“Defend the core, deter the decisive threat.”
By Kevin W Billings OBE
Climate resilience is not a tangential concern, but the essential enabler for denial-based deterrence.
China’s rapid military modernization and expansion have coincided with its selective adherence to global environmental standards. The Chinese military leverages lax environmental policies to gain operational, strategic, and economic advantages, enabling it to advance national security objectives at the expense of ecological sustainability.
Global standards, such as the Paris Agreement and protocols on emissions, aim to mitigate climate change and ecological degradation. While China participates in these frameworks, its domestic policies often prioritise industrial and military growth over environmental stewardship. Regulatory leniency, weak enforcement, and prioritization of economic objectives create loopholes exploited by state-linked entities, including the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The PLA bypasses stringent environmental impact assessments, accelerating infrastructure projects. For example, rapid construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea involved dredging that destroyed coral reefs, showcasing a trade-off between strategic positioning and environmental stewardship. Additionally, China dominates rare earth mineral production, critical for advanced military technology. Mining these resources in regions like Inner Mongolia, often with minimal environmental safeguards, ensures a steady supply for defence industries while externalising ecological costs. Simultaneously, the Chinese military relies on coal-powered energy, which remains abundant and cheap due to state subsidies and relaxed emissions controls, reducing operational costs.
Manufacturers supplying the PLA face fewer environmental regulations, lowering production costs. For instance, state-owned enterprises producing aerospace and naval equipment benefit from reduced compliance expenditures. China’s GDP growth, partly fuelled by polluting industries, correlates with increased military budgets. In 2023, China announced a 7.2 percent rise in defense spending, supported by industrial sectors exempt from strict environmental oversight. Furthermore, lax environmental monitoring aids in concealing military activities. Emissions from undisclosed facilities or unregulated waste disposal from defence projects avoid international scrutiny, complicating intelligence efforts by adversaries.
China’s strategic non-compliance with environmental standards provides the PLA with tangible benefits, from resource access to operational secrecy. While advantageous nationally, this approach exacerbates environmental degradation and challenges international norms, urging a reevaluation of global frameworks to address militarized ecological exploitation.
President Trump’s Executive Order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accords was an immediate and powerful reaction to this situation. Nonetheless, the strategic and tactical actions the United States, NATO allies, and Indo-Pacific partners take can turn environmental constraints into asymmetrical advantages by prioritising technologies that reduce human dependency, enable sustainable logistics, and enhance resilience. By adopting innovations such as autonomous systems, synthetic fuels, and decentralized resource generation, the United States and its allies can outpace China, which remains tethered to legacy systems and environmentally costly practices while simultaneously reducing emissions and the threats those emissions exacerbate.
Unfortunately, for too long the dialogue about climate change has devolved into an almost religious shouting match between alarmist demanding impractical and draconian measures and deniers advocating the status quo. Both these alternatives are simply another front in the culture war, where the most significant causality is a bruised ego and neither are productive.
However, actual wars are being fought now and serious military operations to deter war and maintain the free flow of commerce throughout the world are currently underway. Combatant Commanders do not have the luxury of the dilettantes in the culture war. They have to make real life and death decisions about getting fuel and hydration to the front and whether or not they can add another 1,000 pounds of fuel to an aircraft and still get every munition to its target because the temperature has risen beyond the planning scenario. How we fight and how we shape the environment in the future battlespace is as much a piece of delivering resilience, deterrence and lethality as developing a new unmanned capability or hypersonic weapons.
The United States and its allies should be resolute in addressing the challenges of climate change, not simply to address the climate threat, that is a secondary reward, but to embrace it as an opportunity to leverage the climate as an disproportional benefit which could be the deciding factor in the next war. “To put readiness and lethality first” as Secretary Hegseth so aptly stated in his opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing.
In his first message to the Department of Defense Secretary Hegseth emphasised, “The President gave us a clear mission: achieve Peace through Strength. We will do this in three ways — by restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and reestablishing deterrence. We will rebuild our military by matching threats to capabilities. This means reviving our defence industrial base, reforming our acquisition process, passing a financial audit, and rapidly fielding emerging technologies. We will remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world.”
This vision of “Peace through Strength” gains urgency in an environmentally-constrained world. By rebuilding the military with sustainable technologies, restoring the warrior ethos through human-machine synergy, and deterring adversaries via unbreakable logistics, the United States and its allies can turn environmental challenges into asymmetrical advantages. China’s polluting, centralized model becomes a liability while the West’s climate-aware ready force emerges as the standard for 21st-century strength.
As Secretary Hegseth asserted, rebuilding requires “rapidly fielding emerging technologies.” This means systems that outlast storms, outthink adversaries, and outmanoeuvres ecological disruption—ensuring the United States military remains “the strongest and most lethal force in the world” on a changing planet.
Militaries of the world have long been attuned to security risks which extend beyond traditional threats and encompass environmental vulnerabilities among others. As far back as the 5th Century BC, Chinese General and strategist, Sun Tzu placed significant emphasis on the role of the environment in warfare. He understood that the environment is not static and that successful commanders must be adept at reading, anticipating, shaping and adapting to changing conditions.
Environment perturbations exacerbate all our existing vulnerabilities — such as resource scarcity, population displacement, and natural disasters which can lead to instability and the greater potential for conflict. On a more fundamental level, the simple physics of a hotter planet is making our air systems less effective, our sea based nuclear deterrent more vulnerable, and placing an unnecessary additional burden on the human resilience of soldiers and marines on the ground. Moreover, there is increasing public demand for sustainability limits on carbon-intensive military operations. By reframing climate constraints as drivers of innovation, the West and Indo-Pacific allies can gain agility over China’s reliance on resource-heavy, human-centric models.
In Elbridge Colby’s insightful work The Strategy of Denial he outlines a realist approach to United States grand strategy, emphasizing the need to prioritize the Indo-Pacific, deter Chinese aggression by making it prohibitively costly, and avoid overextension in secondary theaters. Leveraging environmental constraints for asymmetrical advantage, adopting autonomous systems, and decentralizing logistics — align closely with Colby’s principles of “deterrence through denial,” “threat prioritization,”and “strategic focus.”
The military’s understanding of these dynamics positions it as a credible source for workable and effective climate action both in contested battlespace and less threatening dynamics. Through their operational experience, military leaders are best positioned to support our elected leaders to help them to effectively and practically address climate impacts in order to minimize humanitarian crises, stem the tide of migration from the south to the north, and reduce the threat of potential conflicts over resources, all of which will increase global security.
Energy and climate resilience are inextricably linked to actually bringing the necessary mass together to fight and win in these new battlespaces — and they are the Rosetta Stone to how we unlock all that potential. Military climate efforts should not merely aim to optimise current strategies and fight the last war more efficiently, but should instead seek to fundamentally alter the landscape of warfare, creating new paradigms that provide disproportionate superiority. Our ability to develop and innovatively use energy and create sustainable resilience as an asymmetrical advantage will be the deciding factor in the next war and the time to start thinking that way and building it is now.
Colby argues that deterrence requires making Chinese aggression “futile and unprofitable.” Climate-resilient technologies achieve this by extending operational endurance. Even with abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuel promised by the Trump Administration, imagine instead of requiring resupply convoys of up to 50 highly visible, slow-moving targets — 60 percent of casualties in Iraq were protecting supply convoys — we deploy combat assets operating on sustainable and regenerative support capabilities, capabilities that can win the fight anywhere in the world.
In the not too distant future, a coalition carrier strike group like the one we will see this summer in the Western Pacific, powered by forward produced sustainable hydrocarbons and hydrogen-powered engines would reduce reliance on vulnerable oil supply lines and will be able to remain on station indefinitely during a blockade, while China’s oil-dependent fleet faces multiple supply chain vulnerabilities. Moreover, China’s reliance on coal and fragile water/food supply chains have been severely impacted by Himalayan glacier loss causing acute consequences for rivers and creating ancillary vulnerabilities. United States and allied climate-proofed forces can exploit these weaknesses, aligning with Colby’s emphasis on asymmetric cost imposition.
Modern warfare in a climate constrained environment, demands disruptive thinking and a dramatic improvement in how we orchestrate, employ, supply and sustain our forces. This future force will require greater autonomy from its strategic base in order to facilitate kill chains which have been shortened to fractions of seconds that benefit from and enable greater agility, focused precision and better resilience inside our adversaries OODA Loop. By consistently identifying and striking targets faster and more precisely than we currently do, we will use fewer resources, benefit from more compact logistics tails and generate less emissions in achieving our goals and — most importantly — save the lives of our sons and daughters that we send into harm’s way.
Unmanned aerial and surface vehicles (UAVs and USVs), undersea drones, and robotic ground systems reduce troop exposure to climate hazards whether it be desert heat or Arctic cold. Massed drones and AI-driven platforms such as those being developed by the United States Navy’s Replicator Initiative can deploy thousands of autonomous systems to counter China’s mass, a key Colby recommendation in the Indo-Pacific. Additionally, Machine Learning will optimise supply routes and energy use, mitigating weather disruptions. The United States Army’s Project Convergence integrates AI with sensors and shooters to compress decision cycles, enabling faster responses to climate-aggravated crises like humanitarian disasters or contested logistics.
Forward produced synthetic biofuels and hydrogen-powered engines can reduce reliance on vulnerable oil supply lines. Solar-powered forward bases, like those tested and deployed by the Italian Air Force and UK Royal Marines, ensure operations in fuel-scarce regions. Devices like Israel’s Watergen, which extracts drinking water from humidity, can sustain troops in arid climates, and portable hydroponic systems enable on-site food production, cutting dependence on fragile supply chains. Sustainable logistics such as forward produced synthetic fuels and water-from-air systems allow United States and allied forces to operate longer in contested zones like the South China Sea, raising the costs for China to sustain a conflict.
The interoperability necessary in the 21st century will come not only from similar tactics, techniques, and procedures, but our ability to fuse information in real time from a range of sensors, across manned and unmanned platforms, in all five domains — such that one person can do the work of a hundred and a hundred nations can act as one. To address both these challenges and dominate the future battlespace, militaries around the world are beginning to design capabilities around smaller, cheaper, scalable and attritable autonomous technologies leveraging digital advancements in sensors and hardware that exploit deployable clean-tech such as solar, wind, small nuclear and the continuing advancement in battery development.
Large numbers of cheap, expendable drones can overwhelm adversaries while avoiding centralized infrastructure targets like airfields and fuel depots. On-demand manufacturing of spare parts reduces logistical footprints. The US Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept relies on such distributed solutions. This supports Colby’s call for “dispersal and resilience.”
China’s military modernization, while formidable, has many vulnerabilities. It remains dependent on coal-powered industry and PLA supply chains are energy-intensive and carbon-heavy, creating vulnerabilities to sanctions or climate-driven disruptions. The PLA’s centralized command and rigid hierarchies struggle to adapt to decentralised, agile forces. Moreover, China remains significantly dependent on global resources. It is the world’s largest importer of crude oil importing over 70 percent of its oil, and as well as many of it critical minerals exposing it to climate-aggravated maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Malacca Strait.
By contrast, by leveraging sustainability and autonomy the United States and its allies can operate longer in contested environments; reduce physical and political risks tied to fossil-intensive operations; and exploit China’s ecological overextension such as the desertification in Xinjiang which is significantly impacting PLA bases.
Many may argue that prioritising sustainability weakens deterrence posture and claim adversaries like China and Russia will perceive climate adaptation as a sign of vulnerability rather than strength. In reality, sustainability signals unmatched capability. A military that generates its own fuel, water, and food can sustain longer deployments in contested zones. China’s PLA, reliant on imported oil and centralised supply chains, cannot match this persistence in climate-stressed regions like the South China Sea.
When writing about divergences and synergies Colby is skeptical of “niche” technologies that distract from core warfighting needs. However, climate resilience is fundamentally core to warfighting in a contested, resource-scarce environment. Both frameworks of divergences and synergies emphasize “deterrence through innovation.” Colby’s denial strategy thrives when adversaries perceive United States and allied forces as unstoppable — climate-ready systems amplify this perception by showcasing adaptability and endurance.
Colby advocates deepening partnerships with Indo-Pacific nations. Leading on climate resilience strengthens these alliances. For example, NATO’s 2023 Climate Change and Security Action Plan attracted Indo-Pacific partners like Japan and Australia, who view Western green tech as a counterbalance to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Additionally, sustainable infrastructure projects position the United States as a preferable partner over China’s coal-heavy BRI, which exacerbates climate risks for developing nations. Moreover, sharing renewable energy tech such as solar microgrids or disaster-resilient infrastructure is a cost effective way to attract partners like the Philippines or Vietnam by addressing climate threats while boosting military interoperability.
Creating deterrence through innovation is a force multiplier. Strikingly, China’s own 2023 Defense White Paper openly expressed concern over United States advancements in AI and renewable energy, admitting the PLA’s coal-dependent industrial base is a “strategic liability.”
Colby’s realism and a climate-innovation agenda are mutually reinforcing — denial requires not just military power, but the ability to sustain that power in an era of ecological disruption. By addressing climate as any other threat variable, the United States, NATO and the Indo-Pacific allies can credibly threaten to make Chinese expansionism “unprofitable”—the cornerstone of The Strategy of Denial.
Secretary Hegseth’s directive to “achieve Peace through Strength” by restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding military capabilities, and reestablishing deterrence intersects critically with the challenges and opportunities of a climate-constrained world. It is imperative that DoD integrate climate resilience and emerging technologies into the Hegseth’s framework of reviving the defence industrial base, reforming acquisition, and fielding cutting-edge systems in order to transform environmental constraints into asymmetrical advantages against China and other adversaries. By prioritizing autonomy, sustainable logistics, and decentralized operations, the United States and its allies can dominate in an era where ecological disruption is both a threat and a strategic lever while China invites strategic obsolescence and struggles under the weight of its own environmental contradictions.
Kevin Billings OBE is the CEO of Legation Strategies.
