial R and D, like think of the big tech companies today, you know, has really, that balance has shifted. And so when we think about that as applied to the energy transition, what's really important is to be working in lockstep with the advances occurring in commercial, you know, in the private sector in energy technology, so that those can be also taken advantage of as we look to make our forces lighter and more agile and unleashed from the tether of fuel that we experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- [45:09]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, and you're already getting at where I wanted to sort of end up, which is these four pillars of climate action and reform that you lay out. But before we go there, I just wanted to address a few skeptics, you could say. So the first skeptic I would put on the table here is one who you are well familiar with throughout Europe, your career, this argument that great, we should care about environmental protection, but it should be subservient to hard national security concerns. In other words, in pursuit of climate change action, are we sacrificing military readiness? I think you mentioned that this is a needle that you had to thread throughout your time at the Pentagon, even back from starting in the 90s. So what do you say to a skeptic like that, either who's in the military or in civilian life?
- [45:57]
Sherry Goodman
Well, I say you have to be able to walk and chew gum. You know, in the military, you can't just choose one or the other. You know, you always have to manage against the set of constraints. You know, whether the constraint is what weather you're going to have the next day when you're planning your D Day operation and you got to have optimal weather, or, you know, it's whether you're going to be able to conduct your training operations and not kill off, you know, the endangered red cockaded woodpecker because you cut down the trees on the range and that was where they made their nest. Now, the military learned after, you know, getting an adverse biological opinion at Fort Bragg early in the 1990s that, oh, well, we don't actually have to cut down those trees. We can make them realistic training obstacles. And then the Marine Corps and the army said, oh, we're saving a few good species. That became a Marine Corps environmental campaign playing off their traditional motto. So, you know, we really rethought about what the operational requirement was and what the needs were and then how to do both. So, you know, what's often seen of as an either or can sometimes be a both. And, and that's, that's the important piece of this. To understand that it's not, yes, you have to have military readiness, absolutely, is fundamental. But how you achieve that readiness, you have to think about what are all the components that go into it. And it's often the case that environmental stewardship and climate security can be a piece of enabling that readiness. In fact, today we often say climate readiness. You know, mission readiness is climate readiness because you have to be able to operate in the changing climate. You can't just say, well, it doesn't exist, but it does exist because the ocean, the temperatures are hotter everywhere and the Arctic is melting. You know, we have to be able to operate up there. So you can't, you can't ignore it. You have to do. You have to do both.
- [48:01]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, There was another line I really liked in the book. I can't remember who said it, but they said it's about missions, not emissions. That is to say, these things are, you know, inextricably linked. So the other counterargument I wanted to just address as well is maybe on the sort of climate activist side of the spectrum that maybe we shouldn't be securitizing climate issues, or maybe the military is not the right institution to address these problems. So I want to just give you the chance to address that. And I also wonder if you could bring in your sort of a theory of change that comes out in the book, which is the ability to create change through well informed critiques from within the establishment, sort of institutional reform, rather than from outside of it. So I know I put a lot out there, but I'm curious your thoughts on that.
- [48:54]
Sherry Goodman
Yes, thank you very much. There is this whole sort of academic school of thought on securitization and that when applied to climate, says essentially, you know, that we're turning this into a sort of overly militarized approach to climate by focusing on its security implications and that the military, you know, isn't the solution. Well, I agree with that latter point. The military is not the solution to global climate emissions reductions. It's not, it's very small amount of global climate emissions reductions. But I reframe that consideration. First of all, I often talk about climatizing security instead of securitizing climate. And when you think about what you need to have an effective foreign policy, you know, today you need, you need diplomacy, development and defense. You need all three of those. Okay, that's long been widely recognized, the 3Ds. Sometimes today people even add a fourth D. You need disaster risk management. But even if we just focus on those 3Ds in climate, the climate challenge affects everybody. But the solution set should be led by diplomacy and development around the world. The military has to lead by example in getting its own house in order to, to the extent that it is a substantial energy user, it's not a substantial part of global emissions. But what it does can lead by example in certain segments. So I talk about climatizing security because there are many ways that the military can lead by example, both in the way it uses energy and transitions in energy, and second in working with allies and partners around the world. That's incredibly important. And that sort of sets, you know, that's a core component of our foreign policy. And we've seen this sort of in the, in the war in Ukraine. The fact that we've had unity within NATO is a core component of that strategy. And also in the Indo Pacific, you know, in the contest with China, the fact that we have developed a very strong unified alliance of approach with Aukus and with a broad base of Asia Pacific, Indo Pacific cooperation across many domains, from trade to health to foreign policy and to climate and security, particularly for small island Pacific nations that are existential risk and where Chinese influence could be very attractive. So I think it's sort of all has to come together there. And that's all part of, in my view, leading by example and sort of climatizing security in a positive way. And to your point about how to make change from within. Yes, you know, in a broad sort of historic sense. You know, I came of age, you know, in the 70s, so just after, you know, the 60s, an era which was characterized by people marching and protesting to get make change from the outside. But I have always tried to be a change maker, more often from inside, because I think you can make a difference. And I've seen that. I mean, I feel like that's my life story. Threat Multiplier has been about sort of institutionalizing environment and climate awareness and action within our national security institutions in a way that's enduring. But I'm not alone. There are many people like me who have been doing that and will continue to do it because that is how you. And that's meant, that's part of public service. And also. So I want to lift up and express the importance of those who continue to serve in public office because it's a hard thing to do, it's not always the easiest thing and you can get criticized for no reason and you know, it's not the most highly compensated career, but it really can make a difference in so many people's lives. And so there's many great public servants, from those in uniform to civilians throughout the national security community and beyond who've dedicated their lives to, you know, making, making the world, making our nation better. And I think to me, you know, as someone, my parents are Holocaust refugees and came from Germany early in their lives. And in the late 1930s, they were among the fortunate few to escape Hitler and Nazism. And I grew up believing that we always had to give back and make the world better. And so this has been my way of trying to do that.
- [53:49]
Tyler McBrien
Yeah, that really comes through in the book. I think if someone just glances at the COVID they may think it's an institutional story or it's a personal history history, and that's it. But you really highlight so many people along the way. These public servants in and out of the military. And I was really struck by how many just individuals you profile in the book. This is sort of an unexpected joy of the book. But I want to end sort of where you end. You were beginning to talk a bit about climatizing security or climate proofing security, and you lay out four pillars at the end there. So I just wanted to give you the opportunity to see your vision for the future of the military's efforts to combat or curb climate change. What do you see as these important aspects of that strategy?
- [54:37]
Sherry Goodman
Well, thank you. Thank you, Tara. And let me note, among those unharold who have made such a difference in this field is the center for Climate Insecurity, which I'm privileged to be a part of and from its early leadership with Frank Femi and Kate Wuerl and now with Eric Sikorsky as a director. Previously John Conger, who also served in the Department of Defense in a position similar to the one I held and there have been many others and they've really this is important work that they continue and do every day. So I'd say the four pillars for climate action in national security are first, what I call sort of improving our predictive capability and getting precision climate prediction so that we can close the gap between short term weather and what we have sort of near to medium term climate right now. And so that is going to be so fundamental. It's fundamental across every sector of the economy, you know, from health to agriculture and from transportation to infrastructure. But it's particularly important for all sorts of defense applications. And that is coming rapidly with advanced technologies from AI to quantum computing. But sort of advanced climate prediction services are going to be so important. Second, we have to be resilient as a society because so much of climate change changes already baked in the higher temperatures, the retreating sea ice, the perennial, almost perennial wildfires we face now and the flooding and the extreme weather events. And so we have to become resilient as a society. We have to become resilient, particularly at our military infrastructure. And that's an important way that the Department of Defense leads by example because many bases are becoming those resilient bases of the future. Today, when Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida was hard hit by Hurricane Michael about five years ago now, it and had the hangars torn off for the F35 ripped off in that very powerful hurricane. It's now rebuilding as a climate resilient base of the future. So those are examples that then can serve as models both across the military and parts of it. Also other parts of how they develop with natural infrastructure using digital twins. All these advances can also be used in the civilian sector. And then third, when we think about sort of mitigation, sort of how do you reduce your emissions, that's really all about the energy transition. And again, you know, the military learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan that long fuel supply lines put soldiers at risk when they were trucking fuel to the front, that they could be hit and were hit by improvised explosive devices. So we need to protect our force first and foremost. And we have to operate today in what the Department of Defense calls contested logistics environment. Particularly we think about planning for aggression, you know, potential aggression with China in the Pacific. We want to reduce the vulnerability those supply lines. And so there are many alternatives being developed now that make the forest lighter and more agile, require less refueling, more efficiency, new fuel types. So all of that advanced energy from renewables to advanced nuclear to hydrogen to just more efficiency in weapon systems design like the blended body wing aircraft design that could potentially save up to 30% fuel just on existing fuel use. And then of course there's efficiency in how you use today's fuel. So all of that has to come together to reduce emissions and then better and then track and report and be rigorous about it. Something that military is quite good at doing. And then lastly, I would say reimagining global cooperation, sort of working with our allies, allies and partners to ensure that on the one side you have the call for doing climate sensitive development strategies now, but we also are doing climate aware cooperation with our allies and partners. We're using, let's say war games around all our combatant commands to understand how a changing climate could affect any particular scenario, conflict or contest in a region. You know, from the growing competition as the Arctic changes, you know, the great greater use of that region to changes in the Indo Pacific, Latin America, even across Africa. But also use it as in a positive way to develop those improved both technologies and practices to share with our allies and partners and learn from them so that we are all stronger together.
- [59:53]
Tyler McBrien
I think that framework or plan sounds like a perfect place to end this conversation. It's an excellent book. It's called Threat Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security. Sherry, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
- [60:08]
Sherry Goodman
Thank you, Tyler. It's been a pleasure.
- [60:13]
Tyler McBrien
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- [60:56]
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