U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus Has Been Pushing A 'Great Green Fleet'

So in theory, Congress should have no problem passing legislation to provide the funds to make this a reality. However, there are a few hurdles standing in the way: Republicans. The House GOP included a measure in the defense authorization bill this month prohibiting the Defense Department from buying alternative fuels if they cost more than “traditional fossil fuel.” And the Senate Armed Services Committee last week followed suit with an “even tougher” provision mirroring the House version but also exempts DOD from clean energy standards.

Why are the Republicans doing this? VoteVets.org chairman Jon Soltz pointed out yesterday that they get a lot of money from the oil and gas industry:

In short, Republicans would be forcing the military to go back to using the same fuels that hampered it from doing its job — and the same fuels that have resulted in the deaths of so many Americans.

Why? That’s the question that must be asked. And the answer is pretty simple. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Oil and Gas interests have donated 88 percent of their political contributions to Republicans this cycle — nearly $18 million. That’s the highest percentage they’ve given to Republicans since at least 1990.

And, boy, are Republicans delivering for them. Even if it means forcing the Pentagon to stop developing programs that could make our military more effective. Even if it means banning programs that would save the lives of our troops. There is nothing, it seems, that they value more than delivering for their dirty oil campaign donors.

Two Senate Democrats, Jim Webb (VA) and Joe Manchin (WV) joined the Armed Services Committee Republicans in voting for the measure. However, the amendment may have failed had Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who voted against a similar amendment, been present for the vote. The Hill reported last week that “[a] Collins spokesman said she had to miss the vote to speak with the commander of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine after the USS Miami fire. He said Collins would support biofuels if the issue comes up on the Senate floor.”

“While we all love the environment and want to be good stewards of the earth,” Soltz added, “the military isn’t on some kind of ecological mission when it comes to renewables. They’re trying to help ensure men and women come home to their loved ones.”

BIDEN: Looking at your kids, most you have kids here, and it was the first time in my career, my life, I realized someone could go out and I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here — but it’s more important, you’re more important.

For the first time in my life I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their heart, they never get there again, that there was never going to get — there never going to be that way ever again. That’s how an awful lot you have feel.

There will come a day, I promise you, and you parents as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. [...]

So, hang onto each other. Hang onto each other. And I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you how deeply the five of us on this stage feel about the sacrifices you’ve made for this country. That doesn’t — that doesn’t fill the black hole. You should know only 1 percent of you have fought these wars and much less thank God than 1 percent of those that fought the wars are going through what you’re going through.

We owe you more than we can ever, ever repay you. As I said, my prayer is that that smile will come sooner than later, but I promise you it will come. God bless you all and my God protect our troops. Thank you.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired a clip of Biden’s speech:

But all of the impacts occurring simultaneously will have an even more devastating synergy (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts“).  It means the rich countries will be far less likely to be offering much assistance to the poorer ones, since there will be ever worsening catastrophes everywhere simultaneously so we’ll be suffering at the same time.  Heck, this deep economic downturn and the record-smashing disasters of the past two years has already exacerbated media myopia and compassion fatigue to help those around the world staggered by floods and droughts.

And that suggests another deadly climate impact — far more difficult to project quantitatively because there is no paleoclimate analog — may well affect far more people both directly and indirectly: war, conflict, competition for arable and/or habitable land.

We will have to work as hard as possible to make sure we don’t leave a world of wars to our children. That means avoiding decades if not centuries of strife and conflict from catastrophic climate change. That also means finally ending our addiction to oil, a source — if not the source — of two of our biggest recent wars.

Last November, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan “said rising temperatures and rainwater shortages are having a devastating effect on food production. Failing to address the problem will have repercussions on health, security and stability.”

The NYT reported in 2009:

The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

That’s a key reason 33 generals and admirals supported the comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs bill in 2010, asserting “Climate change is making the world a more dangerous place” and “threatening America’s security.”  The Pentagon itself has made the climate/security link explicit in its Quadrennial Defense Review.

Sadly, the chance that humanity will avert catastrophic climate impacts has dropped sharply in the past two years (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2“).  And that means it is increasingly likely we face a world beyond 450 ppm atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which in turn means we likely cross carbon cycle tipping points that threaten to quickly take us to 800 to 1000 ppm — a world of rapid warming and a ruined climate far outside the bounds of any human experience.

It is a world not merely of endless regional resource wars around the globe. It is a world with dozens of Darfurs and Pakistani mega-floods, of countless environmental refugees — hundreds of millions in the second half of this century — all clamoring to occupy the parts of the developed world that aren’t flooded or desertified.

In such a world, everyone will ultimately become a veteran, and Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day may fade into obscurity, as people forget about a time when wars were the exception, a time when soldiers were but a small minority of the population.  And if we don’t act swiftly and strongly to stop it, the worst impacts could last a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe and Nature Geoscience: ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).

So when does this start to happen?

Thomas Fingar, “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” sees it happening by the mid-2020s:

By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change “could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Fingar said, while the United States will face “Dust Bowl” conditions in the parched Southwest“¦.

He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.

For the latest literature review and projections, see my May 13 post “Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now” as well as the 2011 study, Michael Wehner et al., “Projections of Future Drought in the Continental United States and Mexico,” and the 2010 piece, “Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path.”

The 2010 NCAR is being revised, but the figure below (which had been his 2030s projection in his original version) is a rough representation of where his analysis projects things will be in mid-century — if we are so self-destructive as to let this happen:

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here).

And, of course, we’ve seen that even in areas expected to become wetter, can experience an extreme heat wave so unprecedented that it forces the entire country to suspend grain exports:

• Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
• Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”

See also Nature Publishes My Piece on Dust-Bowlification and the Grave Threat It Poses to Food Security

Significantly, the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a scenario similar to Fingar’s in a 2009 speech to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it.

You can see a five-minute BBC interview with Beddington here. The speech is online. Here are some excerpts:

We saw the food spike last year; prices going up by something in the order of 300%, rice went up by 400%, we saw food riots, we saw major issues for the poorest in the world, in the sense that the organisations like the World Food Programme did not have sufficient money to buy food on the open market and actually use it to feed the poorest of the poor.

So this is a major problem. You can see the catastrophic decline in those reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves”….

So, what are the drivers? I am going to go through them now very briefly.

First of all, population growth. World population grows by six million every month “” greater than the size of the UK population every year. Between now and”¦ I am going to focus on the year 2030 and the reason I am going to focus on 2030 is that I feel that some of the climate change discussions focusing on 2100 don’t actually grip”¦. I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together.

By 2030, looking at population terms, you are looking at the global population increasing from a little over six billion at the moment to about eight billion”…

… you are going to see major changes but particularly in the demand for livestock — meat and dairy….

… By 2030, the demand for food is going to be increased by about 50%. Can we do it? One of the questions. There is a major food security issue by 2030. We’ve got to somehow produce 50% more by that time.The second issue I want to focus on is the availability of fresh water”¦. The fresh water available per head of the world population is around 25% of what it was in 1960. To give you some idea of this; there are enormous potential shortages in certain parts of the world”¦ China has something like 23% of the world’s population and 11% of the world’s water.

… the massive use of water is in agriculture and particularly in developing world agriculture. Something of the order of 70% of that. One in three people are already facing water shortages and the total world demand for water is predicted to increase by 30% by 2030.

So, we’ve got food — expectation of demand increase of 50% by 2030, we’ve got water — expectation of demand increase of 30% by 2030. And in terms of what it looks like, we have real issues of global water security.

…. where there is genuine water stress [in 2025 is] China and also parts of India, but look at parts of southern Europe where by 2025 we are looking at serious issues of water stress”….

So, water is really enormously important. I am going to get onto the climate change interactions with it a little bit later but water is the one area that I feel is seriously threatening. It is so important because a shortage of water obviously interacts with a shortage of food, there are real potentials for driving significant international problems — what do you do if you have no water and you have no food? You migrate. So one can have a reasonable expectation that international migration will occur as these shortages come in.

Now, the third one I want to focus on is energy and, driven by the population increase that I talked about, the urbanisation I talked about and indeed the movement out of poverty”…. For the first time, the demand of the rest of the world exceeded the demand of energy of the OECD …. Energy demand is actually increasing and going to hit something of the order of a 50% increase, again by 2030.

Now, if that were not enough … those are three things that are coming together. What will the world be like when that happens? But we also have, of course, the issue of climate change. Now, this is a very familiar slide to you all but we are shooting for a target of two degrees centigrade, a perfectly sensible target. There is enormous uncertainty in the climate change models about that particular target. It is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for one degrees centigrade or, oddly enough, it is perfectly reasonable to say ‘shouldn’t we be shooting for three degrees centigrade’, the only information we have is really enormously uncertain in terms of the climate change model.

Shooting for two seems a perfectly sensible and legitimate objective but there are enormous problems. You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers “” the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way….

The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification….

As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.

… we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

Some of this can be avoid or minimized if we act now. Some of it can’t. But if we don’t act strongly now, then by Memorial Day 2030, many of the global conflicts will either be resource wars or wars driven by environmental degradation and dislocation (see “Warming Will Worsen Water Wars). Indeed that may already have started to happen (see “Report: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation Trigger Darfur Crisis).

For one discussion of the kind of wars we might be seeing, albeit for the year 2046, here is a three-part radio series on Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, a Canadian journalist and historian of warfare.

For all of the above reasons, veterans and security experts and politicians of all parties have begun working together to avoid the worst.   A key leader on climate and energy security has been the conservative Virgina Republican, John Warner, who pushed hard to pass the clean energy bill — because he is a former Navy secretary and former Senate Armed Services Committee chair and because he is a former Forest Service firefighter now “just absolutely heartbroken” because “the old forest, the white pine forest in which I worked, was absolutely gone, devastated, standing there dead from the bark beetle” thanks in large part to global warming.

Warner has been “trying to build grass-roots support for congressional action to limit global warming,” as Politics Daily reported. “He is traveling the country to discuss military research that shows climate change is a threat to U.S. national security.” Here is part of PD‘s interview:

PD: Does the responsibility fall to us to respond to the consequences of climate change?

JW: Not exclusively, but we’re often in the forefront of response to these things. We’re the nation with the most sealift. The most airlift. We have more medical teams which are mobile, more storehouses of food and supplies to meet emergencies. And throughout our history, from the beginning of the republic, America’s always had to respond to certain humanitarian disasters.

PD: What are some examples of destabilization due to climate?

JW: One clear case of it is Somalia. [In the early 1990s] the prolonged drought began to tie up the economy, the food supplies. There was a certain amount of political and economic instability. Where you have fragile nations . . . a serious climactic problem will come along, with a shortage of food or water, and often those governments are toppled. And then they fall to the evils of . . . terrorism or others who try to exploit these fallen governments. You saw it in Darfur. You saw it in Somalia. This political instability and weakness is given the final tilt by a problem associated with climactic change.

Our choice today is clear. We can continue listening to the voices of denial and delay and disinformation, assuring that everyone ultimately becomes a veteran of the growing number of climate-related conflicts.

Or we can launch a WWII-scale effort and a WWII-style effort to address the problem as Hansen and I and many others have called for. That is our most necessary fight today.

This post is an update.

Related Posts:

• Nicholas Stern: Climate inaction risks a “global war”
• Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”
• Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization
• Steven Chu on climate change: “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California”
• Sen. Barrasso (R-WY) seeks to block intelligence on the national security threat posed by climate change. He needs to see the Fingar.
• Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America

The late David Levine's caricature of Bolton

In Iowa, the typically über-hawkish Fox News commentator pleaded with event attendees to support Romney even though he “may not have been your perfect candidate,” and later told the crowd:

A dollar well spent on American defense is a lot different than a dollar spent with the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s qualitatively different.

Romney is trying to base his campaign for president on his (dubious) record as a job creator (at the expense of all other issues, including Bolton’s forté, foreign policy).

But Bolton’s idea won’t help Romney’s campaign theme. He’s right: Military spending is “qualitatively different,” but not quite in the way that Bolton means. According to a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, study, military spending creates fewer jobs than other government spending. Here’s a chart published in the study:

So actually, a dollor spent on the military is “different”: it’s less valuable in terms of job creation than spending on government programs such as those administered precisely by the Department of Health and Human Services. This, however, will probably be news to Mitt Romney and his generously-spending militaristic advisers. What shouldn’t be news to the Romney campaign however, is Bolton’s push to rob social security and health care spending to give more money to the military.

Supporters of the amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), said removing the restriction is a matter of fairness for military women:

Supporters argue that it would simply provide parity between civilians insured by the government and uniformed service members. [...]

“This is about equity,” Shaheen said. “Civilian women who depend on the federal government for health insurance — whether they are postal workers or Medicaid recipients — have the right to access affordable abortion care if they are sexually assaulted. It is only fair that the thousands of brave women in uniform fighting to protect our freedoms are treated the same.”

Shaheen’s provision would mirror the Hyde Amendment, which allows Medicaid funding for abortions in cases of rape and incest, so women with military-provided insurance plans would have the same health care options as civilian women with government health care plans.

And because nearly one in three women will be sexually assaulted while serving in the military, Shaheen’s amendment expands access to necessary services so that women do not have to pay out of pocket if they seek abortion care after being rape.

Now that the committee has approved the measure — with three Republicans voting for it — it heads to the Senate floor. When Shaheen introduced this amendment last year, anti-choice senators blocked it from being considered.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters now believe the United States should remove all its troops from Western Europe and let the Europeans defend themselves. Only 29% disagree, but another 20% are undecided.

Part of President Obama’s plan to cut nearly $500 billion in military spending over the next decade (DOD’s budget will still grow over that same period) includes cutting two Army brigades in Europe.

Back in February, CAP’s Lawrence Korb, Alex Rothman and Max Hoffman praised the Obama plan to scale back from Europe, adding that there is “no reason” to maintain such a large American presence there:

[T]he Obama administration’s plan to remove two brigades from Europe will focus U.S. military resources where they are most needed. There is no reason for the United States to continue stationing 70,000 troops on a stable continent that has more than enough resources to provide for its own defense.

The CAP report notes that the 2010 Sustainable Defense Task Force found the United States can reduce its troop presence in Europe and Asia by one-third without harming American security or interests.” Moreover, “withdrawing 33,000 troops from Europe and 17,000 from Asia — far more than Panetta’s proposed withdrawal of two brigades — would enable savings $80 billion over the next decade.”

Last year, President Obama signed into law a budget scheme that threatens to saddle the U.S. military with nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years. President Obama’s own defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called cuts of this magnitude “devastating” to our national security. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has plainly said that such a reduction means “we would not any longer be a global power.” Despite these warnings, the Obama administration has pledged to veto an attempt to replace these cuts with savings in other areas. [...]

With the United States on a path to a hollow military, we are hardly in a position to exercise leadership in persuading our allies to spend more on security. And in fact the Obama administration has failed to exercise such leadership. Quite the contrary; a multiplier effect has set in: The administration’s irresponsible defense cuts are clearing the way for our partners to do even less.

There’s one major flaw in Romney’s argument: Obama alone is not responsible for the $1 trillion in military spending reductions over the next decade. The Obama administration did usher in nearly $500 billion in cuts over the next decade, but those cuts — contrary to Romney’s suggestion — have “real buy in” from the military’s top brass, as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said. Panetta supports the cuts too, saying the U.S. will still have “the capability to confront and defeat more than one adversary at a time.”

Congress, however, is responsible for the other $500 billion in military spending cuts as a result of the bipartisan debt deal that Obama signed into law. Those reductions are set to take place because of the sequester the deal put in place should lawmakers fail to agree on how to find savings elsewhere (House Republicans want to cut much needed programs for the nation’s poorest to offset the military spending cuts).

Indeed, as the Washington Post noted, “Romney’s statement fails to note that the sequester was part of a deal negotiated by the White House and leaders of both parties, a sweeping proposal that was approved by nearly three-quarters of the House Republican conference and six in 10 Senate Republicans.”

But on the substance, Romney is also wrong to claim that the U.S. military can’t withstand $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. As CAP defense budget expert Lawrence Korb noted, “[t]his would, in real terms, allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 levels.”

Photo: Getty Images

Moreover, seeming to concede President Obama’s dominance of national security issues this campaign season, a Romney adviser told the Times that Romney isn’t interested in talking about foreign policy. “Romney doesn’t want to really engage these issues until he is in office,” the adviser said.

And there’s good reason. Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy and national security issues has dogged his campaign with confusion, ignorance and private and public disagreements among Romney’s campaign advisers and surrogates:

AFGHANISTAN

Romney has been “all over the map” on Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reported late last year, Romney “has not explained what he thinks the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is at this point and what would constitute success.” And keeping with his adviser’s above statement, Romney said in a major foreign policy speech that he’d wait until becomes president to “order a full review of our transition to the Afghan military.”

Romney also says that the U.S. should not be negotiating with the Taliban, a position that puts him at odds with his top national security campaign surrogate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), his own advisers and even former top Bush administration officials. “Romney’s supporters and foreign policy advisers argue that after a decade at war, the only option is a political settlement,” the Times noted.

IRAN

Romney said that if Obama is re-elected, Iran will get a nuclear weapon. “If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” he said. That line “caused some of his advisers to cringe” the Times reported this weekend. But overall, again, Romney has no real policy on Iran that differs much from the current administration’s approach. Romney has proposed much of what Obama is already doing. The Times noted that “when pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding.”

But Romney does occasionally ramp up bellicose rhetoric on Iran which prompted a former Israeli Mossad director to say the former Massachusetts governor “is making the situation worse” with Iran. Romney has ignored what the IAEA, U.S. and Israeli intelligence think about Iran’s nuclear program and his campaign advisers even attacked the Obama administration for public discussion of the consequences of attacking Iran.

RUSSIA

Russia “is without question, our number one geopolitical foe,” Romney said in March. The Washington Post called the remark “a bit puzzling,” given Russia’s post-Cold War global standing and less adversarial relationship with the United States. Even McCain seemed a bit wary of endorsing that point of view.

And the co-chairman of the Romney campaign’s working group Russia, Leon Aron, disagrees with Romney’s contention that, as the Times put it, “natural resources could vault Russia to a position of global influence rivaling any nation by midcentury.” Aron wrote last month that “Russia’s most serious risk stems from a near-fatal dependence on the price of oil.”

CHINA

Romney’s regularly hypes the Chinese military threat and ignores the need for engaging China diplomatically and economically. In fact, former GOP presidential candidate and U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, who declared himself a Romney supporter, said that Romney’s China policy is “wrongheaded.” Even one of Romney’s top foreign policy advisers praised President Obama on China. “I think he has a good policy in Asia, particularly in dealing with China,” said Robert Kagan.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE/MIDDLE EAST

While Romney often throws out the baseless attack line that Obama has thrown Israel “under the bus,” the presumptive GOP nominee has offered no real plan to achieve peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In fact, Romney has said that the U.S. “should not play the role of leader” in the Middle East peace process. “My inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel,” he said last October.

Romney criticized Newt Gingrich for saying Palestinians aren’t people, but again, he said he’d ask the Israelis what his position would be. “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: ‘Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?’” Former U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration Martin Indyk said that statement implied that he would “subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.”

VETERANS

The Romney campaign has attacked President Obama for not doing enough for the nation’s veterans, yet Romney has no plan to address various issues affecting the U.S. military — for example, veterans’ health care and unemployment or servicemembers’ education.

TERRORISM

In 2007 and 2008, Romney based his national security policy during his failed presidential bid on the need to fight “radical jihad” and the threat from those wanting to unite the world “under a single Islamic caliphate.” During that campaign, Romney also said he does “not concur” with then Sen. Obama’s plan to go after “high-value intelligence targets” in Pakistan with or without permission. And referring to Osama bin Laden, Romney said, “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

But now, Romney barely mentions terrorism, jihadists or an Islamic caliphate and claims that “of course” he would have done what Obama did and ordered the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader last year. “Any thinking American” would have ordered the raid, Romney said. Apparently “any thinking American” does not include Vice President Biden and Robert Gates, who was Defense Secretary at the time of the raid.

The Times also reported this weekend that Romney’s foreign policy advisers — many of whom helped push for the Iraq war and are now doing the same with Iran — are themselves divided. “There are two very different worldviews in this campaign,” on adviser said. Some of the more mainstream views within the campaign have resulted from “the scar tissue they developed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Bush-era experiments in the exercise of American power.” But there also remains the more hawkish “Bolton faction,” referring to former Bush administration ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

So it’s clear why Romney doesn’t want to engage on foreign policy and national security issues in this year’s presidential campaign: his advisers don’t agree with him or each other. And Romney either doesn’t have any national security policies, they aren’t different from President Obama’s, or as recent polling has suggested, they aren’t very popular.

On Friday, House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) took to Fox News, claiming that the budget cuts endorsed by, among others, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey would undermine U.S. national security:

FORBES: If you listen to what the Navy says, it will reduce the number of ships in our navy down to the lowest level in a hundred years. [...] But worse than that is that fact that, for the first time, we’re moving dangerously close to not being able to guarantee the security of the United States of America. And I don’t think the American people want us to be there.

Watch the clip:

But Forbes’ argument for higher defense spending is undermined by the facts. Politifact examined the argument about the reduction in naval ships, and concluded that:

[A] wide range of experts told us it’s wrong to assume that a decline in the number of ships or aircraft automatically means a weaker military. Quite the contrary: The United States is the world’s unquestioned military leader today, not just because of the number of ships and aircraft in its arsenal but also because each is stocked with top-of-the-line technology and highly trained personnel.

Thanks to the development of everything from nuclear weapons to drones, comparing today’s military to that of 60 to 100 years ago presents an egregious comparison of apples and oranges.

And the Center for American Progress’s Lawrence J. Korb, Melissa Boteach and Max Hoffman looked at the Republican defense budget proposal and found that strategic cuts to our defense budget, including reducing our nuclear stockpile, can be implemented without undermining national security. In an issue brief earlier this year, Korb and Alex Rothman observed that budget cuts could save $600 billion over a decade without undermining national security. “Unnecessary defense spending does not make our nation safer,” they wrote.

While Republicans claim that budget cuts would damage national security, keeping the defense budget sequestration cuts — which for FY 2013 would limit the budget to $472 billion — would allow the Pentagon to spend at its 2007 level, a year in which even defense hawks weren’t complaining about the budget being too low, for the next decade. This budget would keep real defense spending above the Cold War average, a period in which the U.S. faced a genuine existential threat from the Soviet Union.

Today, Forbes kicks off the “Defending our Defenders” tour in which House Republicans will hold town-hall events across the country in a push to persuade voters to oppose defense cuts and support GOP efforts to boost the coming year’s defense budget. They face an uphill battle. Polling data released last week shows that 65 percent of American think defense spending is already too high.

At a press conference today, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey explained how the materials taught in the class were brought to his attention and expressed a harsh criticism of them. He said:

DEMPSEY: As you know, I’ve made an inquiry into a particular course that was brought to my attention by one of the students because he was concerned that it was objectionable and that it was counter to our values — you know, our appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness. And the young man who brought it to my attention was absolutely right. It’s totally objectionable.

And so we are looking at how that course was approved, what motivated the individual to adopt that — it was an elective, but what motivated that elective for being part of the curriculum. And we are looking across the institutions that provide our professional military education to make sure there’s nothing like that out there.

It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound. This wasn’t about pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.

Watch the video:

As Dempsey mentioned, he ordered an investigation of the class upon recognizing just how “objectionable” the material therein was. The examination of other teaching materials might find a good place to start by looking into Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, who facilitated the class, remains, for the moment, in his position at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

During the DOD presser today, Dempsey said he doesn’t “see a need” for the East Coast missile defense:

Q: The House has added $100 million for missile defense into the budget. Do you think that the East Coast needs a missile defense system. Do they need to do this survey that will cost $100 million that the Pentagon didn’t request or is this politically motivated? [...]

DEMPSEY: On ballistic missile defense, as you know we went through a strategic review in the fall and we mapped our budget to it and what I can tell you Jennifer is in my military judgement the program of record for ballistic missile defense for the homeland as we’ve submitted it is adequate and sufficient to the task and that’s a suite of ground based and sea based interceptors. So I don’t see a need beyond what we’ve submitted in the last budget.

Watch it:

Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH,) who supported the East Coast missile defense measure, claims it’s needed “to lessen the threats from both Iran and North Korea.” But the AP reports that Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O’Reilly, the head of the U.S. missile defense program, told Congress recently that North Korea lacks the testing for a capable system and has made little progress in its spaceflight program. And former CIA Mideast analyst Paul Pillar has noted that “the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile].”

Moreover, as Dempsey hinted at in the press conference, Danger Room notes that existing systems already have the eastern sea board covered from ICBM threats.

“This is a political move,” said Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) referring to the GOP’s missile defense scheme. “Every time the election comes around, the Republicans run out a national security agenda.”

With the Pentagon’s base budget — which does not include war costs — forecast to hit 3.5% of GDP in 2013, a jump to 4% would mean an increase of around $100 billion dollars in defense spending in 2013. [...]

Compared to the Pentagon’s current budget, Romney’s plan would lead to $2.1 trillion in additional spending over the next ten years, according to an analysis conducted for CNNMoney by Travis Sharp, a budget expert at the Center for a New American Security.

And that number assumes a gradual increase to 4% of GDP. The additional spending would hit $2.3 trillion over a decade if the Pentagon’s budget were to immediately jump to 4% of GDP.

CNN charts the numbers:

And Romney has not said how he’d pay for it. CNN notes that the “lack of detail means that Romney’s claim of moving toward a balanced budget requires a great deal of trust.” On top of increased military spending, Romney plans on expanding on the Bush tax cuts but has also not said how he would pay for them.

Budget experts criticized Romney’s defense plan. Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the plan for additional spending does not “reflect fiscal reality,” while Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said “spending should be determined by the security environment — not the size of your economy.”

“Romney’s plan might reduce military risk in some areas,” Sharp said. “But you can never eliminate all the risk — no matter how much you spend.”

Perhaps Romney will take cues from his friends on the House Republican caucus, who want to cut programs that help the poor to prevent necessary reductions in military spending.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA)

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), a sponsor of so-called “conscience” measure — which may turn into a “licence to bully” gay and lesbian servicemembers — claimed, “The president has repealed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and is using the military as props to promote his gay agenda.” Akin is running for Senate in Missouri.

Indeed, his claims are dubious at best. Under current policy, chaplains can opt out from performing same-sex ceremonies and have publicly stated that they continue to conduct “religious ceremonies and rites in keeping with the canons [or beliefs, doctrine, policies] of the religious faith group that endorses that chaplain.”

The inclusion of anti-gay measures in the defense bill also represents a reversal for House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), who upon winning back the chairmanship in November of 2010, pledged to pass clean defense bills that were “not weighed down” by social issues. “Congress should pass clean legislation — without the liberal social agenda items Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi and (Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid have insisted on attaching in the run-up to the election,” McKeon said, referring to amendments to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and enact hate crimes protections. He added: “The National Defense Authorization Act—especially in wartime—should be focused on one core equity: caring and providing for the men and women in uniform and their families.”