Defense: As threats to America's security proliferate, the military has a new priority. Nuclear weapons? China? Russia? Terrorism? Nope. How about climate change. Feel safer now?
A new Pentagon directive says that climate change must now be part of all Defense Department "programs, plans and policies." According to a report by the Washington Times' Rowan Scarborough, the Defense Department is creating a "wide array of 'climate boards, councils and working groups' " to make this a priority. In other words, a vast new defense climate change bureaucracy is being born, after years of defense cutbacks.
This would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. As any objective observer will tell you, the U.S. faces a host of grave and growing threats.
Just this week, for instance, satellite photos show Iran working on a mysterious new installation that's tied to its nuclear weapons program. No doubt, work there is picking up since President Obama started forking over billions of dollars to them under the Iran nuclear deal.
Meanwhile, just a desert away from Iran, defense analysts fear something like World War III is brewing as the U.S., Russia, Turkey, Syria, ISIS and a number of Islamic rebel groups vie to decide the fate of the Middle East. Well. But our military's green policies are already having an impact. As Obama's former CIA deputy director Mike Morell recently told PBS' Charlie Rose, "we didn't go after oil wells . . . that ISIS controls because we didn't want to do environmental damage."
As if that weren't enough, North Korea on Super Sunday launched a three-stage Taepodong missile that could potentially carry a nuclear weapon to U.S. shores. Sunday's successful missile launch is the second in a row, and comes just a month after the Communist state declared it had detonated a hydrogen bomb.
Another foe, China, is creating a blue-water navy to challenge the U.S. dominance in the Western Pacific, building its ground forces into a formidable, modern standing army of 2 million, while making spurious territorial claims in the South China Sea. The world's No. 1 polluter, China seems surprisingly unworried about its military dirtying the atmosphere.
Add to that, Russia's continuing threats against Eastern Europe, the Baltic states and even Finland, and the U.S. has not been this threatened since before the end of the Cold War.
Closer to home, there have been at least 81 major terrorist threats against the U.S. since 9/11, the most recent just last month, the Heritage Foundation reports.
All these threats are very real. Global warming is purely hypothetical. And yet, the military is making global warming a priority.
The Pentagon's No. 3 official, procurement czar Frank Kendall, initiated this program. But make no mistake: It's President Obama's baby. His EPA, after all, has slapped strict CO2 limits on industry that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, and now wants to raise per-barrel oil taxes by $10. As recently documented, Obama has at least 22 times declared that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism. He's so obsessed that he's willing to damage both our economy and America's ability to defend itself.
We have a frivolous president who isn't serious about defense, and our enemies know it. For those who think the coming presidential election is a joke, think again. America's security, perhaps its very existence, depends on making the right choice.
