From Draft NOtices, January-March 2025
— Lauren Reyna Morales
Americans are subjected to patriotic propaganda in nearly every facet of our institutionalized culture. From the movies, to pledging allegiance, to the nightly “news,” to the classroom and everywhere in between, we are conditioned to buy into the greatest-democracy-on-earth schtick. It is no wonder there’s an abundance of stunningly ignorant beliefs about U.S. militarism and imperialism. Beliefs that forsake a global perspective, ecological health and human rights in favor of dogmatic fealty to the beloved State narrative.
In an August 2024 publication in The Hill, columnist Amrik Chattha expressed a view so distressing that it even surprised me. Chattha wants the U.S. military to rebrand itself as a super-awesome-leading-fighter against the climate crisis. He contends that since young people are motivated to wage war against the onslaught of climate catastrophe, such a rebranding would encourage a new generation to consider careers in militarism. Chattha supposes that the U.S. military has a greater capacity to combat environmental challenges than any other organizational entity.
Imagine! There are “boots on the ground, not only in conflict zones but also in every corner of America that needs robust climate resilience measures — installing advanced electrical grips, engineering sustainable water systems” and more. For Chattha, the U.S. military reinventing itself as “dutiful protector of our planet” is a win-win situation. The greenwashing of our military would boost recruitment numbers and “serve as a catalyst for a broader national effort” towards sustainability that will ultimately confront climate change, the defining existential threat of his generation.
Chattha’s opinion piece is propaganda that promotes a march further into dystopian hell. Those sufficiently educated about the American imperialist project that is sustained by militarism know that maintaining this system is incompatible with a livable and just future for all living things. As War Resisters International (WRI) puts it in a valuable new report, the U.S. military is indisputably one of the “greatest destroyers and toxic contaminators of all life — people, animals, water, forests, mountains, deserts, you name it”. This is an organization engaged in massacres of civilian populations and ecocide under the false guise of “liberation.” Militarism has enabled the United States to develop an economy built on mass consumption that breeds insatiable extraction of the land and exploitation of its people.
The ecologically destructive nature of the U.S. military has been given a pass for decades. It is often the “elephant in the room” as it relates to human created climate change. Despite having a carbon footprint larger than any other institution on earth, disclosure of its greenhouse gas emissions has been “kept off the books”. The U.S. government successfully lobbied for an exemption for military activity from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that set binding emissions targets for signatory nations. Even though this exemption was later removed during the 2015 Paris talks, “reporting of military emissions remains optional.” As noted by journalist Lorraine Mallinder, two 2019 reports revealed the U.S. military to be the world’s largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons, “belching more emissions than industrialized nations like Portugal and Denmark.”
Just how could such a noxious entity convince the public that it is a defender of the Earth? According to Xander Dunlap, author of WRI’s "Short Primer on Militarism and the Climate Crisis,” greenwashing militarism is accomplished in two different ways. First, the military presents itself as a force to protect nature by assisting in transforming lands into sanctuaries like National Parks. In practice, this historically means removing Indigenous people from their homes to curate an eco-fascist paradise, devoid of human inhabitants and for the voyeur of settler colonial societies. Second, the military will attempt to green itself by powering sustainable violence. This looks like establishing “domestic and overseas military operations on supposedly lower-carbon energy sources than fossil fuels,” such as solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric power and biofuels. The materials and land required to produce this sustainable violence will ravage the people and environments of the global south. The extraction and exploitation, like most military operations, will be kept far away from Westerners who benefit from the destruction.
Let us take a moment to recognize that the United States has been funding the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestine for over a year now. Israel’s relentless onslaught has been destructive for all life on a massive scale. In June of 2024, the United Nations released a preliminary assessment on the environmental impact of that war. It reported the region has suffered “unprecedented soil, water and air pollution,” with explosive weapons generating some 39 million tons of debris. “Water, sanitation, and hygiene systems are now almost entirely defunct.” Before October 7th, the Gaza strip had one of the highest densities of rooftop solar panels in the world. Israel has since destroyed most of the “burgeoning solar infrastructure, and broken panels can leave lead and heavy metal contaminants” into the land. Eoghan Darbyshire, senior researcher at the UK-based non-profit Conflict and Environment Observatory, observes that large areas of Palestine “will not be recovered to a safe state within a generation, even with limitless finances and will.” The current atrocities funded by the United States in Palestine is just one example from the countless cases of the hellish destructive nature of militarism.
The views expressed by Amrik Chattha are incredibly dangerous. Naturally, they build on the mythical foundation that the U.S. military is a benevolent force for people and the planet. There is no possible world that exists wherein the U.S. empire, maintained by militarism, does not wreak havoc on human communities and the environment. It is crucial that the current and future generations fighting for their literal survival amid the climate crisis are educated to understand this truth. Dismantling militarism must be on the forefront of any advocacy for climate justice and social equity as it relates to this issue.
Information sources:
Chattha, Amrik. “Less Rock, more Earth: Increase recruitment by making the armed forces a climate force.” The Hill, Aug. 13, 2024. Available at: https://thehill.com/
Dunlap, Xander. “Sustainable violence is social war: against green militarism.” War Resisters’ International, Oct. 25, 2024. Available at: https://wri-irg.org/en
Dickie, Gloria, and Withers, Alison. “Gaza conflict has caused major environmental damage, UN says.” Reuters, June 18, 2024. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/
Mallinder, Lorraine. “‘Elephant in the room’: The U.S. military’s devastating carbon footprint.” Aljazeera, Dec 12, 2023. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/).
