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General News    H3'ed 1/23/23

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Pentagon's Version of the World Is Not the World

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Maybe since Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met with Joe Biden in the midst of his growing document brouhaha, you noticed, at least in passing, the news that the Japanese military budget is about to rise in a truly significant fashion. But my guess is you didn't notice that the U.S. Marines' 12th Artillery Regiment, presently stationed on the island of Okinawa (the site of a fierce World War II battle between the U.S. and Japan), is also going to be upgraded in a fashion that should be considered newsworthy. It's going to become the future 12th Marine Littoral Regiment and, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin described it, "We will equip this new formation with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as anti-ship and transportation capabilities that are relevant to the current and future threat environments. These posture updates adhere to the basic tenets of the 2012 realignment plan, and they will strengthen our Alliance's ability to maintain regional peace and stability."

And yes, that is English, even if it does need to be translated. As Reuters reported, the new regiment and at least two others like it to be stationed in the Pacific region will be "dumping most of their cannon artillery and heavy armor in favor of smaller 'dispersed' forces equipped with missiles and drones that can operate in contested areas." In other words, the 12th Artillery Regiment will become a "more rapidly mobile unit," armed with anti-ship missiles, that will, as a Biden administration fact sheet put it, "bolster deterrence and provide a stand-in force that is able to defend Japan and quickly respond to contingencies."

As it happens, a further translation for the rest of us is still necessary and, to the best of my understanding, it might go something like this: with the agreement of Japan, the United States is continuing to upgrade its forces in the Pacific in preparation for a possible future conflict with China over the island of Taiwan. In other words, just what the world truly needs at this perilous moment, a further heightening of the increasingly edgy stand-off between Washington and Beijing.

As if there weren't enough crises right now, including the drowning of California! In that context, let TomDispatch regular Michael Klare, author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change and a founder of the Committee for a Sane U.S.-China Policy, put Washington's (and the Pentagon's) all-too-militarized and limited worldview in the context of the actual planet we're living on. Tom

Climate Change Will Supersede Everything
The Pentagon's Massive Intelligence Failure on China

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Given the secrecy typically accorded to the military and the inclination of government officials to skew data to satisfy the preferences of those in power, intelligence failures are anything but unusual in this country's security affairs. In 2003, for instance, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq based on claims "- later found to be baseless "- that its leader, Saddam Hussein, was developing or already possessed weapons of mass destruction. Similarly, the instant collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, when the U.S. completed the withdrawal of its forces from that country, came as a shock only because of wildly optimistic intelligence estimates of that government's strength. Now, the Department of Defense has delivered another massive intelligence failure, this time on China's future threat to American security.

The Pentagon is required by law to provide Congress and the public with an annual report on "military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China," or PRC, over the next 20 years. The 2022 version, 196 pages of detailed information published last November 29th, focused on its current and future military threat to the United States. In two decades, so we're assured, China's military " the People's Liberation Army, or PLA " will be superbly equipped to counter Washington should a conflict arise over Taiwan or navigation rights in the South China Sea. But here's the shocking thing: in those nearly 200 pages of analysis, there wasn't a single word " not one " devoted to China's role in what will pose the most pressing threat to our security in the years to come: runaway climate change.

At a time when California has just been battered in a singular fashion by punishing winds and massive rainstorms delivered by a moisture-laden "atmospheric river" flowing over large parts of the state while much of the rest of the country has suffered from severe, often lethal floods, tornadoes, or snowstorms, it should be self-evident that climate change constitutes a vital threat to our security. But those storms, along with the rapacious wildfires and relentless heatwaves experienced in recent summers " not to speak of a 1,200-year record megadrought in the Southwest " represent a mere prelude to what we can expect in the decades to come. By 2042, the nightly news " already saturated with storm-related disasters " could be devoted almost exclusively to such events.

All true, you might say, but what does China have to do with any of this? Why should climate change be included in a Department of Defense report on security developments in relation to the People's Republic?

There are three reasons why it should not only have been included but given extensive coverage. First, China is now and will remain the world's leading emitter of climate-altering carbon emissions, with the United States " though historically the greatest emitter " staying in second place. So, any effort to slow the pace of global warming and truly enhance this country's "security" must involve a strong drive by Beijing to reduce its emissions as well as cooperation in energy decarbonization between the two greatest emitters on this planet. Second, China itself will be subjected to extreme climate-change harm in the years to come, which will severely limit the PRC's ability to carry out ambitious military plans of the sort described in the 2022 Pentagon report. Finally, by 2042, count on one thing: the American and Chinese armed forces will be devoting most of their resources and attention to disaster relief and recovery, diminishing both their motives and their capacity to go to war with one another.

China's Outsized Role in the Climate-Change Equation

Global warming, scientists tell us, is caused by the accumulation of "anthropogenic" (human-produced) greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere that trap the reflected light from the sun's radiation. Most of those GHGs are carbon and methane emitted during the production and combustion of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas); additional GHGs are released through agricultural and industrial processes, especially steel and cement production. To prevent global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era " the largest increase scientists believe the planet can absorb without catastrophic outcomes " such emissions will have to be sharply reduced.

Historically speaking, the United States and the European Union (EU) countries have been the largest GHG emitters, responsible for 25% and 22% of cumulative CO2 emissions, respectively. But those countries, and other advanced industrial nations like Canada and Japan, have been taking significant steps to reduce their emissions, including phasing out the use of coal in electricity generation and providing incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles. As a result, their net CO2 emissions have diminished in recent years and are expected to decline further in the decades to come (though they will need to do yet more to keep us below that 1.5-degree warming limit).

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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