Are We Fighting the Wrong Battle, Mr. Secretary of War?

 The disconcerting speeches of Hegseth and Trump to an assembly of silent, stone-faced military leaders at Quantico on September 30, 2025 revealed three intertwined visions of how armed force should be used to ensure security in our moment. All are familiar, but all three are becoming obsolete. Hardly extinct, but completely outmoded by current and future conditions. A fourth vision of what the mission could be for both our own and our adversaries’ militaries includes a radical consideration of looming climate effects upon military mission and strategy.

The first vision, from Hegseth, was a reversion to the idea that modern wars can be won by a ferociously male fighting culture. The major flaw in this vision of future glorious patriotic wars (setting aside that no one can “warfight” and win a nuclear war)  is revealed by stalemates such as Vietnam and Afghanistan, which became standoffs not from lack of U.S. ferocity, but because we failed to look more deeply inro the political and cultural interests  of our adversaries. The leaders of North Vietnam admired Thomas Jefferson, loathed and feared the Chinese, and wanted out from the colonialism both of the French and of the Americans who tried unsuccessfully to administer an updated version of what the French failed to achieve.

The second vision of war, from President Trump, was that our country can become peaceful if its own citizens are pacified, or forcefully suppressed, by using our own military against them. American constitutional government is designed to prevent just such a regression into civil war, whose story we should want, from painful experience, not to revisit. Mass violence between American citizens who are awash in numbers of guns, motivated by hate and fear, and basically indistinguishable from each other, would not be pretty.

The third vision of security, deterrence, is presently administered by that very group of trained,  intelligent, professional, dedicated military leaders that made up Trump’s and Hegseth’s command-performance audience. It is the establishment vision of war prevention through strength, about which Hegseth discoursed at length before going on to harangue the crowd about physical fitness and the prohibition of beards.

Hegseth declared that the military will no longer get involved with climate change issues, even though there are whole books about how the U.S. military is already having unavoidable encounters with the effects of global warming, including more ferocious storms and rising sea levels affecting bases at home and abroad. Setting aside that the militaries of the world are responsible for more pollutants than any other human institution.

The problem is that deterrence, given an unstable, headlong arms race, will eventually and inevitably break down. It already has. We came all too close to doing ourselves in with the Cuban crisis, way back in 1962. Our vast array of nuclear weapons did not prevent the 9-11 attacks.

But in our own time deterrence has an even deeper flaw: It addresses the wrong war. While we spend trillions updating our nuclear weapons, global temperatures keep rising at faster rates. In another ten years, we will learn to our considerable regret how stupid it was to spend 1.5 trillion dollars on projects like the Lockheed Joint Strike Fighter, instead of using those funds to build a stronger electric grid and hasten the transition to clean sustainable energy sources.

Left unaddressed, the follow-on effects of the global climate emergency will accelerate new tensions, as the refugee challenge intensifies and countries have to cope with mass deaths from excess heat, flooding, droughts, and storms.

The militaries of the world are not about to wake up, shed their weapons, and magically pursue the arts of peace. Yet it is worth asking what militarism does to address climate constructively. Sadly, the answer is, at the moment, nothing. Our grandchildren will be asking tough questions about who encouraged and who obstructed the great transition into sustainable energy and earth-regeneration.

In contrast to the Hegseth/Trump/establishment vision which could leads to mass death, imagine the militaries of the world gradually redirecting their resources, prowess, and logistical efficiency toward addressing the regeneration of Earth’s biosystems. It would be a very different conception of military strength—because authentic strength that leads to real security for all from now forward will be whatever contributes to the health of the whole planetary organism. We’re all in a leaky boat together, including the military.

Looking at the totality of world conflict, it may feel as if such a refocus would be a long time coming, if ever. The military brass sitting silently in Mr. Hegseth’s come-to-Jesus meeting are caught between a dying mission and what will become an inescapable new one. They know that the climate effects which are going to cause shortages, chaos, mass migrations and unwinnable wars are not a long time coming.  They’re here.

Winslow Myers, author with Libby Traubman of a recently publish book: One: One Earth, One Humanity, One Future, is a syndicated writer for Peacevoice, and serves on the Advisory Board f the War Prevention Institute

 

Common Sense

 

The term “common sense” is often evoked by President Trump, though his “common” sense can seem grotesquely solitary and unique, as for example when he cruelly shut down the USAID program, increasing disease, malnutrition and death for people in faraway places with desperate needs.

Or when he blamed the Washington plane crash on DEI initiatives. Even that eccentric assignment of blame already seems almost quaint a few weeks later as his “common sense” upends 80 years of NATO consensus and, in an inversion of truth worthy of Orwell, he blames Ukraine for causing Russian aggression. While Trump may not be a warmonger in the usual mold of a number of recent U.S. presidents, he admires dictators and shares their brutal, transactional temperament.

His autocratic instincts are running roughshod over core conceptions of American identity, including the difficult balance of three co-equal branches of government, equality under the law, protection of minorities, the free press, and leading the free world against totalitarianism. His administrative minions (or is he their minion?) want to abandon Jefferson’s noble ideal of freedom of religion in favor of (white) Christian nationalism.

The contemporary meaning of “common sense” could use some examination. What principles might become essential to maintaining and enlarging our shared sense of reality, not only within our borders but beyond them?

Get any group of ordinary people together anywhere in the world and they would exhibit agreement, a common sense, that nuclear war was not a good thing and arms control treaties are a useful preventative. At the same time the “common sense” of establishment strategists in the nuclear nations seems to be exactly the opposite—build more and more weapons until the system breaks down into the very war nobody wants and nobody can win.

Same with the other biggest challenge the planet faces together: two contending “common senses.” One common sense asserts that untrammeled markets, narrow self-interest and growth all lead to greater prosperity. Drill, baby! The other common (and scientifically proven) sense is that untrammeled, narrow self-interest and growth are withering the biosystems which are the only possible true source of our prosperity.

During the American revolution Thomas Paine, an Englishman, penned a fiery and popular pamphlet entitled “Common Sense,” making the case for American independence. The pamphlet accelerated our Revolution. As our foundations are being shaken, is there an opportunity for a worldwide “peoples’ common sense” to emerge? What would be its outlines? What would its leaders look like?

The late Alexei Navalny, in his superhuman defiance of tyranny, was a modern-day incarnation of Thomas Paine and a demanding but universal model of common sense. All he wanted for his beloved Russia was the very same things we are in danger of losing in America at the moment: free speech, a free press, uncorrupted free and fair elections. Another dimension of common sense Navalny exemplified was nonviolence. While he apparently wasn’t a doctrinal pacifist in the Gandhi mold, like Gandhi his absolute confidence in truth was his only sword. Harassed by a Kafka-esque system of petty prison regulations deliberately designed to drive him nuts, he remained cheerfully defiant unto death.

In our own common sense defiance of lies and baloney, we must add the inconvenient truth of the global climate emergency which the President and his administration so painfully and backwardly deny, much to the deep distress of broad swaths of the world.

The primary context of planetary common sense today is radical interdependence. Everything “nests” in that larger truth. If we should slip into nuclear war, and as the global environmental crisis becomes more acute, people everywhere will suffer. We find ourselves all in the same leaky boat. Neither militarism nor unrestrained capitalist growth can get us where we need to go. Indeed, world military forces, with the U.S. leading the pack, are the single greatest source of fossil fuel emissions.

But these realities also give us a new sense of shared fate and therefore common, shared self-interest—a new anti-militarist pro-environment common sense. The meaning of strength and security has fundamentally changed.

Many countries are a mixture of help and harm; that is simply the norm. We abhor the Chinese record on human rights, but the reality that they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and electric car batteries will benefit our health by cutting greenhouse gases.

Our strength and security now come not from numbers of weapons or gross national product but instead from what each nation can contribute to strengthen the total health of the biosphere. This insight might be drowning in a vast sludge of uncommon nonsense, but truth has a way of willing out—whether painfully or triumphantly.