Ducking climate science is a danger to the US military. Congress must help.  

The Trump Administration’s recent decision to revoke the EPA “endangerment finding” is emblematic of a trend in American politics — to ignore science when it makes people uncomfortable. But turning a blind eye doesn’t change the fact that climate change is happening — and that it’s impacting the US military’s mission to keep Americans safe. 

As the former Senior Climate Advisor to the US Army, I saw directly how climate change is eroding military readiness and endangering our warfighters. Wildfires are threatening our bases in the West, with air quality deteriorating around those facilities. In the southeast, the number of “Black Flag” days where it’s simply too hot and humid to safely train is increasing, impacting unit readiness. Severe flooding is hitting coastal cities and inland communities, from the Great Plains to the Carolinas, putting troops, families and civilians at risk. And across the country, extreme weather is straining the commercial electric grid that is vital to powering our installations, surrounding communities, and the defense industrial base.  

There have been public, and costly, incidents that captured the attention of the defense community. In October 2018, Hurricane Michael, a category 5 storm, destroyed 95 percent of Tyndall Air Force Base and damaged many of its fifth-generation fighters. Then in March 2019, the Missouri River experienced a 500-year flood, inundating Offutt Air Force Base, home to US Strategic Command, with waters that covered runways and poured into operations buildings. According to a February 2026 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the impact of these and other major disasters across the Defense Department has been so severe over the last decade that Congress has had to pass over $4 billion in emergency supplemental assistance to rebuild.  

But there are impacts that don’t receive nearly the attention, while still impacting military readiness and taxpayer dollars. 

Each year, military installations see destruction to facilities and training ranges from wildfires, storms, and floods that Congress doesn’t bail out. According to the same GAO analysis, military installations have experienced another $8.5 billion in damage from extreme weather events since 2015 that they’ve had to absorb on their own. The cost of those damages ranges, from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per disaster. 

In some instances, rebuilding gets programmed into the next budget request, crowding out modernization needs, but more often the funds to repair come from the same accounts that commanders use to pay electricity and water bills, renovate barracks, update operations buildings, and make airfield improvements that are critical to warfighting. I’ve watched senior leaders wrestle with the hard choices about what to fund and not, adding to an ever-growing backlog of unfunded needs across installations that will slowly hollow out the military’s financial and combat readiness.

It is no surprise that Congress has, for years, directed the Department of Defense to start planning for climate change. As early as 2007, the annual defense policy bill required the military to consider the impacts of climate change on its “facilities, capabilities, and missions.” Since then, Congress has regularly used the defense authorization to pass some bipartisan provision to strengthen how the military protects its installations and personnel from extreme weather and severe environmental change, making that must-pass defense policy bill the one place where Congress has regularly taken action to address the threat of climate change.

In 2019, Congress went further, requiring the military to forecast how climate change may impact facilities over the next 50 years and adapt the way it sites, designs, and constructs buildings to protect against future hazards. That work — which continues today — may sound simple. But having overseen some of those plans, it’s not. A refrain I often heard from local installation staff was “we can plan for the weather, not the climate.” It’s not that they didn’t understand the importance; they just typically didn’t have the right expertise to predict what a warming world could mean for them over the next several decades. 

That is why the science community is so important. The Pentagon has incredible climate capabilities, but there are hundreds of installations worldwide. It’s impossible to ask the few experts it has to, as the expression goes, do everything, everywhere, all at once. We need to harness all of America’s world-class climate expertise and continue to invest in cutting-edge science to ensure we can make all those installations resilient. 

Instead, we’re doing the opposite. When leaders at the highest level of government refute science and duck those willing to make our military stronger, we put these ongoing efforts to protect the force in jeopardy.  

The administration has made its stance on science clear, and no one should expect an about-face. That’s why Congress needs to do what it has done for years: continue to direct the Pentagon to take the threat of climate change seriously. 

The defense policy bill that Congress passed at the end of 2025 builds on that practice by mandating the Department of Defense examine the risks of extreme weather at our service academies, and it requires military installations to conduct resilience exercises with defense communities to see how they hold up against weather disasters. It can go further with the FY27 NDAA by demanding the military use the best available science to plan for the future.   

Climate change is real, it’s happening now, and humans are responsible. We can debate the best policies and approaches for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. We can argue about the right balance between regulation and innovation, between immediate costs and long-term benefits. Those are legitimate conversations. But the science is unequivocal: this is a planetary emergency that is threatening even those that serve to protect us. 

For their sake and ours, let’s continue to follow the science so that America’s warfighters can continue to defend the nation regardless of whatever Mother Nature throws our way in the future.  

Will Rogers served as Senior Climate Advisor to the US Army from 2022 to 2025. He teaches on climate change and national security at Johns Hopkins University and is currently an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.