The article examines how the U.S. Department of Defense is attempting to quantify and manage the financial and readiness costs of extreme weather at military installations. A recent Government Accountability Office review highlights gaps, progress, and the road ahead.
What the DoD is measuring and why it matters
The Defense Department estimates that at least $15 billion in damage has affected military installations over the past decade due to hurricanes, floods, wildfires, storms, and other extreme events.
Yet the department did not systematically track installation-level costs of extreme weather until 2024, leaving a long tail of recovery costs unaccounted for.
In fiscal 2025, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment required installations to submit detailed spreadsheets outlining impacts to built and natural infrastructure, costs, and intangible effects on training and mission readiness.
The goal is a baseline in December 2025 and a transition to a web-based, continuously updated system in fiscal 2026.
GAO findings and the scope of the current effort
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the DoD’s data collection is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate.
The effort excludes certain natural disasters—most prominently seismic events—because they fall outside DoD’s definition of “extreme weather.”
The GAO warned that the current approach is largely a point-in-time snapshot that can miss long-tail recovery costs that surface years after an incident.
Officials cited Tyndall Air Force Base as an example: the 2018 recovery is still ongoing, underscoring the need for longitudinal cost tracking.
Long-tail costs and real-world examples
Two themes emerge from the GAO’s assessment.
First, recovery costs can extend long after the initial damage, and without ongoing tracking, many expenses remain hidden from planning and budgeting.
Second, resilience efforts are unevenly distributed across installations.
Some have invested in better drainage, seismic-hardened rebuilding, and other measures, while others lack data or funding to pursue upgrades.
Implementation progress and ongoing challenges
Progress on resilience is mixed.
Some installations have made tangible improvements, while others struggle due to data gaps or limited funding.
Although statutes require integrating resilience into installation master plans, GAO identified a lack of guidance on how to use that planning information during disaster recovery.
What needs to happen next
To move from a promising start to a robust resilience program, several actions matter:
- Expand scope beyond weather to include seismic events and other natural disasters
- Enhance data quality and consistency across installations
- Adopt and refine longitudinal tracking to capture long-tail recovery costs
- Integrate resilience outcomes more fully into installation master plans and disaster-recovery planning
- Ensure a scalable, user-friendly web-based system for ongoing updates
Here is the source article for this story: DoD only recently began tracking the cost of extreme weather, despite billions in damage