From Readiness to Resilience: Two Decades of Extreme Weather Impacts on US Military Infrastructure
Introduction
Over the past two decades, extreme weather events have occurred with increasing frequency, severity, and geographic reach. Globally, the period from roughly 2005 to 2025 has been marked by a notable escalation in high-impact hazards—ranging from catastrophic hurricanes and inland flooding to large-scale wildfires, prolonged drought, and compounding heat extremes. These events have been amplified by broader climatological shifts that are reshaping baseline environmental conditions, increasing the likelihood that once-rare disruptions now pose chronic and systemic risks. As these hazards accelerate, their consequences extend well beyond civilian communities and economic infrastructure, directly affecting institutions central to national security.
US military installations—whether large coastal hubs, inland training ranges, logistics nodes, or forward-operating bases—function as essential national infrastructure. They host critical assets, serve as staging areas for operations, enable global force projection, and support the daily readiness of service members. Because these installations often sit in regions of strategic value that are also highly exposed to environmental hazards—coastal zones, river basins, arid regions, and fire-prone landscapes—they face an increasingly complex risk environment. Damage to installation infrastructure, disruptions to training and operations, and stress on energy and water systems can quickly cascade into broader challenges for mission assurance and force readiness.
The strategic relevance of these extreme weather event disruptions is profound. Extreme weather events have repeatedly curtailed or delayed operational activities, reduced training availability, and forced the relocation of high-value assets. They have strained already-pressured maintenance and modernization budgets, compromised installation energy resilience, and placed additional burdens on the military and surrounding communities during recovery. More fundamentally, these disruptions threaten the Department of Defense’s (DoD) capability to maintain a stable, ready, and forward-leaning posture amid evolving geopolitical competition.
This article examines major extreme weather events affecting US military installations from approximately 2005 to 2025 and evaluates their physical, operational, and strategic impacts. It assesses how hurricanes, floods, wildfires, heat extremes, and other hazards have shaped installation vulnerability and highlights recurring patterns across diverse geographic regions and service branches. The article concludes by identifying core lessons for future planning and adaptation—arguing that understanding these events is essential not only to protect physical infrastructure but also to sustain long-term readiness and national security in an era of accelerating environmental change.
Background: Extreme Weather Trends and Military Vulnerability
The past two decades have produced clear evidence that extreme weather hazards in the United States are intensifying in both frequency and severity. Hurricanes have become more destructive, with slower-moving, rainfall-heavy storms increasing the likelihood of catastrophic flooding along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Inland regions have experienced recurrent riverine flooding driven by extreme precipitation and saturated watersheds. At the same time, the western United States has endured unprecedented wildfire seasons fueled by prolonged drought, elevated temperatures, and shifting vegetation regimes. Concurrently, persistent heat waves across the southern and central states have created acute risks to personnel, training availability, and installation energy demand. These trends collectively reflect a broader climatological shift: climatological change is amplifying hazard intensity, extending hazard seasons, and increasing the probability of multiple hazards occurring simultaneously or sequentially.
Military installations are deeply embedded within these evolving environmental conditions. Many of the largest and most strategically important US bases are located along coastlines, river deltas, and other high-risk zones. Naval Station Norfolk, Tyndall Air Force Base, Camp Pendleton, and Offutt Air Force Base exemplify the geographic exposure that characterizes the US military basing footprint. Installations in the Southeast face recurrent tropical storm activity and coastal flooding; bases in the West confront wildfire encroachment and drought-driven water scarcity; and northern installations contend with extreme cold events and rapid freeze–thaw cycles. As environmental hazards shift and intensify, the environmental envelope within which installations operate is becoming less predictable and more disruptive.
These pressures intersect with long-standing challenges in military infrastructure management. Much of the DoD’s built environment is decades old, with large portions suffering from deferred maintenance that has reduced structural resilience and increased vulnerability to climate stresses. Hangars, piers, housing, power systems, and aging utilities are often ill-suited to withstand repeated flooding, extreme heat, or wildfire threats. Moreover, the concentration of critical assets—shipyards, aviation hubs, logistics depots, and command-and-control facilities—within a limited number of coastal or regionally clustered installations compounds risk. Damage or downtime at a single installation can disrupt continuity of operations across entire mission sets, highlighting the essential relationship between infrastructure resilience and military readiness.
Over the past decade, the DoD has begun to formalize its approach to environmental risk. Key directives—from early climate adaptation guidance in 2014, to the 2019 and 2021 climate reports, to the Climate Adaptation Plan released in 2021 and updated through 2024—have emphasized the need to integrate environmental considerations into installation planning, acquisitions, and mission assurance frameworks. The military services have likewise advanced service-specific resilience strategies, such as the Navy’s Climate Action efforts, the Army’s Installation Energy and Water Plans, and the Air Force’s focus on resilient energy and infrastructure modernization. Despite these initiatives, external assessments, particularly from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), continue to document persistent maintenance backlogs, inconsistent resilience planning, and vulnerabilities across both shipyards and fixed installations. These findings emphasize that while policy direction has strengthened, implementation remains uneven, and vulnerabilities and risks endure.
Together, the scientific trends, infrastructure challenges, and policy developments outline a clear framework: US military installations are operating in an increasingly hazardous environment where environmental extremes interact with aging infrastructure and mission-critical demands. Understanding this context is essential for interpreting the impacts of region-specific extreme weather events and for developing a forward-leaning resilience strategy capable of sustaining military readiness in a rapid environmental change.
Overview of Major Extreme Weather Events Affecting Installations
This section surveys the major categories of extreme weather events that have most directly disrupted US military installations in recent decades, highlighting recurring patterns of exposure, vulnerability, and operational impact. Collectively, these cases demonstrate that extreme weather is a systemic challenge shaping installation resilience and military readiness.
Hurricanes and Tropical Storms
Hurricanes represent some of the most acute threats to military installations, given the concentration of major bases along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 marked an early inflection point, severely affecting naval installations across the Gulf Coast and disrupting port operations, housing, and maintenance facilities. Katrina’s widespread destruction highlighted the cascading consequences of coastal vulnerability, including prolonged regional recovery and the diversion of military resources toward humanitarian response.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 introduced a new risk profile for installations in the Northeast. Naval Station New York and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst experienced significant flooding, power loss, and transportation disruptions. Sandy highlighted the susceptibility of densely populated coastal zones—where military and civilian infrastructure are deeply intertwined—to both storm surge and large-scale energy system failures.
The 2017 hurricane season—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—further demonstrated the breadth of military exposure. Harvey overwhelmed installations across Texas with record-breaking rainfall, Irma disrupted operations throughout Florida and the Southeast, and Maria devastated military facilities in Puerto Rico, generating long-term challenges to local readiness and energy resilience. In 2018, Hurricane Michael caused some of the most concentrated installation-specific damage in recent history when it struck Tyndall Air Force Base as a Category 5 storm, destroying much of the installation’s built environment and dispersing aircraft and personnel. Collectively, these events revealed how tropical systems can impose multibillion-dollar shocks on single installations while simultaneously affecting broad swaths of the military basing network.
Wildfires
In the western United States, wildfire seasons from 2017 to 2021 brought repeated and severe disruptions to operations at several major installations. Camp Pendleton and Vandenberg Space Force Base experienced direct fire encroachment that destroyed training infrastructure, required evacuations, and halted range operations. Beyond immediate physical damage, prolonged smoke exposure created hazardous air quality conditions that canceled training, degraded personnel health, and impaired visibility for flight operations. These wildfire impacts illustrate how environmentally driven shifts in temperature, fuel loads, and precipitation have expanded the spatial reach and operational implications of fire hazards for military missions.
Flooding (Non-Hurricane)
Extreme inland flooding has also emerged as a significant threat. In 2019, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska suffered one of the most severe non-coastal flooding events in DoD history when swollen rivers and levee failures inundated nearly one-third of the installation. The flooding damaged command facilities, airfields, and support infrastructure, demonstrating that major disruptions are not limited to coastal bases. Similarly, chronic tidal flooding at Naval Station Norfolk and Joint Base Langley–Eustis has become a recurring issue, affecting access roads, piers, and stormwater systems. These “nuisance” flooding events illustrate how sea-level rise interacts with daily operations, creating cumulative impacts even in the absence of significant storms.
Heat Waves and Drought
Heat extremes and water scarcity pose persistent challenges to installations across the Southwest. Prolonged heat waves have triggered training restrictions at Army bases such as Fort Hood, Fort Bliss, and Fort Huachuca, reducing available training hours and increasing heat-related health risks for personnel. Concurrent drought conditions have strained water availability at installations like Fort Irwin, where resource limitations complicate both daily operations and long-term planning. These slow-onset hazards demonstrate how environmental stress can accumulate over time, reducing installation resilience and operational flexibility.
Severe Storms, Tornadoes, and Other Hazards
Beyond the more widely recognized environmental hazards, severe storms and cold weather events have also disrupted installations. Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany has suffered repeated tornado damage, affecting facilities and delaying logistics operations. In northern states, Arctic cold snaps have stressed energy systems, increased heating demand, and complicated maintenance operations. These events highlight the diversity of hazards that installations face, and the importance of preparing for both acute, high-impact events and chronic stressors that can degrade readiness over time.
Case Studies
This section examines four case studies that illustrate how extreme weather hazards—both acute and chronic—disrupt military installations, degrade readiness, and impose long-term resilience challenges. Together, these cases show that extreme weather is a structural factor shaping installation resilience and military effectiveness.
Case Study 1: Hurricane Michael and Tyndall Air Force Base (2018)
Aircraft hangars lay scattered in pieces across the flight line at Tyndall Air Force Base after Hurricane Michael made landfall on Oct. 10, 2018 (Image Credit: Staff Sgt. Alexander C. Henninger/US Air Force)
Hurricane Michael’s landfall on 10 October 2018 remains one of the most consequential extreme weather events to strike a US military installation. Making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane—the first such storm to impact the Florida Panhandle—Michael exhibited sustained winds exceeding 155 mph, rapid intensification in the 24 hours prior to landfall, and a destructive combination of storm surge and wind-driven debris. The storm’s unusual intensity, tightly packed core, and trajectory placed Tyndall Air Force Base directly in its path, leaving the installation exposed to forces far exceeding the design standards applied when much of the base infrastructure was constructed in 1941.
Tyndall’s exposure to the storm’s eyewall resulted in catastrophic damage. Post-event assessments estimated that nearly 60 percent of the installation’s buildings were severely damaged or entirely destroyed, including hangars, dormitories, administrative buildings, and key support facilities. Maintenance structures designed to house advanced fighter aircraft were torn apart, energy and water systems failed under the combined pressure of flooding and wind damage, and residential areas across the base were rendered uninhabitable. Infrastructure that was not physically destroyed was often structurally compromised, requiring extensive remediation before it could be returned to service.
The operational implications were immediate. Tyndall served as a critical home for a substantial portion of the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fleet, a sophisticated and limited asset central to US air dominance. Although a portion of the fleet was evacuated ahead of the storm, aircraft that remained on-site were damaged, and the destruction of maintenance and support facilities forced the rapid displacement of the entire F-22 mission to other installations. This redistribution stressed receiving bases, complicated maintenance schedules, and temporarily reduced the fleet’s operational flexibility. The disruption also revealed how concentrated basing of high-value assets can amplify vulnerability when exposed to low-probability, high-impact hazards.
The long-term recovery challenges at Tyndall have been equally significant. Rebuilding the installation has required one of the most ambitious reconstruction efforts in recent Air Force history, with cost estimates surpassing $5 billion. The project has involved not only repairing or replacing damaged structures, but fundamentally rethinking the installation’s footprint, design, and resilience posture. This effort has included elevating facilities, modernizing utilities, integrating passive survivability measures, and redesigning mission areas to reduce single-point failures. The scale and duration of the reconstruction underscore the reality that extreme weather events can generate decade-long financial and operational burdens, even when anticipated and managed effectively.
Tyndall’s experience provides several key lessons for enhancing airbase resilience. First, the storm demonstrated the vulnerability of legacy infrastructure built to outdated design standards that do not reflect modern climatological baselines. Second, the F-22 mission’s displacement highlighted the importance of distributed basing concepts and cross-installation redundancy for continuity of operations. Third, the reconstruction effort illustrated the value of integrating environmental-driven projections into installation planning and military construction, rather than applying minimal compliance metrics. Ultimately, Tyndall serves as a case study in the operational, financial, and strategic costs of insufficient resilience in a rapidly changing hazard environment.
Case Study 2: Offutt Air Force Base Flooding (2019)
Offutt Air Force Base – One-third of the installation was flooded, and the boom was a precautionary measure for possible fuel leaks (Image Credit: US Air Force/Delanie Stafford)
In March 2019, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska experienced one of the most severe non-coastal flooding events ever recorded at a US military installation. A combination of extreme precipitation, rapid snowmelt, frozen ground, and upstream ice jams along the Missouri River produced historic water levels that overtopped levees and breached flood defenses surrounding the installation. The resulting inundation occurred quickly, leaving little time for protective actions and overwhelming drainage systems not designed for such extreme hydrological conditions.
As floodwaters spread across the installation, roughly one-third of the base was submerged under several feet of water. The inundation severely damaged buildings, roadways, aircraft maintenance facilities, and portions of the airfield. Particularly noteworthy were the impacts on facilities supporting US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), whose global mission makes installation resilience essential to national security. STRATCOM’s headquarters had recently transitioned to a new building located on higher ground. Still, numerous support and administrative structures, IT systems, and mission support facilities remained within the floodplain and sustained substantial damage. The event highlighted the strategic consequences of locating critical command-and-control support functions in areas exposed to intensifying hydrological hazards driven by exogenous change.
The Offutt flood also provided key lessons in engineering and hydrology. Post-event analyses identified that the levee systems protecting the base were designed for historical flood conditions that no longer reflect current or projected climate realities. The scale of the 2019 flood demonstrated that planning assumptions based on 20th-century hydrological norms underestimate contemporary risk, particularly in regions experiencing more volatile precipitation patterns. The event catalyzed a reassessment of local flood protection measures, leading to new investments in levee improvements, updated flood maps, and hardened infrastructure for essential services.
In the aftermath, the Air Force initiated a multi-year effort to relocate vulnerable facilities to higher elevations and reconfigure installation layout to minimize flood-exposed concentrations of mission-critical assets. Similar to the lessons at Tyndall, Offutt’s experience highlighted the importance of integrating environmental projections into master planning, reducing dependency on at-risk structures, and developing capabilities to maintain continuity of operations even during prolonged recovery periods.
Case Study 3: Wildfires and Threats to Western Installations (2016–2025)
The Las Pulgas Fire burns behind the Marine Corps Air Station at Camp Pendleton, Calif., 16 May, 2014. The Las Pulgas Wildfire on Camp Pendleton has burned more than 15,000 acres and is the largest fire in San Diego County history (Image Credit: US Marine Corps/Cpl. Ethan Johnson)
From 2017 to 2021, western US military installations faced a dramatic escalation in wildfire activity, driven by prolonged drought, extreme heat, and shifting vegetation patterns across California and the broader region. Vandenberg Space Force Base (formerly Vandenberg Air Force Base) and Camp Pendleton, two of the military’s most significant West Coast installations, experienced repeated fire encroachment that threatened facilities, training ranges, launch infrastructure, and personnel safety.
At Vandenberg, wildfires in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2024, and 2025 burned thousands of acres on or adjacent to the installation, in some cases disrupting scheduled space launches and damaging training infrastructure. Camp Pendleton, situated in one of the most fire-prone regions of California, faced numerous fires in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 that forced partial evacuations, threatened housing areas, and destroyed or degraded range facilities essential to Marine Corps training. In several instances, flames approached or crossed installation boundaries faster than anticipated, with wind-driven fire behavior complicating suppression operations and overwhelming existing firebreaks.
These wildfire events had serious operational consequences. Evacuations reduced personnel availability and forced pauses in training cycles, while smoke and poor air quality created hazardous conditions for outdoor training, aviation operations, and routine maintenance. Across multiple seasons, installations lost dozens of training days due to unsafe conditions, reducing the predictability of training schedules and increasing pressure on units to meet readiness requirements in compressed timeframes. The health risks posed by prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke—ranging from respiratory irritation to more serious long-term impacts—added further burdens to installation medical systems and personnel welfare.
Infrastructure losses further complicated operations. Fires damaged communication lines, range targets, utilities, and perimeter fencing, requiring repairs that diverted funding and personnel from other mission priorities. At both Vandenberg and Camp Pendleton, firefighting coordination presented significant challenges. Installations rely on a combination of military, local, state, and federal firefighting assets, and large wildfires often strain these joint capabilities. Differing organizational timelines, communications protocols, and resource needs occasionally introduced friction into multi-agency fire responses. These coordination challenges highlight the importance of well-developed interagency planning and joint incident command structures, especially in regions where military and civilian lands interface closely.
The broader implications for readiness and range management are substantial. Wildfires have forced the services to reconsider vegetation management practices, rethink the placement of critical infrastructure, and invest in early detection and rapid response capabilities. They have also revealed the limitations of relying on historical fire patterns in regions experiencing rapid ecological change. For installations whose training missions depend on large, contiguous tracts of land—as is the case for the Marine Corps and the Space Force—fire-driven landscape transformation threatens the long-term realism and availability of training. Ultimately, the wildfire experience from 2017 to 2021 highlights that western installations face not just episodic threats, but a shifting environmental baseline that demands sustained, adaptive resilience planning.
Cross-Cutting Impacts on Military Readiness and Operations
Extreme weather events do not affect military installations as isolated incidents; rather, they generate cascading effects that reverberate across infrastructure, readiness, mission assurance, and the well-being of the force and their families. The past two decades demonstrate that hazards as varied as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heat extremes consistently degrade the DoD’s ability to maintain operational continuity and strategic responsiveness.
Physical Infrastructure Damage
The most immediate and visible cross-cutting impact is the degradation of critical infrastructure. Hurricanes and storm surge have destroyed or severely damaged hangars, aircraft shelters, maintenance depots, and barracks, while inundation has compromised runways, electrical substations, and fuel distribution systems. Naval shipyards and waterfront facilities face accelerated corrosion, chronic flooding, and disruptions to dry-dock operations. Each event compounds long-standing maintenance backlogs, leaving installations more vulnerable to subsequent hazards.
Operational Readiness
Extreme weather routinely interrupts training, force generation, and deployment cycles. Live-fire exercises are canceled due to wildfire risk or heat stress thresholds; aircraft and ground vehicles must be relocated ahead of storms; and flooded ranges or smoke-choked airfields delay training pipelines. These disruptions cascade into reduced sortie rates, diminished unit preparedness, and compressed training timelines once normal operations resume. Weather-driven logistical delays—ranging from compromised road access to port closures—further impede sustainment operations and mobility.
Mission Assurance and Strategic Concerns
When critical nodes are disrupted, mission assurance is jeopardized. The displacement of high-value assets, such as the F-22 fleet after Hurricane Michael or the temporary loss of STRATCOM support facilities at Offutt AFB, illustrates how environmental hazards pose strategic-level risks. Installation downtime constrains the United States’ ability to project power, maintain forward presence, or surge forces during contingency operations. For coastal and Arctic installations, recurrent flooding and extreme cold events challenge the reliability of communication systems, energy supply, and command-and-control networks essential to national security missions.
Financial Costs
The financial burden of recovery and reconstruction is substantial. Environmental disasters have generated tens of billions of dollars in repair costs, often requiring multi-year appropriations and diverting funds from modernization priorities. For services already facing significant deferred maintenance, each disaster tightens fiscal constraints and delays needed upgrades across the installation portfolio. These expenditures highlight the escalating economic risks associated with environmental vulnerabilities and military installations.
Human Factors
Finally, extreme weather imposes significant human costs on service members and their families. Housing shortages following hurricanes or wildfires displace families for months, while repeated crises contribute to fatigue, stress, and disruptions to childcare and schooling. Personnel often balance recovery duties with operational requirements, which increases burnout and compounds manning challenges. These human-factor stresses directly affect retention, morale, and the force’s overall resilience.
Conclusion
Over the past 15–20 years, extreme weather events have revealed unmistakable patterns in how environmental hazards affect US military installations and, by extension, national security. These events demonstrate that extreme weather is neither isolated nor anomalous; it forms a persistent backdrop against which the military must sustain readiness. The ability to project power and maintain deterrence depends not only on weapons systems and trained personnel but also on installations that can withstand, absorb, and rapidly recover from environmental shocks. Ensuring the resilience of installations is therefore a national security imperative, central to the nation’s ability to deter adversaries, respond to crises, and maintain global stability.
Meeting this challenge will require moving beyond reactive recovery toward proactive, risk-informed resilience planning. This includes systematically integrating extreme weather risk into installation master planning, infrastructure investment decisions, and mission assurance assessments. Hardening critical infrastructure—such as energy, water, transportation, and communications systems—must be prioritized based on mission criticality and exposure, with redundancy and rapid restoration capabilities embedded by design. Such efforts should be treated not as discretionary initiatives, but as core readiness investments that reduce operational risk and long-term costs.
Equally important is the institutionalization of resilience across governance, budgeting, and acquisition processes. Ensuring installation resilience will require greater transparency and accountability across the DoD, sustained funding mechanisms beyond post-disaster supplemental appropriations, and acquisition pathways that enable adaptive, forward-looking infrastructure solutions. Cross-service coordination and partnerships with state, local, and private-sector stakeholders can further enhance resilience, particularly where installations are embedded in shared civilian infrastructure systems vulnerable to the same extreme weather hazards.
Finally, resilience must be understood as a dynamic capability rather than a static end state. As hazard profiles continue to evolve, so too must the assumptions underlying installation design, risk tolerance, and operational planning. Developing a workforce capable of anticipating, preparing for, and learning from extreme weather disruptions—and institutionalizing lessons learned from past events—will be critical to sustaining readiness. In doing so, the Department of Defense can better ensure that its installations remain reliable platforms for power projection and crisis response despite an increasingly volatile operating environment.
The authors are aware that, in accordance with Executive Order 14347, the Department of Defense has administratively changed its name to the Department of War. The change has not been codified, and the US Code and Department policies and directives still use the official name Department of Defense. This publication will use Department of War generally but use Department of Defense for legal and policy documents that have not undergone this administrative change.
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