By John Conger
It’s said that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a new report in February that asserts the military is failing to measure the impacts of natural disasters. Directed by the Senate in the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to assess the Department of Defense’s recovery from natural disasters, the report highlights the fact that natural disasters and extreme weather have caused at least $15 billion in damage to US military installations over the past decade. However, the Department has only recently begun collecting department-wide data on these events, and the system it is building remains incomplete.
The GAO notes that the Department began an effort in 2024 to track extreme weather impacts at installations, but GAO found gaps in both the scope and accuracy of that effort. In short, the report observes that disasters are already affecting readiness, but the military lacks a complete picture of the problem’s scope, which undermines its ability to plan for the impacts of future disasters and to appropriately prioritize resilience to their effects.
There’s something missing, however, in the GAO report and likely within the Department, driven by the incorrect assumption that the military repairs all the damage it takes from natural disasters. In fact, DoD maintains a deferred maintenance backlog across its enterprise that exceeds $130 billion. Some damage simply isn’t addressed or accounted for. A data call to installations is going to yield responses of variable quality and accuracy, and it may not get at the core question of how much impact these disasters have actually had. Some installations will report what has been spent to recover, while others may address damage quantified by the capability lost. They are not the same.
In other words, it seems like a simple thing – tracking damage from extreme weather – but given how the Department of Defense operates, it is not as straightforward as it seems.
The GAO report was requested by Congress, and without question, Congress gets interested when billions of dollars are at stake.
The annual hearings that the House and Senate conduct with the Pentagon’s energy, installations, and environment offices have traditionally been the venues where climate security gets the most attention. The Pentagon has assiduously avoided using the word climate over the last year, and Congress has done the same.
But at the most recent hearing on March 4, the Readiness Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee opened that door several times by discussing two important and adjacent topics – what might be called proxy topics – natural disasters and resilience.
In particular, Representative Sarah Elfreth (D-MD) brought up the aforementioned GAO report during her questioning of Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Energy, Installations and Environment) Brendan Rogers, highlighting the impacts of extreme weather and the challenges posed by inadequate stormwater infrastructure. She represents the Naval Academy in Annapolis, which endures significant impacts from flooding (dozens of recent examples of flooding impacts in the 2025 Anne Arundel County Nuisance Flood Plan). She proposed a contingency fund for stormwater and flooding recovery, so the Department would not have to raid existing budgets intended for validated needs when unscheduled (but completely predictable) disasters occur.
Other members highlighted the vulnerability of the electric grid, specifically in the context of damage from natural disasters. For example, Representative Gabriel Vasquez (D-NM) raised this issue, speaking about the mission-criticality of grid resilience, specifically highlighting the impacts of extreme heat. Assistant Secretary of Defense (Energy, Installations and Environment) Dale Marks noted that 98 percent of the electricity used by the Department comes from off-base sources, and they needed to work with the Department of Energy and industry to address the resilience of the broader grid. Of note, Vasquez asked Marks directly whether there had been any internal prohibitions or restrictions on the use of renewable energy. Marks replied that he had not received nor issued such guidance.
Finally, the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act included several provisions about training for and recovering from natural disasters, including measures specifically focused on the resilience of military installations and their surrounding communities. Taken together, the NDAA, the hearing, and the GAO report suggest that while there may be discomfort with explicitly framing these discussions in terms of climate change, the operational and fiscal impacts associated with climate-driven disasters remain front and center.
As the GAO report makes clear, the Department has already sustained billions of dollars of damage from natural disasters, and as recent Congressional activities underline, such threats remain a focus even while their primary cause is politically sensitive. Even at the current pace of extreme weather–which is sure to rise due to climate change– the Pentagon leadership faces the practical challenge of managing through disasters that will continue to affect the force.
Taken together, the GAO report, the recent hearing, and the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act point toward a clear conclusion: the Department of Defense is willing to treat disasters as an operational and fiscal management problem, even in a world where the word “climate” is not uttered. However, the systems needed to manage that problem effectively are not yet in place.
First, while the GAO is correct that the Department needs to start tracking disaster impacts, that effort will need to be structured and consistent across the enterprise. Tracking should distinguish between recovery costs, deferred disaster repairs, and mission impacts, rather than relying on installation-level discretion. In addition, major disasters (those exceeding a defined threshold such as $100 million) should trigger a legally required comprehensive assessment of total damage and condition impacts, regardless of whether the repairs are ultimately funded.
Second, Congress should consider establishing a dedicated, no-expiration disaster response fund that the Department can access without diverting resources from planned investments. Congress could require notification for any resources applied from this fund, thereby allowing improved tracking of disaster costs.
Finally, the Congressional posture and the Pentagon’s openness to addressing natural disasters and resilience offer a possible path forward for those focused on climate security at this moment. At least for 2026, rather than centering discussions with the Pentagon on climate change writ large, there is an opportunity to focus on the operational impacts of specific natural disasters and their effects on military capability, and the need to build resilience against those kinds of impacts. There is currently clear receptivity to this approach despite the overall approach to climate policy, and it points to a way for continued progress in the near-term.