Against a Military Transition

The world’s most powerful states are arming themselves to the teeth. Amid escalating geopolitical conflict and competition, global military spending has hit record levels. At the same time, the climate crisis is nearing points of no return: the world is on track for 1.5 degrees of warming within the next five years; loss and damage funds are totally inadequate; and the US, UK and EU’s green programmes lack coordination or the requisite ambition.^[1] At this juncture — with global temperatures and military spending reaching simultaneous all-time highs — what are the implications of rising militarism for a world that needs coordinated mitigation and adaptation to the climate crisis? 

Military establishments have developed one answer to this question: from Brussels to Washington, Western militaries are positioning themselves as solutions to the climate crisis. This project of military adaptation is founded on two strategic fictions — first, that Western military power must be expanded and repurposed to govern climate chaos and second, that materiel and operations can be made “green” to maintain military superiority in a net zero world. As we explore below, these fictions conceal the reality of the West’s military power, disguising it as a route to peacekeeping in a dystopian future, rather than a primary source of ecological damage. Even in simplistic terms, plans for expanded militarisation are not compatible with decarbonisation: projections suggest that if all member states met their annual military spending target of two per cent of GDP, NATO’s military spending between 2021 and 2028 would produce two billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. This equates to approximately five times the annual emissions of the entire UK economy. 

Attempts to maintain Western military superiority are also an unstable basis to coordinate a global transition to new modes of organising production and consumption. Decades of overseas interventions and a US-sanctioned genocide in Gaza exemplify the global instability produced by US empire, while Cold War-style tension between US and China promotes ruthless competition over perceived economic interests, tying US climate investment to geopolitical competition rather than cooperation towards decarbonisation. A serious project to address climate breakdown instead requires understanding the position of Western militaries at the root of an unequal global order, along with their role as historic defenders of fossil fuel interests. A just transition demands a drawdown, not the expansion, of military power.

Climate planning in the Pentagon‍

Though one might not expect defence ministries to be particularly climate-conscious, Western military institutions are well aware of the effects of climate change. For more than three decades, military planners have warned of climate change as one of the world’s defining security threats. Over the past four years, these warnings have reached a crescendo. Military establishments largely present a two-part answer to the question of how they can exist in a world redefined by the climate crisis: first, they argue that Western military power is essential to maintaining security in a world of climate chaos; and second, they call for climate-proofing military practice to ensure the continuation of Western warfighting superiority in a net zero world.

From 2020 onwards, a frenzied release of policy papers has defined the “threats and opportunities” that climate change presents to NATO and EU militaries, staking out paths toward “greening” military practice while boosting operational superiority. An alliance of military “greeners” is emerging across the European and North American military sectors, spearheaded by the US and the UK. “The time to address climate change is now” and “the Army will lead by example” professes the US Army Climate Strategy. During a high-level event at COP26 in Glasgow, then UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, declared: 

We have a strong obligation to make sure that our forces deliver a sustainable deployment … but we will [also] have to deal with the consequences of a failed climate change policy … of migrant flows, of breaking down of communities, of fights over rare resources, of border frictions which will no doubt grow as climate change increases.

We like to think of the two central ambitions that Wallace put forward — the need to expand and repurpose military force to secure Western nations and their allies against a litany of climate threats and to make warfighting environmentally “sustainable” — as strategic fictions. These fictions are foundational to proposals for a military green transition: at the heart of the story is a narrative about climate change, its causes, impacts and implications, that is used to justify the expansion of Western militaries as a form of climate adaptation.

The first fiction derives from the popular idea of “climate security”.^[2] Since the late 1980s, US military planners have published threat assessments and future scenario reports fixing climate change as a national security issue and “threat multiplier”, generating “cascade risks” and exacerbating geopolitical tensions.^[3] Though hotly contested and badly evidenced, these reports have reshaped public and policy discourse on the relationship between climate change and security.^[4] In this literature, the Pentagon presents a future of imminent climate chaos, a world ravaged by mass climate migration, surges in climate conflict and all out climate wars fought over access to ever-scarcer resources.^[5] The normalisation of these scenarios serve a particular political purpose, and very effectively: to centre the role of Western militaries in “fighting” climate change.

By predicting an inevitable descent into climate chaos, Western militaries position themselves as indispensable actors in the green transition. Military power is deemed central: first, to maintain national security amid global upheaval, and second, to secure the conditions for Western states to transition from fossil to green energy economies.^[6] The types of climate action offered by the military green transition thus promote increased reliance of Western states on military organisations for border security, counterterrorism, militarised conservation or military interventions overseas, to cope with “climate-induced” migration, terrorism and resource conflicts. 

While we agree with the need to take seriously how the impacts of climate change — droughts, wildfires, extreme rains, ocean acidification and groundwater depletion to name a few — worsen already fragile social and economic systems, we draw a different conclusion as to why this is happening, and how to respond. Lost in the narrative of climate chaos are the social, political and economic conditions that produce migration, conflict and resource competition to begin with. The climate itself is not to blame for “scarcity” — rather so is our inequitable distribution of the means of life: the resources that people depend on to live with dignity. Nor is it inevitable that communities take to violence to secure access to diminishing resources. As Jan Selby, Gabrielle Daoust and Clemens Hoffman outline in Divided Environments, a critique of deterministic climate security discourses, while climate change can exacerbate resource depletion, there is no evidence base that unequivocally demonstrates a direct, causal link between climate change, associated resource depletion and social conflict.^[7]  Blaming environmental conditions like drought for conflict erases the social and political context in which conflict occurs. More to the point, this tactic “is often an exercise in deflecting state responsibility and obscuring political agency”. Instead of mirroring reality, the discursive strategies of “scarcity-conflict” and “climate chaos” are proving to be compelling political tools. Indeed, as we show later in this essay, those demonstrating the greatest tendency to deploy force to secure resources — whether driven by presumptions of “scarcity” or not — are Western states.

The second fiction defining military green transition proposals is that armed forces will deliver  “sustainable deployment” or the “greening” of military force. Greening “solutions” include everything from weapon systems hybridisation (think solar-powered drones and algae-powered warships), bee-keeping and soil carbon sequestration on military bases, to infrastructural adaptation to extreme weather and improving climate literacy among troops.^[8] By ramping up decarbonisation efforts such as digitalisation and electrification — especially the increased use in autonomous weapons systems — military sectors are, so they say, stepping up to “play a pivotal role” in realising the West’s net zero visions. Whether this technological revolution will ever happen at a scale and pace sufficient to actually “decarbonise” warfighting is highly improbable if not impossible.^[9] More importantly, it misses the point.

The intention of a military green transition might appear welcome — bloated global militaries are responsible for 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a much greater share than civilian aviation — but the transition is in fact an attempt to repurpose and expand Western military power in a new energetic context. Behind the green military hype lies a barely concealed rationale: cutting Western militaries’ fossil fuel dependencies not to reduce emissions but to meet the battlefield demands of operating in a world powered by a greater mix of energy sources. The ambition of military adaptation is thus to ensure that militaries have a role to play in governing the transition. As explored below, however, this would likely mean emulating the role they presently play in the fossil fuel economy: using military power to control access to a diversified set of resources and their economic benefits.

The strategic fictions behind the militarisation of climate change and climate action normalise the idea that war and weapons can be made environmentally friendly, and that the expansion of military capabilities is necessary to ensure both the security and the climate commitments of Western nations. These fictions make military responses to climate and ecological crises appear rational, even essential. As such, they help justify and expand the role of Western militaries in a climate changing world. Yet the fictions hold only as long as the true extent of militaries’ social and ecological costs are hidden from view. Attention to these costs, along with Western militaries’ central role in facilitating and maintaining the social and economic systems causing climate breakdown, quickly explode their claims of being “unexpected drivers of climate action”.‍

Dead end solutions

Left out from Western military establishments’ response to the climate crisis is the extent of military power’s role in climate disaster. This is a convenient omission: the development, maintenance and use of military force all produce vast ecological damage. The US military — the heart of the NATO coalition — is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels.^[10] And contrary to the utopian visions of those plotting a future of “net zero” military operations, technological options to decarbonise equipment are a dead end: carbon emissions from military activity are concentrated in the use of fighter jets and warships, which have no current “net zero” alternatives.

Carbon emissions from the war machine are one part of a broad spectrum of ecological damages from the production and use of military force. War not only generates vast quantities of greenhouse gases, but destroys ecosystems across its lifecycle, from the mining of raw materials to the production, testing and use of weapons.^[11] This ecological destruction is inherent to the everyday maintenance of Western states’ global military capacity. Between them, the US and UK militaries operate a network of nearly 1000 overseas bases that contaminate water, soils and air with toxic pollution from weapons tests and training exercises.

Beyond the development and maintenance of military power in the everyday, war itself accelerates ecological devastation. Ecocide has long been used as a weapon, taken to its extreme in the incineration of forests, fields and villages by the US army in Vietnam. In its most severe form, ecocide features as a strategy of genocide; most recently, the Israeli military has bulldozed agricultural lands, filled water springs with concrete and damaged sewage and waste infrastructure as part of its bid to make Gaza unlivable for Palestinians.^[12]

The strategic fictions behind the military adaptation agenda thus abound with paradox. Omitted from the claims to “greener” war — including through digitalisation, electrification and autonomous systems — are references to the huge ecological burdens required to deliver such endeavours; for instance the ecological costs of maintaining the data centres essential for artificial intelligence. Betting the earth on military-industrial tech-fixes such as hydrogen-powered unmanned weapons systems, the military “green transition” would continue producing massive ecological impacts in service of Western military dominance.

And yet, despite their scale and importance, these ecological costs are not the centre of what makes Western militarism a climate problem. What most distinguishes the US and leading European militaries in their contribution to the climate crisis is their historic and ongoing role in the development of the global fossil fuel economy, a world order which geographer Andreas Malm calls the empire of fossil capitalism.^[13] While other military powers are also responsible for ecological damage, Western militaries and their allies have played a specific role in producing and defending the dominant global infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction.^[14] As Malm explains in Fossil Capital, fossil fuel-powered militaries were essential to the expansion of European and North American imperial power from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a process which made military force dependent on fossil fuels and embedded the security of first coal and later oil supplies in military strategy.^[15] 

The protection of energy supplies extends far beyond military purposes, however. One of the primary motivations behind US and UK imperial strategy in the Middle East since the turn of the twentieth century has been to maintain an empire of economic interests that depend on the extraction, production and consumption of fossil fuels.^[16] Perhaps at its defining point in the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 following the nationalisation of Iranian oil, US and UK strategy in the Middle East has continuously relied on military violence to defend the interests of fossil fuel companies and the wider economic empire. Indeed, while they are now the junior partner to the US, the British armed forces still operate on a clear mandate: to protect and promote the economic interests of Britain and its allies. Through “persistent engagement overseas”, the British armed forces “are on duty 24/7 around the globe projecting the UK’s influence” and promoting “the National prosperity agenda.” Military power is not just a source of emissions, but an essential condition for the development of fossil fuel interests and the empire driving today’s climate emergency. 

The constant maintenance of the ability to project power overseas has a further set of climate implications. While public resources are not zero sum, maintaining the capacity to “strike anywhere, anytime” is extraordinarily expensive and soaks up public investment that could be directed towards existential priorities like the climate crisis. In the US, the military-industrial base is afforded a level of public investment rarely seen in other areas of the economy. Notably, this spending eclipses the money devoted to climate programmes several times over: even using the most optimistic estimates of its uncapped tax breaks, a decade of green investment through the Inflation Reduction Act is equivalent to just one year of the US Department of Defense budget. The fiscal devotion to war across the West is a historic missed opportunity: while the decarbonisation of the economy is starved of public investment, there is a carefully-tended money tree that funds the projection of military power.

It is in this context — of military emissions and ecological damage, overseas military power that governs a fossil empire and public resources devoted to the war machine instead of climate investments — that military establishments present themselves as climate solutions. The acceleration of a military green transition serves a single purpose: to maintain, expand or adapt Western military power in an era of climate crisis. Even with the most basic understanding of military ecological damage, it is clear that military adaptation is not an agenda for decarbonisation. Most critically, the structural role played by Western militaries in the governance of global resources indicates that they would govern an uneven and traumatic transition, a chaotic dead end marked by violence and competition. Rather than the evolution of military power in a world of climate crisis, the opposite is necessary: an end to the global projection of Western military power and the “strike anywhere anytime” philosophy to facilitate deep decarbonisation and build a more equitable global order. ‍

Towards reparation: building from the Lucas Plan 

What, then, is the route out of this dead end? If Western militaries are not climate solutions but essential components of fossil empire, posing barriers to both effective mitigation and adaptation, a drawdown of their global projection of force is necessary. This must be a reparative process that uses and redirects the resources concentrated within the military-industrial-complex to provide public capacity and financing to global south countries in support of an international project of decarbonisation. Within this transformation, the repurposing of military-industrial production in Western countries is one essential element that can mitigate military emissions, scale green industries and support the withdrawal of overseas military force. Here, industrial policy tools that seek to develop green manufacturing sectors can draw on decades of labour movement organising that has advocated for the repurposing of military-industrial sites towards “socially useful” production.

In 1976, trade union shop stewards across different branches of Lucas Aerospace (then a leading British manufacturing company) published an alternative plan to convert production from parts for military aircraft towards a range of “socially useful” goods, including heat pumps. The Lucas stewards led a movement of trade union representatives and workers in the military industry who produced and campaigned for alternative plans at other leading firms until the early 1980s.^[17] Although these trade union proposals were ultimately rejected in negotiations with company management, they indicate the potential of repurposing military industrial capacity towards civilian uses. Industrial conversion like this is not a fringe idea, but has clear technological potential: during the Covid-19 pandemic, several military firms in the UK converted production lines towards ventilators under a government mandate; BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin have pioneered the production of hybrid buses at a facility in Endicott, New York and at least four of the UK’s naval shipyards have produced components for wind turbines.^[18] The constraints to industrial conversion are thus far less technological than they are political and economic.

Although it is outside the military industry, the best example of how conversion might unfold in the present setting — of manufacturing sectors in which trade union power is weak and investment firms are strong — is that of GKN Automotive in Florence. Facing the closure of their plant and mass redundancies, workers at GKN have occupied their factory for the past three years and designed a pathway to convert production from luxury automotive parts towards products they consider socially useful, such as cargo bikes and solar panels. Their conversion project has been hindered by the prohibitive cost of buying out the private equity ownership of the site without further support. As with the Lucas Aerospace plan, a successful attempt to repurpose either military industrial sites or automotive plants like GKN would require the mobilisation of state resources currently directed towards an inflated military budget to support worker-led proposals for conversion.

Alongside a broader project of reparative financing for international decarbonisation, an industrial transition like this offers a path out of the dead end of militarised adaptation for three reasons. First, it is a direct route towards the mitigation of military-industrial emissions and, later, military emissions overall, as carbon intensive goods such as fighter jets and warships would be produced and used at a much lower volume. Second, resources, industrial capacity and public investments that are concentrated within the military sector offer the means to develop essential industries for a decarbonised economy, especially in countries like the UK and US where military suppliers are far better resourced than the green industrial base. Third, and perhaps most important, the model proposed by the Lucas shop stewards represents a fundamental break from the economic order that has produced the climate crisis, of never-ending exploration, extraction and combustion of fossil fuels to meet the profit imperative. Worker governance, supported by public resources, reflects one means through which democratic concerns can shape the flow of new investment while ensuring a path away from the militarised economies that have helped produce the climate crisis so far. 

‍Averting the dead end‍

The transition plans proposed by Western military establishments only serve as solutions to social and ecological crises when the causes of climate breakdown are ignored. As military considerations gain influence over climate governance, the conceptual understanding of and practical possibilities for climate action are shifting accordingly, yielding a climate policy approach tethered to Western strategic interests, rather than genuine decarbonisation and ecological stability. The current global trajectory of rearmament and militarised adaptation reveals how ruthlessly imperial states like the US and UK will pursue their perceived interests. 

All of this raises the question of exactly what kind of “green” transition imperial militaries are willing to promote. A world order predicated upon capital and military might will look similar whether propelled by oil or increasingly complemented with lithium, nickel and copper. The project of US and allied military dominance has repeatedly failed to produce either global security or stability: brutal interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and a genocidal war against Palestinians are recent embodiments of the willingness to use immense violence to demonstrate power in an imperial system in which security is meant only for some. The possibilities for just forms of climate action and international coordination to decarbonise the world economy within this unstable order are bare. 

By contrast, an industrial transition from the production of military equipment to social and ecological goods is an example of a solution that addresses the economic order and its militaristic foundations at once. Rather than accept Western militaries as capable of “climate action”, real solutions to social and ecological crises reckon with their role in engineering and maintaining fossil empire. Redirecting state support from military industries to international climate finance and a just transition for arms workers — giving workers greater power over the direction of new investment and production — are essential steps in the right direction.