Pentagon vs. Nature

If Congress gets its way, the Pentagon will soon be war-gaming against a whole new sort of enemy. Forget WMD and terrorists, how will the military deal with Mother Earth?

According to the Boston Globe, the Defense Department may soon get to use its mighty analytical power to look at how global warming will affect U.S. security:

The CIA and the Pentagon would for the first time be required to assess the national security implications of climate change under proposed legislation intended to elevate global warming to a national defense issue.

The bipartisan proposal, which its sponsors expect to pass in Congress with wide support, calls for the director of national intelligence to conduct the first-ever "national intelligence estimate" on global warming.

*The effort would include pinpointing the regions at highest risk of humanitarian suffering and assessing the likelihood of wars erupting over diminishing water and other resources. *

The measure also would order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect U.S. security, including "direct physical threats to the United States posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes."

It's an interesting idea, but a Pentagon report already did this on a small scale two years ago, and it didn't exactly set the White House on fire.