The Pentagon and global warming

An unremarkable and needed evolution.

All of the regions where we fear the impact of climate change are basically inside the Gap, so we're talking about all the same places where we've been intervening for two decades now.

All the stuff we'll need to do sit on the SysAdmin side of the house, meaning we drive more resources to that side of the ledger and build up capacity there.

Of course, the big-war types will want to stick in "resource wars" with China as part of this package, but this is a weak argument, given we're talking about failed states unable to cope. China won't want to get sucked into that sort of stuff, and yet it must, and therein lies new opportunities for cooperation.

But I guarantee you, so long as we rush in and hog all control, the Chinese will be more than happy to see us to do so, so long as their access to desired resources continue, and since we'll need to exploit that Chinese demand in order to attract FDI that we ourselves will be unwilling to supply (see Afghanistan as an example), we'll learn to live with that dynamic in certain situations.

But ultimately, we'll want China to pull its own share of the security duty.

In sum, there is no additive danger or threat in the Pentagon simply realizing that it's still stuck with the Gap and that the biggest environmental change there in coming decades will be global warming. The environment in most of these places was bad before, so we're talking differences in degree, not kind.

But you know our system: it needs to freak out and get all jacked to make any sort of shift, so we all need to get "very afraid!" of global warming to get it on the planning agenda.

And then we calm down and simply deal with the reality as it slowly unfolds.