The Navy's Misplaced Prioritization of Climate Ahead of China

Last week Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro released his updated strategic guidance on the long-term transformation and modernization of the service branch. Del Toro rightly addresses the Department of the Navy’s mission to recruit, train, equip, and organize to deliver combat-ready naval forces. Additionally, the top priority in the guidance is well placed - to strengthen our maritime dominance to deter potential adversaries, and if called upon, fight and decisively win our Nation’s wars. Under that top priority, the document includes combatting climate change as one of four actions required to strengthen the Navy’s maritime dominance. Citing climate change as “one of the most destabilizing forces of our time”, Del Toro curiously claims that achieving the Biden Administration’s commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will enable the Navy to become a more agile, capable, and lethal fighting force. Including the questionable connection between emissions reductions and combat capability is enough to undermine his guidance, but there is an even greater deficiency – nowhere in the guidance is there a direct mention of China and our urgent need to outcompete that country in the race for maritime superiority.

The failure to directly name China in the Navy’s strategic guidance is even more difficult to defend.  Out-competing China has already been identified as a top global priority by the Biden Administration in the 2022 National Security Strategy. Why merely mention a “rapidly improving peer competitor” in the introduction of the Navy’s strategy?  Just last week the Pentagon released its annual report on Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China (PRC), and the picture it paints is not pretty.  The PRC is embarked on a campaign to: expand its national power; “revise the international order” in support of its national interests; increase military coercion against the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region; strengthen its nuclear, space, and counterspace capabilities; intensify its pressure against Taiwan; deepen its ties with Russia; and resist military-to-military with the U.S.

One must wonder if Del Toro directly avoided mentioning China in support of an apparent approach by the Biden White House of appeasement to authoritarian regimes. Beginning with the shameful surrender to the Taliban through the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden Administration has been unwilling to leverage the full force of the world’s most powerful military to decisively deny our adversaries their destructive and destabilizing objectives. The U.S. only incrementally supported Ukraine against Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken initially refrained from blaming Iran for backing the horrific October 7^th massacre by Hamas in Israel, and President Biden hesitated to forcefully respond when Iran’s proxies recently attacked U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the Navy’s prioritizing climate mitigation over competition with China is the astonishing inconsistency of such a misplacement.  While the Navy’s net zero push will do nothing to curb the planet’s current warming, China is determined to reinforce its role as the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gasses, setting a record peak this year, falsely reporting its actual emissions, and building six times as many coal plants last year as the rest of the world combined. Likewise, the visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia last December sent a clear signal that Beijing’s appetite for fossil fuels is insatiable.

Credible sources have suggested that China’s current nonrenewable energy posture is part of a whole of nation campaign to prepare for an invasion of Taiwan, aligning with other measures such as its stockpiling of grain, a first of its kind emergency power outage drill in the country’s eastern region, completion of two major military dress rehearsals required for such an invasion, an alarming 350% expansion in the installation of intercontinental ballistic missile launchers over the past three years, and Xi Jingping’s increasingly hostile rhetoric towards the U.S., to wit, in a May 30th address to China’s National Security Commission, Xi’s first after cementing a historic third term as President, he said, “We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios, and be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms.” Not a single China watcher in the West or Chinese scholar in Beijing has interpreted this as a comment about climate, rather, he was clearly warning of the danger of war. Considering that a former U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Commander recently stated that the U.S. is not ready to defend Taiwan in this decade, the Navy must remove its misplaced mandate to mitigate climate change and instead prioritize preparedness for the coming conflict with China.

RADM Tim Gallaudet (USN ret.) is the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC, former  acting and deputy administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and former acting undersecretary and assistant secretary of Commerce. Prior to NOAA, he served as an oceanographer in the U.S. Navy, completing his career as the commander of the Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command and director of the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change.