surveillance market has not eluded Lockheed Martin either; in 2013 it was recognized as one of the top 15 companies to profit from “border security” based on multimillion-dollar contracts for aircraft and data processing products.
Nobody noticed when the coffee spilled, except for a server dressed in a white shirt and black pants who beelined to the table to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, Brigadier General Cheney was speaking at the podium about how an unprecedented drought from 2006 to 2010 had helped fuel the current conflict in Syria. He talked about Nigeria, Lake Chad, migration caused by water scarcity, and the Boko Haram terrorist group that formed in the region. And right when the coffee hit the white tablecloth, Cheney was talking about what he called the “poster child” of climate and conflict—Bangladesh. He talked about the 2,000-mile iron wall along the Indo-Bangladeshi divide, and said that Indian border guards have “shoot to kill” orders. Indeed, from 2001 to 2011 the Indian border forces killed 1,000 people, turning these borderlands into, according to Brad Adams in The Guardian, “South Asian killing fields.”6
Cheney said that current studies project that 5 million Bangladeshis will be displaced due to sea-level rise, but according to generals he has talked to, it may be more like 20 or 30 million people. When the young man from Lockheed Martin bolted for the bathroom, I couldn’t help but notice the stark and racialized divide between the servers and the conference participants. Although I couldn’t say for sure, it occurred to me that many of the servers at the conference, like the man who was scrubbing away the coffee, might have been from Bangladesh, Nigeria, Turkey, Tunisia, or from any one of the very climate-stressed places that Cheney was talking about right before my eyes. It was entirely possible, if not probable, that climate refugees, the very people that countries were building walls to stop, that Donald Trump travel policies were designed to ban, places where Lockheed Martin was unleashing its “cataclysmic fury,” were also at the conference serving coffee to the mostly white, middle-to upper-class conference participants.
“There is no doubt,” Cheney said as the young Lockheed Martin employee returned to his seat, “that climate change is going to increase the demands on military personnel. You’re going to see more humanitarian interventions, more peacekeeping, and certainly more conflicts.”
“Our military is preparing for climate change,” Cheney said; it is a “stressor,” a “threat multiplier,” an “accelerant of instability.” At first the words themselves were difficult to understand. Yet they were part of the growing vocabulary of military generals and Washington officials that named emerging aspects of the current ecological crisis. And there were other surprising twists to older concepts. For example, I had never heard the expression “military environmental industrial complex.” This came not from an activist, but from the executive director of the energy company Constellation, John Dukes, during a session called “Defense and Energy.”
When U.S. Navy Captain Jim Goudreau first used the term “sustainable national security,” my immediate assumption was that he was referring to the U.S. military and Homeland Security’s goal to reduce their massive level of greenhouse gas pollution, including the U.S. Army’s goal to get to net zero emissions (quite a spectacular one given that the Department of Defense was the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the United States, by far) and Custom and Border Protection’s goal to reduce emissions by 28 percent.
But there were much deeper implications, I soon saw, to Goudreau’s use of the term.
“When people typically hear the word sustainable, they automatically jump to an assumption that it’s hugging a tree, it’s saving the world, [but] it’s more than the environmental piece. It’s an absolutely legitimate and important piece from the environmental perspective, but there’s an economic perspective to sustainability, there’s a political perspective to sustainability, there’s a cultural aspect to sustainability—we have to approach all of those.”
And sustainability’s most important piece, Goudreau explained, is military-tactical. As he said it, I couldn’t help but think of the countless surveillance towers dotting the Sonoran desert in the U.S. borderlands, powered by solar panels. Sustainable, renewable energy resources would not only cut down on emissions, Goudreau said, it would make the military “more lethal.”
“We’ve always designed our systems to achieve victory. Not by small margins. But to crush the enemy . . . I never want to be in a close fight. I don’t want it to be an even fight. I want to be,” Goudreau stressed, “the overwhelming winner.” Sustainable national security no longer seemed so pretty.
It was the same point that U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis famously made when he was commanding troops in Iraq during the Bush era: “Unleash us from the tether of fossil fuel.”7 Mattis’s wish has been coming true: Between 2011 and 2015 military renewable-energy projects tripled to 1,390, producing an amount of power that could supply electricity to 286,000 average U.S. homes. This has continued: on February 3, 2017 SunPower landed a $96 million contract with the Trump administration to power the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California until 2043. Indeed, the Department of Defense will “forge ahead under the new administration with a decade-long effort to convert its fuel-hungry operations to renewable power,”8 senior military officials told Reuters in March 2017.
“We know for a fact,” Cheney continued with momentum back at the podium in Washington, “that [climate change] is already driving internal and cross-border migration. We know that it is opening new missions and responsibilities for the military. Just look at the Arctic and the potential up there. We know that it is going to destabilize unstable states and societies.”
If there are problems anywhere, Cheney said, environmental crisis is going to exacerbate them.
“There will be more demand for already existing missions such as peacekeeping, conflict prevention, war fighting. . . . It will heighten tension between states. And it is going to draw us into wars that we don’t want to be in.
“Fortunately, if there is any good news to this story it’s that the military is really good at risk management and preparing. . . . So the U.S. military plans for the worst, plans for the most likely, and then hopes it is over-prepared.” Thus, in an age to be defined by decreasing amounts of clean water, breathable air, and food-producing land, the United States, with the help of companies like Lockheed Martin, aims to be the well-armed, well-fortified, “overwhelming winner.”
“IT WILL AFFECT EVERYTHING YOU DO IN YOUR CAREERS”
On a beautiful, breezy day in May 2015, President Barack Obama stepped up to the podium to give a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. It was the first time a U.S. president emphasized climate change in a keynote speech. Before Obama got to the crux of his message, in which he would stress that “climate change refugees”9 would become a significant part of the Coast Guard’s future, he spoke to the cadets of the importance of guarding U.S. territorial borders and interests—underscoring an important yet often overlooked point about his presidency: the continued expansion in policies and practices of an already historic U.S. border enforcement and deportation regime. Obama stated that the Coast Guard will start patrolling in faraway places such as the Caribbean and Central America, in the Middle East alongside the U.S. Navy, and in the Asian Pacific. Obama said that the new patrol missions were meant “to help partners train their own coast guards,” and “to uphold maritime security and freedom of navigation in waters vital to our global economy.”10
Obama spoke about upgrades to Coast Guard fleets such as Fast Response and National Security cutters, “the most advanced in history.” These cutters were a part of a $25 billion program to replace much of the Coast Guard’s equipment, known ominously as the Integrated Deep Water System Program.
“And
