The_Pentagon_January_2008With dollar signs in their eyes, Pentagon officials have jumped on the global warming bandwagon and ”released a report Monday asserting decisively that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security, with increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages.” What’s the answer to these many woes? Why, to give the military-industrial complex lots and lots and lots of money. Why is ISIS gaining ground? Because global warming. The climate experts at the DOD say so.
Not that the Defense Department was ever at risk of seeing any real cuts. What backers of the Pentagon call “draconian cuts” are never more than tiny trims to the rate of increase in Pentagon spending, and of course, the Pentagon is awash on money today, just as it has always been every single day since 1945.
Conservatives and other pro-military groups will likely take issue with this latest bid for more cash from the Pentagon, not because they think the Pentagon is already overfunded but because they’re against the acceptance of global warming/climate change as a real phenomenon. This will be mentioned in the right wing press, but largely overlooked, because for them, the Pentagon is to always be treated with deference and credulity whenever it demands more money.
Not that it will make much difference either way. This global warming report is just a way for the Pentagon to pile on its already huge lobbying effort to keep the money flowing, and there’s no shortage of right wing politicians and pundits calling for an even bigger river of cash flowing to the government in the name of “defense.” This latest report simply offers an opportunity to get a few center-left politicians on board who might have been reluctant to sign yet another blank check for the Pentagon. It also offers a few talking points to the administration in its climate change efforts.
The generals, all of whom are political appointees and lifelong bureaucrats who haven’t held real jobs in decades, will be more than happy to come up with exciting new plans for dealing with global warming, and all the manpower and trillions of dollars that will require over the next 30 or 40 years. It would unpatriotic to do anything less. National security is at stake.