In 2019, the Missouri River flooded at historically high levels and damaged 137 facilities, destroyed 1.2 million square feet of workspace, and flooded 3,000 feet of runway at Offutt Air Force Base. Repairing the installation cost $1.2 billion. The Trump administration and Department of Defense justified $1.2 billion in budget reductions to the U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Defense Department climate programs as cuts to “woke” climate or environmental initiatives, but a singular event caused sufficient damage to erase those savings.
The lethality of American presence in the Pacific depends upon the resilience of bases, ports, and ranges against climate threats. Removing funding from the studies, modeling, and adaptation projects that keep forward installations operational does not redirect dollars to warfighting — it removes capability that warfighting requires.
The National Defense Strategy calls on the military to “build, posture, and sustain a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain.” The First Island Chain experiences significant effects from the current climate, such as intense rains and floods, high-intensity typhoons, and erosion that depletes island water supplies— and models project more severe effects in the future. A flooded airfield does not generate sorties. A failed breakwater does not sustain submarine operations. American warfighters can’t fight if they don’t have drinking water. Every program that increases installation resilience boosts lethality, and therefore every cut to such a program is a lethality cut.
Death of Lethality by 1,000 Budget Cuts
The first way budget cuts affect military readiness involves offices outside the Department of Defense. The Fiscal Year 2026 budget request reduced National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funding for oceanographic studies and climate modeling by approximately 75 percent. The request also eliminated $564 million from the U.S. Geological Survey. While the Department of Defense currently uses Federal Emergency Management Agency 100-year floodplain data for facilities planning (as required by Executive Order 11988 from 1977), the deficiencies in that data are well documented.
In 2019, when Offutt Air Force Base was rebuilt after flooding, the base worked with the U.S. Geological Survey to compensate for Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain data limitations in implementing new flood mitigation. The Trump administration’s justification for the cutting “social agendas (e.g., climate change)” fails to capture the Defense Department’s lethality impacts on the U.S. Geological Survey’s work. Cutting funding to the U.S. Geological Survey and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ensures that the next major construction at the next exposed installation —including new construction in the First Island Chain— will knowingly use data the Defense Department’s own engineers deem inadequate.
Budget cuts and unfunded Defense Department requirements also impact lethality. The First and Second Island Chains — operational priorities under the National Defense Strategy — sit in the highest-exposure climate environments in the joint force. In 2023, Super Typhoon Mawar damaged the Glass Breakwater at Apra Harbor, Guam; the $600 million repair became the second-highest item on the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2025 Unfunded Priorities List, — the congressionally mandated list of items the services would fund if their final budget was higher
The Navy justified the request as necessary to “ensure the integrity of Apra Harbor and the Navy’s ability to sustain forces.” A failed breakwater inside the Second Island Chain directly affects logistics in the National Defense Strategy’s decisive theater — not simply the local environment. Kwajalein Atoll hosts test range and missile defense infrastructure not replicated anywhere else in theater. While the Pacific Deterrence Initiative funds maintenance of the facilities, it neglected items such as recommendations from a 2024 Army Corps of Engineers study, which found intentional vegetation planting could mitigate damage from the kind of wave event that flooded the island in 2020. The United States currently plans to expand its presence in Palau, but a 2022 study identified causeways as critically vulnerable to tropical cyclones and rising sea levels. These funds do not represent discretionary environmental investment. Each is a piece of forward-deployed combat infrastructure.
Current Programs Already Under Water
While the Defense Department already implements resilience programs, they do not adequately address the problem today. Executive Order 11988’s requirement to plan according to 100-year flood data from the binds new construction to a dataset the engineering community already treats as a floor rather than a ceiling. The Glass Breakwater repair sits on the Navy’s Unfunded Priorities List but was ultimately not included in the annual budget request.
The FY2026 budget request cuts approximately $600 million from environmental programs, including funding for environmental planning at training ranges and investment in environmental risk mitigation. The FY2027 request continues the pattern with cuts to facility and engineering design. The Pacific Deterrence Initiative receives money to repair facilities damaged by extreme weather but not to mitigate effects from the inevitable next event.
The strongest defense of the current budget posture argues that limited dollars must be allocated against warfighting capacity rather than against peripheral resilience spending. This effort also attempts to address the longstanding complaint that Defense Planning Guidance provides insufficient prioritization between readiness and modernization. This argument holds that money spent on facilities hardening comes at the expense of purchasing manpower and equipment that directly fights wars.
History tells us the math doesn’t realistically result in savings. The combined National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Geological Survey, and Defense Department environmental reductions across FY2026 and FY2027 equal roughly $1.2 billion. The reconstruction of just Offutt Air Force Base matched that total in a single year. The Government Accountability Office estimates extreme weather caused approximately $15 billion in damage to military facilities over the last 10 years — an average of $1.5 billion a year — while acknowledging that these estimates fail to capture all costs. Both the annual costs and the lack of proper data collection highlight the risks incurred by the current system.
In addition to unrealized fiscal tradeoffs, the military will endure operational tradeoffs. The U.S. Climate Prediction Center predicts a greater than 60% chance that the summer of 2026 will result in El Niño conditions across the Pacific. Typically, these conditions result in an increased risk of tropical cyclones, drought, and extreme heat across the region. The damage caused by Super Typhoon Mawar on Guam exemplifies the risk posed to Pacific installations.
Drying conditions create wildfire risks to U.S. infrastructure further afield. The 2023 El Niño conditions drove the Maui wildfire within three miles of the Maui High Performance Computer Center operated by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The United States opened new basing agreements with Australia in 2024 precisely in the areas likely to suffer El Niño-related drought and wildfire conditions.
Military assessments indicate that China intends to be ready to reunite militarily with Taiwan as early as 2027, thus opening “the danger zone” for military conflict between the United States and China. In that context, damage to U.S. military infrastructure caused by the 2026 El Niño season or subsequent natural disasters could directly affect the military’s ability to respond to a priority threat in the National Defense Strategy in the coming decade.
Most importantly, the Defense Department’s own guidance concedes the operational case. A March 2025 Defense Secretary memo included a carve-out for weather-operational planning and installation resilience that admits that the work the budget cuts eliminate is mission-essential. The Trump administration does not make the lethality-versus-resilience argument its proponents make on its behalf — it simultaneously asserts the requirement to preserve installation resilience and defunds the studies, modeling, and projects that produce it. The position lacks logical consistency with itself.
Four Fixes that Don’t Require a U-Turn
Fortunately, the Defense Department can still mitigate the effects of these budget cuts. The undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment should purchase or otherwise procure access to data on flood and meteorological modeling from commercial or friendly nation sources. The department should then mandate the use of this data in evaluating risk to military construction via the Unified Facilities Criteria — the published Defense Department standards for military construction — to mitigate cuts to U.S. government-funded modeling.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment should direct Indo-Pacific Command to provide a prioritized list of installations for combat in the theater of operations, along with their associated risk of natural disaster. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, and Air Force Civil Engineer Center should provide assessments of where nature-based hardening could provide facility resilience that exceeds the cost of implementation. Examples of these types of projects include the 2024 Corps of Engineers Kwajalein findings on vegetation as debris and water-level mitigation, and the 2022 living-shoreline projects at North Carolina installations.
The department’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation, Defense Community Infrastructure Program, and the Installation Readiness Program should prioritize projects at the highest risk installations in the United States as identified by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment.
For foreign bases, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment leads coordination between the relevant combatant command, the State Department, and the host nation. This office can also serve as the clearinghouse for working within other executive agencies to fund priority infrastructure projects, such as the Department of the Interior’s Compact of Free Association Infrastructure Maintenance grants in 2022–2024 to Palau. The department doesn’t support these projects as part of “woke” ideology but for operational necessity.
Finally, the department, via legislative proposal, should request a congressional exemption from environmental-law injunctions for controlled burning around installations on which mission-essential capability resides. This exemption would allow bases to conduct controlled burning even if the burn causes a temporary spike in air particulates above regulated levels, giving the bases more days to conduct controlled burns throughout the year.
In 2024, the U.S. Forest Service suspended controlled burns in California due to “staffing shortages” and “pushback from environmental groups.” While President Trump could direct the U.S. Forest Service to prioritize federal land around critical military facilities, an executive order cannot overcome restrictions imposed by acts of Congress, such as the Clean Air Act or National Environmental Policy Act. A targeted exemption — akin to the one carved out of the Marine Mammal Protection Act to allow Navy sonar testing — resolves the readiness problem without addressing the broader environmental dispute, which is the kind of policy move the current administration is, in principle, well positioned to make.
The Defense Department acknowledges the importance of planning for resilience against climate effects but directly undermines its own ability to do so through budget cuts. In the First Island Chain in particular, the cost of failing to build resilient infrastructure erodes the “lethality” the Department claims to promote. Fortunately, some mitigations exist that do not require a wholesale reversal of current administration policies. Ultimately, our military must answer the question: Will U.S. forces survive long enough to get into the fight?
Caitlin Irby is a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who has served in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations. Of her 17 years in the Air Force, nine were spent supporting special operations. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geographic information science and has published articles on the role of geography in U.S. strategy.
The views in this article are the author’s and not those of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: TSgt. Rachelle Blake via DVIDS
