Climate change as a "threat multiplier"

Bureaucratic national-security pioneer Sherri Goodman's new book

Find the book on Amazon here.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and interacting (here and there) with Sherri Goodman over the past three decades, primarily through her association with my first employer, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA). When I first met her in the early 1990s, she was a rare bird as a woman in national security circles — a situation that has changed dramatically for the better in the decades since.

Brief bio: Harvard law grad who goes to Senate Armed Services committee in late 1980s and gets swept up in the Cold War’s conclusion, suddenly shifting her responsibilities from “weapons to waste,” as she puts it in her new book, just out, called Threat Multiplier — a term she coined as a follow-on to the previously established concept of “force multiplier.” With the Cold War’s end, the US began this huge wind-down of its forces, facilities … everything, and an inescapable issue was dealing with that long struggle’s environmental legacy, particularly all those nukes.

That experience led to her being named DoD’s deputy under secretary for environment across the Clinton years (1993-2001), a job that saw her work base closures and all sorts of surrounding issues. Following that, she moves into CNA, where she served, by my remembrance, as general counsel for many a year. It was there that she put together a group of retired military flags in the late 2000s and published a number of pioneering reports recasting climate change as a national security issue with that “threat multiplier” capacity. Based on her internet footprint today, she is part of just about every high-level group/commission/think tank out there on the subject, so a supremely connected person, who, with great justification, can now look back upon her transformative career with serious pride at her accomplishments.

Sherri, to an outsider, epitomizes what some call the “deep state,” or what I prefer to call the “enduring bureaucracy.” Now, most people dislike either term, the first because it is nefarious sounding in its nutty conspiracy-oriented mindset and the latter because it’s … frankly, dull.

But, to me, the enduring bureaucracy (or whatever you want to call it) is an incredible force for good within our government, nation, and the world at-large. These are the people who dedicate their careers to making things better in the most influential and powerful government in the world. It is, quite often, excruciatingly complex drudgery, to be sure, and it takes highly specialized skills that can’t really be taught but only accrued through hands-on experience, but the impact is both lasting and immense, and — quite frankly — the health and even the survival of our democracy depends on these people and the work they tirelessly perform.

Sherri is a master at this sort of work: getting the huge federal bureaucracy to change ever so slightly each budget year so that, over time, true evolution results.

That’s the story she sets out to tell in her book, which is really two books: the first three chapters are her career memoir, which I found very cool because it overlaps with my career and so I know a great deal of the people she cites throughout. To me, those first three chapters really are the book: the sort of inside story-telling that, most of the time, you can only access directly from the person in question at a bar after a long work day. I love those conversations because they are so incredibly illuminating and validating and … in a deep way, community-building in nature.

Books just don’t typically cover the Federal work environment and process like Sherri does in these opening chapters, which is too bad, because there’s a lot of learning and institutional knowledge that can be transmitted in this way. Plus, it’s just fun to read because, in this instance, Sherri interacts with a lot of historical figures.

The book’s remaining chapters are a tour of the horizon on a region-by-region basis, for the most part, ending with chapters looking at specific environmental challenges for the US national security establishment. Those are solid as well, but they don’t feature Sherri in the same main-character way, instead offering lots of mini-biographies of other important bureaucratic players in this realm over the past three decades.

For me, then, the book wins more on the first three chapters, because they’re unique and only Sherri could have written them, while the latter chapters could have been generated by any number of characters from that world. That’s not a criticism so much as a minor disappointment, simply because I would have preferred she leaned in more explicitly into her career experiences as a woman working in a field overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Like I said earlier, Sherri was a very rare bird at the end of the Cold War, while today … nowhere near so. So, while she tells a truly fascinating story of how climate and the environment rose from a planning afterthought to a first-order concern — something she had a huge hand in making happen, I would have been cool with even more autobiographical material, as I assume many women (especially newcomers) in the field would have likewise welcomed.

That’s a nit, though. Sherri can always write that sort of thing in the future, and I hope she does.

Why?