US Air Force: We Need $5 Billion To Fix Weather-Damaged Bases (Climate Change versus U.S. Military)

[KhalaiMakhlooq]

US Air Force: We Need $5 Billion To Fix Weather-Damaged Bases

27 March 2019 | https://www.defenseone.com/threats/...d-5-billion-fix-weather-damaged-bases/155863/

This March 17, 2019 photo shows an aerial view of Offutt Air Force Base and the surrounding areas affected by flood waters in Neb.

Without the cash, service says it will cut pilot training, ground planes, stop other base construction projects.

The U.S. Air Force says it needs nearly $5 billion over the next three years to rebuild bases in Florida and Nebraska severely damaged by weather in the past six months.

If it does not receive $1.2 billion of those funds by June for repairs at Tyndall Air Force Base and Offutt Air Force Base, service officials warned they would be forced to cut projects at bases in 18 states (here’s the list) and cancel 18,000 pilot training hours.

“We desperately need the supplemental funding to recover from the natural disasters that hammered Tyndall and Offutt,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said Wednesday at Heritage Foundation event in Washington. “There are other decisions we’ll have to make if we don’t [have supplemental funding] by May or June. These are just the first decisions that we had to make yesterday…61 projects in 18 states are not going to happen because we have not gotten a disaster supplemental for Tyndall.”

Recovery efforts at Tyndall, leveled by Hurricane Michael in October, have so far been funded through the service’s operations and maintenance account. But an Air Force document about the emergency request, released Wednesday, says that money is running out.

The document says that if the emergency funding does not arrive by May 1, all new recovery work at Tyndall will stop, which “delays the return of full base operations, severely impairs flight operations and forces personnel to continue to work in degraded facilities.” As well, aircraft repair funding would be cut, which would grounding of five bomber aircraft as soon as September. It would also delay maintenance of E-3 AWACS radar planes.

At Offutt, a delay to the requested funding would restrict recovery efforts to “immediate health and safety needs” at the base, which is home to the service’s bespoke spy planes and airborne nuclear command centers, the document said. Other “facilities assessment and mitigation efforts” would be put on hold, “increasing damage from mold and water.”

The ultimatum comes as President Trump, through a controversial emergency declaration, is preparing to raid $3.6 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction budget to extend barriers along the U.S. border with Mexico.

The Pentagon has not said which projects it will cut for the border extensions. Instead, it released a list of projects that have had money appropriated by Congress, but not yet spent. Two projects are at the bases singled out by the Air Force Wednesday: a $17 million fire station at Tyndall and a $9.5 million parking lot for U.S.Strategic Command at Offutt.

Hurricane Michael destroyed most of Tyndall when it hit the Florida Panhandle base in October. Earlier this month, Offutt was partially indundated by Missouri River floodwaters that damaged nearly 80 buildings.

Caught by surprise

The damage to both bases appears to have caught the military by surprise. The Pentagon’s widely criticized climate-impact reportfor 2019 listed Offutt as a base with climate-related vulnerabilities, but only for drought, and said there was no current or potential risk of recurrent flooding. While the report mentioned Tyndall in its text, the base did not appear in the list of at-risk facilities.

An F-22 Raptor training unit has already been moved from Tyndall to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The Air Force is flying F-16 drones from Tyndall and is planning to move F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and MQ-9 Reaper drones to the base beginning in 2023.

Two weeks after the storm Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration was committed to rebuilding the base. Advocates for the base and Air Force officials say Tyndall, despite its location in a storm-prone region, is critical because of its proximity to vast pilot training ranges over the Gulf of Mexico.

Paulina Glass contributed to this report.

 

[KhalaiMakhlooq]

Related Article:

All the Ways the US Military’s Infrastructure Crisis Is Getting Worse

27 March 2019 | https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/20...is-only-getting-worse/155858/?oref=d-dontmiss

U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Cameron D. Touchstone, left, combat engineer, directs traffic across an armored vehicle launch bridge after Hurricane Florence on Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, Sept. 16, 2018.

The weather damage to Tyndall and Offutt AFBs adds to a multibillion-dollar backlog of deferred maintenance that’s taking a strategic toll.

What happens when the Pentagon takes a holiday from taking care of military infrastructure? Since 2012, the Budget Control Act has strangled military infrastructure funding. Adjusted for inflation, combined spending on military construction and family housing dropped from $14.6 billion in 2012 to $10.5 billion in each of the next two years before plummeting to an annual average of $8.2 billion from 2015 to 2018.

Yet tallying the decline of new construction money tells only half the story, since the Pentagon funds most infrastructure maintenance separately through an account called Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization, or FSRM. In 2018 testimony to Congress, Pentagon chief infrastructure officer Lucian Niemeyer warned that the department is running a tab of $116 billion in deferred FSRM funding. With admirable candor, he also admitted that many facilities have deteriorated so badly that they are no longer worth saving.

As of last year, the Pentagon rated the condition of 23 percent of its infrastructure as “poor” and another 9 percent as “failing.” More recently, an emotional February Senate Armed Services Committee hearing detailed the pitiful state of military family housing and featured universal bipartisan agreement that the scale of the problem is worse than previously known. Lack of adequate family housing causes massive unseen costs by lowering recruitment and retention of talented servicemembers.

Related: Pentagon Owns Fewer Buildings Than Previously Thought: Audit
Related: Something We Can Agree On: Close Some Overseas Bases
Related: Pentagon Bans Sale of Chinese-Designed Phones On Military Bases

And even as the Pentagon cannot take care of the facilities it actually needs, it remains saddled with thousands of unnecessary facilities that siphon away scarce FSRM funding. Perceived failure of the 2005 base closure round left such a bad taste in lawmakers’ mouths that Congress remains unlikely to allow further closures any time soon. On top of its growing construction and maintenance funding deficit, the Department of Defense may also face a massive increase in retroactive cleanup costs, given recent momentum behind the effort to account for contaminated drinking water at bases.

That’s not all. The military’s accumulated infrastructure spending shortfall reached its peak just as the Pentagon should be investing in new basing to better prepare itself for generational great-power competition with Russia and China. While the military succeeded in maximizing efficiency through two decades of aggregating forces into peacetime superbases in Germany, Japan, and South Korea, those superbases now serve as juicy, fat targets for advanced adversary missiles and aircraft. China practices first-day-of-war knockout strikes against the colossal collection of U.S.naval forces in Yokosuka, Japan, and Russian missiles threaten every American base in mainland Europe.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy recognizes that existing peacetime basing strategy is no longer appropriate, prompting the Pentagon to prioritize “transitioning from large, centralized, unhardened infrastructure to smaller, dispersed, resilient, adaptive basing that includes active and passive defenses.” Based on the cost of initial investments at U.S. bases in Europe and East Asia, this overdue transition will carry a multi-billion dollar price tag over the next five to 10 years. Additionally, the armed forces have yet to fully budget for significant investments in new and expanded training and testing ranges to accommodate weapons of the future like hypersonic missiles and fifth-generation aircraft that have outgrown dated Cold War infrastructure.

But wait, there’s more! Recent natural disasters highlight the threat posed to military infrastructure by climate change and severe weather events. The Air Force needs almost $5 billion to rebuild Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida from Hurricane Michael, and it’s currently pausing 61 repair projects in other states to pay those bills. The Marine Corps requires at least $3.5 billion to rebuild Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, and it’s about to start canceling military exercises to pay for cleanup costs. Repairing flooding damage at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska will cost tens of millions of dollars, with the tab likely to rise when future flood prevention measures are added.

In a 2019 report to Congress, the Pentagon warned that two-thirds of its 79 most important bases face serious flooding threats, including the heart of the Navy in Hampton Roads and crucial forward bases in Guam. Dozens of other installations face threats from more frequent wildfires and droughts. Yet the report fell short of congressional intent by omitting most overseas bases, and it did not include any attempt at an infrastructure risk mitigation plan or calculating associated funding for such a plan. It should not be a partisan issue to recognize the threat posed to military bases by severe weather events and the necessity of billions of dollars of additional defense spending to mitigate that threat.

Uniformed and civilian defense officials alike have begun to appreciate the necessity of making up for lost time and money in adequately supporting military infrastructure. After years of neglect, the Pentagon finally asked Congress for a sizable facilities maintenance funding increase. The Air Force even released a long-term infrastructure modernization strategy that will “allow the Air Force to cut down on its backlog considerably by 2047.”

Yet the scale of the military infrastructure crisis remains unappreciated, both at the Pentagon and in Congress. Whether or not one supports the White House’s laundering of $7.2 billion of border wall funding through the military construction budget, this gambit hits the Pentagon at a particularly bad moment. The Trump administration’s own long-term defense spending projections show a flat budget with no growth in buying power, which does not provide the Pentagon with enough funding to make up for the $550 billion in buying power lost under the Budget Control Act. The fact that the cost of addressing the military construction crisis isn’t even accounted for in the Pentagon’s budget should serve as a sober reminder that a flat defense spending trajectory simply punts more of the military’s problems into the future.

Ep. 41: Climate change versus the U.S. military

Listen Here how "Climate Change" presents a risk to military


How has climate change cost the United States military already? And what sort of costs can the Defense Department expect to pay in the future? In this episode, we’re going to investigate matters of "resilience" and base design as part of a broader look at how climate change will likely affect the U.S. military in the years ahead. • Chapter 1: The damage (at the 2:03 mark) • Chapter 2: A turning point. (22:23) • Chapter 3: Adaptations (32:40) We’ll hear from a man who was the Navy’s chief oceanographer just a few years ago, Dr. David Titley. We’ll hear from a climatologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. Benjamin Santer. And we’ll talk to a man who helped draft one of the most recent reports on climate change from the Pentagon, John Conger, who directs the Center for Climate and Security. // Music by Terry Devine-King via AudioNetwork.com. // Let us know what you think: email your thoughts to production@defenseone.com • Read a transcript of this episode here: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/03/ep-41-climate-change-versus-us-military/155948/ • Find the 2018 Pentagon infrastructure report here: https://climateandsecurity.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/tab-b-slvas-report-1-24-2018.pdf

 

[Yaseen1]

this is punishment of ALLAH ALMIGHTY to u.s due to their massive killing of innocents and cruel and unjust policies across the world

 

[KhalaiMakhlooq]

Small example of climate change issues from last few days

Penn State Forest fire grows to 8,000 acres burning in New Jersey
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/penn...-to-8-000-acres-burning-in-new-jersey.611454/

Iraq, Kurdistan Region floods: Youth killed, infrastructure damaged as local govs declare holiday
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/iraq...damaged-as-local-govs-declare-holiday.610097/

Iran floods kill 19 with more heavy rain to come
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/iran-floods-kill-19-with-more-heavy-rain-to-come.610062/

Dramatic waterspout forms near Malaysian island
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/dramatic-waterspout-forms-near-malaysian-island.611453/

this is punishment of ALLAH ALMIGHTY to u.s due to their massive killing of innocents and cruel and unjust policies across the world

Climate change is a global issue

 

[Yaseen1]

it is global issue but when it targets military installments then there is a message in it

Small example of climate change issues from last few days

Penn State Forest fire grows to 8,000 acres burning in New Jersey
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/penn...-to-8-000-acres-burning-in-new-jersey.611454/

Iraq, Kurdistan Region floods: Youth killed, infrastructure damaged as local govs declare holiday
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/iraq...damaged-as-local-govs-declare-holiday.610097/

Iran floods kill 19 with more heavy rain to come
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/iran-floods-kill-19-with-more-heavy-rain-to-come.610062/

Dramatic waterspout forms near Malaysian island
https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/dramatic-waterspout-forms-near-malaysian-island.611453/



Climate change is a global issue

 

[KhalaiMakhlooq]

it is global issue but when it targets military installments then there is a message in it

Insects have ‘no place to hide’ from climate change, study warns
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...place-to-hide-from-climate-change-study-warns

 

[war&peace]

It's another attempt to blackmail the govt to release more funds and put pressure on the taxpayers by lending it from federal reserves. BTW Donald Trump and his white supremacist supporters do not believe in climate change so it will be interesting how he tackles this demand.

 

[KhalaiMakhlooq]

It's another attempt to blackmail the govt to release more funds and put pressure on the taxpayers by lending it from federal reserves. BTW Donald Trump and his supporters do not believe in climate change so it will be interesting how he tackles this demand.

I think attitudes are changing

Young Republicans push party to drop climate change scepticism
Strategists warn that Trump’s anti-green rhetoric is alienating younger conservatives
https://www.ft.com/content/3328f388-525e-11e9-9c76-bf4a0ce37d49

If FT article is premium: you can download a copy below:

Climate change threatens a majority of mission-critical military bases, Pentagon report says

18 January 2019 | https://www.militarytimes.com/news/...n-critical-bases-face-climate-change-threats/

A military police officer walks near a destroyed gate at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael on Oct. 12, 2018. The storm caused extensive damage to nearly every building on the base. A new Defense Department report finds that most of the military’s operationally critical installations face a threat from climate change. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

More than two-thirds of the military’s operationally critical installations are threatened by climate change, according to a new DoD report.

The January 2019 report, “Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense,” was submitted to Congress Thursday without an official announcement of the report or a public release. Several environmental organizations made the report publicly available early Friday.

After several reporters questioned why the report was not made public by DoD, the Pentagon published it on Defense.gov mid-Friday.

The Pentagon did not assess all of its hundreds of installations, instead it selected “79 mission assurance priority installations based on their operational role,” the Pentagon said in its report.

In its assessment of those 79 installations, which included Army, Air Force and Navy installations — and notably no Marine Corps bases — the services reported that 53 of the 79 faced current threats from flooding; 43 of the 79 face current threats from drought and 36 of the 79 faced current threats from wildfires.

https://infogram.com/disasters-1h7j4dekn9pd6nr

The Pentagon also looked at logistics sites and other support that it considered operation critical, including Washington Headquarters Services, which includes the Office of the Secretary of Defense and supporting offices. the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

“The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to Department of Defense missions, operational plans, and installations,” the report found.

Critics said the report not only fell short of Congress' direction but also questioned why not a single Marine Corps Base was included. The report also did not mention last year’s massive storm damage to military installations. Tyndall Air Force Base sustained serious damage to almost all of its buildings by Hurricane Michael and the Marines' Camp Lejeune was badly damaged by Hurricane Florence.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, had a few choice words for it.

“The report reads like a introductory primer and carries about as much value as a phonebook,” Reed said in a statement.

The NDAA language also required cost estimated to mitigate the risks at the bases, and a list of the top 10 most climate-vulnerable bases, which it did not, said John Conger, director of the Center on Climate Security.

“It will be interesting to see how Congress views this sort of non-compliance of the law” with the report, Conger said.

When asked why no Marine Corps installations were included, Pentagon spokeswoman Heather Babb said that “in developing the report, DOD focused on mission assurance.”

“The report highlights the climate vulnerabilities of the top 79 mission assurance priority installations. By using this alternative approach, we are able to highlight where there are operational risks,” Babb said.

Conger previously served at the Pentagon as a deputy under secretary in the comptroller’s shop, and as the assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment.

The report, which was directed by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, required the Pentagon to produce an “assessment of the significant vulnerabilities from climate-related events in order to identify high risks to mission effectiveness on installations and to operations.”

Conger Says Consensus Exists to Address Climate-Related Readiness Threats

1 April 2019 | https://www.defensecommunities.org/...to-address-climate-related-readiness-threats/

Recent natural disasters and damage from extreme weather events are increasingly challenging DOD leaders to address long-term issues of installation resiliency, according to a DefenseOne Radio report.

“California wildfires led to the evacuation of family housing at Camp Pendleton, Naval Air Station Point Mugu and the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said at a March hearing. “In addition, our coastal installations and their surrounding communities are already experiencing significant flooding due to sea-level rise.”

The Air Force announced last week that it will cost $1.2 billion to recover to full operations at storm- damaged Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., and Offutt Air Force Base, Neb.

The rise in climate-related installation threats calls for a certain level of acknowledgement and cooperation, former DOD comptroller John Conger said on the DefenseOne podcast.

“It’s not that the issue of climate change is something that’s so egregious; it’s just not necessarily everybody’s priority,” said Conger, now director of the Center for Climate and Security. “But the priority that everybody has is to help the military do their mission. And I think… that kind of resilience-and-readiness-and-responsiveness sort of attitude and priority is really important and is something that you do find consensus on.”

U.S. Air Force photo of John Conger (right) by Airman 1st Class Kyle Gese

“California wildfires led to the evacuation of family housing at Camp Pendleton, Naval Air Station Point Mugu and the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said at a March hearing. “In addition, our coastal installations and their surrounding communities are already experiencing significant flooding due to sea-level rise.”