The Category Confusion | Amitoj Singh

Colonel Robert Bartlow is rebuilding Tyndall Air Force Base to withstand 165-mile-per-hour winds and 75 years of sea-level rise. New buildings sit more than a foot above ground. Manmade oyster reefs will break up waves along the coast. The project will be 70% complete next year. When asked why, Bartlow doesn’t hesitate: “preserving lethality in a high-end combat capability.”

His boss, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has declared that the Pentagon won’t do any “climate change crap” on his watch.

Both men are telling the truth.

I work on how organizations decide what to care about — how they move from vague concern to articulable problem to tractable solution. The sequence matters. You can’t have a problem without an aspiration it blocks. You can’t have a solution without a problem it solves. Aspiration first, then problem, then solution. Each layer depends on the one above it.

Most of my work lives in the academic weeds — specifiability conditions, evaluative settlement, the machinery that converts “we care about this” into “here’s what we’re going to do about it.” But the Bloomberg piece on the military and climate stopped me because the category confusion it documents is so clean. It’s almost a classroom example of what happens when you file something in the wrong layer.

Bartlow has an aspiration: mission readiness. He has a problem: hurricanes destroying $5 billion in infrastructure. He has a solution: build structures that can take 165-mile-per-hour winds. Hegseth has the same aspiration. He also has the same problems — $15 billion in damage to defense facilities over the past decade, flooded roads blocking base access, a landslide cutting the main road at Camp Pendleton. What he doesn’t have is a name for what connects them.

Climate change doesn’t fit in any layer of this sequence. It’s a phenomenon — something happening in the world, independent of anyone’s objectives. The atmosphere warms whether or not the Pentagon has opinions about it. Phenomena don’t compete with aspirations. They generate problems for them.

Hegseth treats climate change as an aspiration — someone else’s objective that the military shouldn’t adopt. That’s what “crap” means in context: an ideological commitment, a distraction from fighting wars. He’s saying: that’s not our aspiration. And he’s right. It isn’t. The military’s aspirations are mission readiness, combat capability, force projection. Climate change doesn’t compete with them. It threatens them. The miscategorization is treating a phenomenon as if it were someone’s cause.

What surprised me in the article was the relabeling.

The Pentagon’s 2022 master planning guidance used the word “climate” 54 times. The updated 2025 version uses it zero times. It still directs planners to identify and mitigate risks from extreme weather. Bartlow says: “When we talk about resilience, it’s focused on preserving that combat capability.”

Most commentary treats this as doublespeak. I think it’s actually a correct instinct. The value — the thing the military cares about — lives at the aspiration: readiness, lethality, the ability to launch missions quickly. “Climate adaptation” locates the work at the phenomenon, which makes it sound like an environmental cause. “Resilience” locates it at the aspiration, which is where the motivation actually lives. The work is identical. The language caught up to the logic.

This is the part I didn’t expect. In my own framework, I’d assumed that refusing to name a phenomenon was always a failure of articulation — a sign that the measurement infrastructure hadn’t been built yet. But the military’s relabeling suggests something different. Sometimes the naming failure is at the wrong layer. Calling the work “climate adaptation” was never wrong about the phenomenon. It was wrong about where the value lived.

The expensive error isn’t the relabeling. It’s what Hegseth did next.

He canceled nearly 100 research studies related to global warming and security. Some focused on the Indo-Pacific, where China has ambitions. These studies were measurement infrastructure — the apparatus that converts a vague phenomenon into articulable problems with tractable solutions. Sea-level projections for specific bases. Storm intensity models for specific regions. The kind of work that turns “the climate is changing” into “this runway will flood within 15 years, and here’s what it costs to elevate it.”

Without that infrastructure, you can still solve problems — one base at a time, one storm at a time, after the damage. Bartlow’s Tyndall rebuild is this: a $5 billion problem solved retail, after a hurricane made it undeniable. What you lose is the ability to solve problems wholesale — to see the pattern across bases, across regions, across decades, and to invest before the damage forces your hand.

Hegseth’s own memo contains the tell. After declaring climate change a distraction, he writes: “Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to prevent the department from assessing weather-related impacts on operations, mitigating weather-related risks, conducting environmental assessments, as appropriate, and improving the resilience of military installations.” The sequence is right there in the caveat. Assess impacts. Mitigate risks. Improve resilience. Aspiration, problem, solution — operating as it always has. He just can’t name the phenomenon that connects the problems to each other.

I’m not confident this pattern resolves cleanly. The relabeling was correct — point the language at the aspiration, where the value lives. But the research cancellation severs the connection between the phenomenon and the problems it generates. You can harden one base against one hurricane. Without systematic measurement, you can’t see that the hurricane and the flood at West Point and the landslide at Camp Pendleton are all generated by the same source. You solve problems retail because you’ve dismantled the infrastructure that would let you see them wholesale.

This is what happens when a phenomenon gets filed as someone else’s aspiration. You don’t stop encountering the problems it generates. You lose the ability to see them as connected. The question I can’t answer — and I think the military can’t either — is whether retail problem-solving is enough. Whether you can sustain readiness by hardening one installation at a time while the phenomenon keeps generating problems faster than you can name them.

Colonel Bartlow is building oyster reefs and elevating runways. The aspiration — readiness — is his. The problems — storms, floods, rising seas — are real. The phenomenon connecting them doesn’t require his endorsement to keep generating the next one.