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The Pentagon’s new climate change report is missing some important details

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Less than two months after President Donald Trump said he did not believe a federal report outlining the existential threat of human-made climate change, the Defense Department has released its own report on how to manage the “effects of a changing climate.”

As part of the defense spending bill for fiscal year 2018, the Pentagon was asked to create “a list of the ten most vulnerable military installations within each service” in addition to “combatant commander requirements resulting from climate change over the next 20 years.” The 22-page report begins with 11 words that contradict the commander in chief’s description of climate change as a “very expensive” hoax. It states: “The effects of a changing climate are a national security issue.” Those lines comprise “the strongest part of the report,” retired naval officer David Titley, who once headed the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change, tells Mother Jones in an email. But the rest, he says,“is disappointing, primarily because it does not answer the key questions Congress raised.”

For example, Marine Corps bases are not listed at all, even though Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the Marines’ largest base on the East Coast, was devastated in September by Hurricane Florence to the tune of roughly $3.6 billion in damage. Ninety-five percent of the buildings on Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida were damaged by Hurricane Michael, yet in the appendix to the Pentagon’s report, Tyndall is not even mentioned as one of the Air Force’s most vulnerable bases.

Other aspects of the report just seem crudely out of date, even though it was submitted a month later than Congress had requested. In November, Naval Base Ventura County in California had to be evacuated due to approaching wildfires, yet in the report, the Navy does not list NBVC or, for that matter, identify a single installation where wildfires pose a “current” threat. Titley thinks the problem is the lack of an “apparent DOD standard for assessing the near- or mid-term climate future and impacts.” One reason for this might be because, according to the report, each military service was “free to select information sources they deemed relevant.”

Without a unifying standard, the report simply provides a “number of anecdotes to daily base and humanitarian operations, most of which are driven by routine weather events or tsunamis and earthquakes that have no connection to climate change,” he says. “Congress will likely not be amused by this report.”

They weren’t. House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (a Democrat from Washington state) blasted the report Friday morning as “half-baked” and “inadequate.”

“The Department of Defense presented no specifics on what is required to ensure operational viability and mission resiliency, and failed to estimate the future costs associated with ensuring these installations remain viable,” Smith said. “That information was required by law. The Department of Defense must develop concrete, executable plans to address the national security threats presented by climate change. As drafted, this report fails to do that.”

Representative Jim Langevin (a Democrat from Rhode Island), whose amendment to the 2018 spending bill mandated the creation of the report, said he was “deeply disappointed” by the report. “It is unacceptable that the Department has ignored the clear instructions provided by law, and it is unacceptable that our service members and readiness will suffer as a result.” Senator Jack Reed (also a Democrat from Rhode Island), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services panel, said: “The report reads like a introductory primer and carries about as much value as a phonebook.”

The Pentagon has long been in an ambiguous position when it comes to acknowledging and preparing for climate change. More than other federal agencies in the Trump administration, DOD has been less likely to skirt past the impact of global warming, given the persistent impacts of drought, wildfires, and flooding on military installations in the United States and abroad. But as an institution that treasures its reputation for transcending partisan politics, DOD has strayed away from emphasizing climate change in its internal documents.

One year ago, the Pentagon released another congressionally mandated report about climate change — that time, a survey of the ways climate change had affected thousands of global installations. Shortly after the release of the report, the Washington Post found out that staffers had removed nearly two dozen references to climate change from an earlier version. “Those and other edits suggest the Pentagon has adapted its approach to public discussion of climate change under President Trump,” the Post reported.

Even as Defense officials have become more careful with their rhetoric, they have actually increased their efforts to account for the effect of climate change in certain crucial ways. A warming Arctic has created new opportunities for conflict with Russia and China, something the Navy has become more conscious of in internal strategic guidance. In a recent piece about the Pentagon’s slow efforts to prepare for climate change, Jonathan White, who succeeded Titley as task force director, told Mother Jones: Tying things to climate change could invite a scrutiny that was undesired.”

If anything, the Pentagon’s reluctance to deal in specifics may lead to more work for the department down the line. Representative Langevin noted: “I expect the Department to reissue a report that meets its statutory mandate and rigorously confronts the realities of our warming planet.”

Read the full report here.

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The Pentagon’s new climate change report is missing some important details

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Photos: Women Who Risked Everything to Expose Sexual Assault in the Military

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Mary F. Calvert won the 2013 Canon Female Photojournalist Award for this body of work and is showing it at the 2014 Visa Pour l’image in Perpignan, France. Calvert also just won the Alexia Foundation 2014 Women’s Initiative Grant to help fund her related project, Missing in Action: Homeless Female Veterans.

Women in the US military are being raped and sexually assaulted by their colleagues in record numbers. An estimated 26,000 rapes and sexual assaults took place in the military in 2012, the last year that statistic is available; only 1 in 7 victims reported their attacks, and just 1 in 10 of those cases went to trial.

According to mental-health experts, the effects of military sexual trauma (MST) include depression, substance abuse, paranoia, and feelings of isolation. Victims spend years drowning in shame and fear as the psychological damage silently eats away at their lives. Many frequently end up addicted to drugs and alcohol, homeless, or take their own lives.

In 2013, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) introduced the Military Justice Improvement Act, which was designed to change the ways the military prosecutes sexual-violence crimes and restricts commanding officer’s power to set aside or overturn convictions for sexual violence. But in March 2014, the bill fell 5 votes short of the 60 required to avoid a filibuster.

In May, the Department of Defense Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for fiscal year 2013 found that reports of sexual assault were up 50 percent. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has implemented a variety of measures to combat sexual assault, including the examination of gender-responsive and appropriate military culture, a review of alcohol policies and sales, the evaluation and improvement of sexual-assault prevention and response training for commanders, and encouraging more male victims to report sexual assaults.

But the violence of rape and the ensuing emotional trauma are still compounded by what victims see as the futility of reporting the attacks to their commands. Take the case of Kate Weber, who says she was raped one week into an Air Force deployment to Germany when she was 18. After she reported the attack, she says she was stalked and harassed. “I just lost everything,” Weber says. “I know he was a repeat offender the moment he touched me. He was able to get away with it because the chain of command allowed it.”

US Army Spc. Natasha Schuette says she was sexually assaulted by her drill sergeant during basic training and subsequently suffered harassment by other drill sergeants after reporting the assault at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Schuette’s assailant is serving four years in prison for assaulting her and four other trainees; she says she suffers from PTSD.

While stationed in Bahrain, Brittany Fintel says she was grabbed and pinned down on a bed by a superior. She says she reported the assault and was told she had an “adjustment disorder,” was taken off the ship, and eventually left the Navy due to PTSD. “They kick the victim out. The victim is more fucked up in the head than apparently the rapist,” she says, weeping at her home in San Diego. Her PTSD service dog, Indiana, is never far from her side.

Gary Noling stands in his daughter Carri’s bedroom in Alliance, Ohio, on the anniversary of her death. Noling says Carri Goodwin faced severe retaliation after reporting her rape to her Marine superiors. Five days after going home with a bad-conduct discharge, she died from drinking to excess. “It destroyed my family,” Noling says.

Melissa Bania holds her banner before hanging it on the foot bridge across from the entrance to Naval Station San Diego. Earlier that evening, military sexual-trauma survivors had gathered at Brittany Fintel’s San Diego home to make banners inscribed with their sexual-assault experiences in the Navy.

Jessica Hinves meets with fellow military rape survivors in Biloxi, Mississippi, while her son plays. Hinves was an Air Force fighter jet mechanic and says she was raped by a member of her squadron at Nellis Air Force Base. Her case was thrown out the day before the trial was to begin.

Connie Sue Foss says she was raped while in the Army. She bears scars from punching a window during a PTSD episode and holds a molar she lost from grinding her teeth at night.

Since the assault, Foss says hasn’t been able to hold down a job to care for herself and her daughter.

Kate Weber says she was raped one week into an Air Force deployment to Germany when she was 18 and now suffers from severe PTSD. Here, she carries the uniforms of a fellow military rape survivor whom she’s helping move.

Suzie Champoux mourns the death of her daughter, Army Sgt. Sophie Champoux, who committed suicide under suspicious circumstances after allegedly being repeatedly raped while in the military. Suzie places a picture of her daughter in a display case at her local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter in Clermont, Florida.

Dr. Nancy Lutwak, a VA emergency room physician in New York, opened up a room just for female vets so they could have a safe place to share their experience of being raped in the military and the health problems they face due to the assaults.

Jennifer Norris says she was drugged and raped after joining the Air Force. In tech school, Norris says, she fought off the advances of other superiors. “It’s like being in a domestic-violence marriage that you can’t get divorced from,” she says. Norris reported the assaults, rape, and harassment and saw her attackers punished—but then says she endured a sustained campaign of retaliation by her peers at work. Now she suffers with PTSD and has become an advocate, counseling MST survivors in Maine.

Tiffany Berkland and Elisha Morrow were sexually harassed by the same man when in basic training after joining the Coast Guard. “He haunts your person by day and your dreams at night,” Morrow says. They did not report the harassment for fear of being kicked out but came forward when they met a third victim. When their case went to trial, they met a fourth young woman who had been raped recently by the same superior. Berkland and Morrow say they’re guilt-ridden for not coming forward sooner.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is fighting to take military rape cases outside the chain of command. A recent Senate vote for her proposed Military Justice Improvement Act fell five votes short.

Jennifer Norris testifies on Capitol Hill before a sparsely attended House Armed Services Committee hearing on sexual misconduct by basic training instructors at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

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Photos: Women Who Risked Everything to Expose Sexual Assault in the Military

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