Several hours from now the US Congress will be told that climate change is a real and present threat to national security, not by a political advocate or climate campaigner, but by the Pentagon itself.

This is the fourth installment of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the first to canvass climate security.  Previews of the Review appeared in media over the past few days. The Guardian quotes from the Review, “While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden on civilian institutions and militaries around the world”.

The QDR provides the strategic framework for Department of Defence (DoD) planning over the next four years and will start reshaping the US military within months, as it forms the basis of the immanent DoD FY11 budget submission.

It was Congress which required in 2008 that this QDR would include climate change, but the Pentagon now works for an administration that is taking action to end America’s reliance on fossil fuels.

Environmentalists and US Democrats hoping for a shift in climate politics in Washington have some reason to be optimistic. The QDR is the responsibility of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy, who is an advocate for climate concern in the security policy community.

While in her position as Undersecretary, Flournoy wrote an article on ‘the contested commons’ where she gently pushes the mandate of her QDR review beyond strategic force ‘rebalancing’ and towards a shift in ‘leadership’. She calls for the military to shape a ‘healthy international system’, including of course, freedom in Cyberspace.

Undersecretary Flournoy co-founded the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in 2007 and made climate a core work programme. CNAS ran a war game in 2008 called Clout & Climate Change where she presented a fictional UN Threat Assessment.

In 2009 CNAS launched a process to influence the standing of climate change in the QDR process, called Promoting the Dialogue. Its military connections gave it access to dozens of interviews with DoD officials and it also ran a forum, under Chatham House Rules. This is an important instance of a shift in power from the hawks of the Bush era in Washington and back towards the doves view of international relations, which stresses interdependence and can meaningfully accommodate the concept of climate security.

Then on the weekend when the Guardian was getting its leaked copy of the QDR, who does it quote but a CNAS research Fellow, Christine Parthemore. She was the perfect fit for the role because she is technically ‘independent’ from CNAS. In her former career she was a research assistant to journalist Bob Woodward on State of Denial: Bush at War Part III and The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat.

The QDR calls on the Military to use information resources to contribute to interagency assessments of climate change impacts, from remote sensing of Arctic ice-melt to socio-political stresses. Secondly, the CNAS context makes it implicitly understood within Pentagon and State Department circles that an international agreement must prevent emissions taking  the Earth beyond the climate tipping point. Thirdly, the DoD is accelerating technological developments in energy conservation and renewable energy (ably assisted by United States Secretary of Energy. Steven Chu. Fourthly, it makes mitigation and climate crisis response a responsibility of the DoD, both domestically and internationally.

It remains to be seen what kind of progress the Pentagon can make in ‘operationalising’  the QDR’s climate emphasis into some kind of ‘Obama Doctrine’. Note that the Pentagon is also about to deliver the Nuclear Posture Review, setting policy for the next decade including the promised follow-on agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

What kind of impact these shifts have on Australian politics and policy remains to be seen. It is a sign of these strange times that aspects of the Pentagon’s stance on climate change closer to the pacifist Bob Brown than the major parties.

The full report was given to the subscriber-only Congress Daily, but those outside the paywall can leverage their cyberfreedom and read a copy via Government Executive.