The US Navy Has a Water Problem

The United States Navy has a big problem, one quite peculiar for such a huge seagoing organization: too much water. The problem isn’t the water itself; the Navy knows how to handle water. The problem is that global warming is putting too much water in the wrong places. of those places is Naval Station …

Aerial image of Norfolk Naval Station (US Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher Stoltz)

One of those places is Naval Station Norfolk, a vast complex in southeastern Virginia whose 80,000 active-duty personnel make it the largest naval base on earth by population. The ships and aircraft stationed at Naval Station Norfolk have historically patrolled the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea.

But in May of 2018, as part of the Trump administration’s new National Defense Strategy “to deter Russia and China,” the Navy announced that it would be expanding operations in the Arctic Ocean. Rising global temperatures were melting polar ice and opening sea lanes in the Arctic, enabling access to sizable deposits of natural resources, including oil.

To counter anticipated Russian and Chinese claims on those resources, the Navy has reactivated its Second Fleet, which had been deactivated eight years ago by the Obama administration; it’s based at Naval Station Norfolk.

Norfolk’s ever-increasing vulnerability to flooding and what sea-level rise means long-term for the Navy concerns some high-ranking former naval officers, including the Navy’s former top oceanographer and a former expeditionary strike group commander based in Norfolk. Already, key access roads to the low-lying Naval Station Norfolk are occasionally submerged during high tides. By 2037, access roads will be underwater during high tides for 50 days of the year, according to scientific studies by First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group. In short, the very melting Arctic that the Second Fleet will patrol will increasingly engulf the fleet’s home base.

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In May, Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, led the US delegation in a meeting of the Arctic Council, an international organization composed of eight nations with borders on the Arctic along with indigenous peoples who reside there. The United States blocked any mention of climate change in the joint declaration issued at the end of that meeting. But Pompeo did extol the Arctic as a region of “opportunity and abundance” of natural resources where the United States is “fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence,” saying, “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade.”

Indeed, seven months before the Arctic Council meeting, the United States dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and other warships to the Arctic, the first time the Navy had sent an aircraft carrier above the Arctic Circle since the end of the Cold War. Richard Spencer, the secretary of the Navy, later announced that additional patrols in the Arctic were planned for 2019. “We have to learn what it’s like to operate in that environment” where bitter temperatures and rough seas stress equipment and personnel, Spencer said at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, in January 2019. Longer term, the Navy envisions building a new base for Arctic operations, perhaps on the Bering Sea in Alaska. “It’s an area we have to focus on, most definitely,” said Spencer.

Meanwhile, though, the Second Fleet will patrol the Arctic from Naval Station Norfolk. And as with all coastal regions on this rapidly warming planet, the sea-level rise in Norfolk is just getting started.

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