The Pentagon recognizes climate change as a destabilizing force.It urges adaptation, resilience, and mitigation to meet this growing national security risk. In A recent commentaryLeo Blanken, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Defense Analysis Department, and Ben Cohen (a student in the school’s Applied Design for Innovation program), argue that sustainable agriculture should be part the military’s climate change strategy. Modernized victory gardenscontainer farmers that use aeroponic or hydroponic systems can theoretically produce as many vegetables as a 5-acre farm, while using a fraction as much water and fertilizer. This could help improve soldiers’ health and reduce military’s environmental footprint. It seems worthwhile to explore this option, especially as the way we produce, package, and process food is responsible for more than a quarter of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions. This technology could also help U.S. allies to become more food-secure and strengthen their partnerships. The Department of Defense could also use its vast research capabilities to develop climate-friendly farming methods. This could make sustainable agriculture more accessible. This conversation has been edited to be more concise and clear.
Why should the DoD care about this?
Blanken: Even if it makes a small change to how it interacts with food, a department as large as the Department of Defense would have major impacts. The department has always been a pioneer in new technologies and new ways of doing business, which have positive externalities that benefit the wider society. (The internet, for example.) The DoD could use these activities in military operations as well as at home bases to reimagine the way they produce their food. This could be a way to solve food security issues in the United States and around the globe. There’s a huge opportunity.
Cohen:Strategy is largely influenced by the Arctic, which is experiencing dramatic climate change. The area becomes more navigable as the ice melts. China is interested in this from a military perspective. If the Arctic melts, they will be able reach the rest of the globe much faster. They want the ice melt. There’s also an estimated trillion dollars of precious resources under the ice pack up there. It’s amazing that what we do in Kansas is affecting climate change, and so its also affecting whats happening in the Arctic, which has strategic implications.
Why do you think the Pentagon’s climate adaptation report doesn’t mention food as part of the solution?
Blanken: 20 years of fighting and thinking about counterinsurgency, terrorism, and 20 years of fighting and living in Iraq and Afghanistan are 20 years of lost time to think about bigger issues. How the DoD sources its food has massive implications for the environment, I just don’t think people have even worked through all these implications yet.
The Pentagon called on adaptation, resilience, mitigation to address national security concerns posed by climate changes. Where do agriculture fit in?
Blanken: National Security is the DoD’s core mission. But I think what climate change is really pushing on to the national agenda is that it’s not just national security. It’s also human security. Human security can also be thought of as food security and a healthy environment. We can think about how we train and influence our young recruits’ eating habits and how they are trained.
These military bases can have huge amounts of space, large amounts of resources, and huge numbers of young people. Is it possible to rethink security in a way that regenerative agricultural may have a role? Can we shift our perspective on security? We can think more about the positive effects we get from national resources like taxes as we feed them to our Department of Defense. Not only can we fight wars and down enemy planes, but we can also create a safer, more secure society by using all of those resources more thoughtfully.
Cohen: What if we taught regenerative agricultural on military installations? We’d be giving our service personnel some skills to carry with them when they leave the force.
Could you please tell me more about how this could look overseas?
Blanken: The vast majority of the food consumed by American forces in Afghanistan was in facilities that were essentially similar to your elementary school cafeteria. Combat rations were only necessary when someone was on a mission outside of the wire. Because missions were so short, men could only drink water, energy drinks, or granola bars. They were forced to eat terrible food from the school cafeterias back in Kandahar Airfield and Bagram Airfield. With these huge footprints, we were in Afghanistan for 20+ years. We could have established a system to sustain Afghanistan’s agriculture that would have made the vast majority healthier and more affordable.
You’re never going to use hydroponic farming on the frontlines. But when you move forces to any location where they’re going to spend any amount of time, there’s opportunity to feed the majority of your people in a different way than moving every pound of processed food across the Pacific, driving it through Pakistan in a truck to get it to Bagram, which was insanely expensive, used a lot of packaging and was unhealthy. The American taxpayer spent a lot of money to send canned spaghetti, corndogs, fruit cocktail and other food to the troops.
Cohen:I can transport an 8-foot-by-40 foot container farm that’s self-sustaining for 96hrs anywhere I want. Instead of having to drive or fly food for hundreds of hours, we can deploy the equivalent of three acres of farm or several three-acre farms to staging areas. It would cut down on the time it takes to supply the food. This is a very important point for the military. We spend a lot, and we waste lots of resources.
You wrote that these farming operations are more crucial in the context of conflict in Indo-Pacific. Why would a conflict in the Indo-Pacific region be more difficult?
Blanken:You can see the nature of a conflict between EuropeUkraine and the Indo-Pacific. Theres infrastructure, railroads, it’s relatively easy to move things to Ukraine. But the Pacific is vast. These nations are so far apart that they require enormous amounts of shipping. It is very expensive to move things, even in peacetime. You need to feed your troops if you send them out. Do you ship all the food over to them every day?
Now, imagine a conflict between China and the United States. China is extraordinarily good at this thing called anti-access area denial, and that is going to disrupt the U.S.’s ability to move things. They’ll sink ships, shoot at planes, disrupt communications and target all of our fueling stations. China’s goal is to prevent the United States from moving people and things across the Pacific. It will make your life easier to have fewer things to move.
You also talk about how agriculture can play a part in partner force enablement. What does this mean?
Blanken:It will be more important to provide security force assistance and build partner capacity. The American public is not happy about sending hundreds of thousands to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to work with our allies and partners to ensure that security outcomes are achieved. It’s basically going to a country and helping with their security to build a relationship and be able coordinate with them during potential conflicts.
We used to go to their troops and teach them how to shoot or communicate better. We also gave them equipment, radios, guns, or any other equipment. As we move forward, we need to think about security in a larger sense. This means moving beyond traditional warfighting and into these notions if human security. This will make us more sensitive to their concerns and interests. Our concern may be that we want you to be a friend because we’re concerned about the influence of China. They may be more concerned with human security issues in their countryterrorism and disaster relief, or the fact that climate change is literally a threat to their existence.
Around 2011, I visited a remote outpost in the Philippines. I had the privilege of eating with the Filipino Ranger colonel. It was so bad that it was almost unpalatable. A spoonful of rice and a chicken wings from a chicken that was probably the size of a canary were all I could eat. It was unbelievable to me that these men were allowed to eat like this for so many years. But they were out there because that’s where the terrorists were. What if there were hydroponic farms? They could eat fresh food every day. It would be more worthwhile to give them a $80,000 container farm than another $80,000 pile with weapons.
We must think about the food security problems of our partner nations. If food security is impacting our neighbors in Georgia or Indiana, how do you think it’s impacting people in Bangladesh, or the Philippines?
There has been much concern about the decline in physical fitness of recruits. Do you think that a focus on sustainable agriculture could play an important role in this?
Blanken: Our recruit base reflects society. Every time I go to a military base, I drive around and it’s all fast-food restaurants. And it’s full of 18-year-olds eating Jack in the Box and McDonald’s for lunch. It’s a problem that affects everyone, not just our young military personnel, but society as a whole. The Department of Defense takes a lot of resources from society, both tax money and human resources. There are many other positive aspects to the military. [beyond national security]. People don’t realize that the U.S. military was one of the first institutions to mandate racial integration. They decided to be ahead of civilian society in this matter. And there’s a lot of military sociological literature saying we can be on the front edge of doing something good within the military, that would be good for society as well.
