Interview: Why is the military industry a climate problem and what can be done to solve it?

In December 2024, WRI staff member Andrew Metheven met with Khem Rogaly, a Senior Research Fellow at Common Wealth, a think tank that sets out to “reimagine ownership to repair past harms and secure a future of sustainable and shared prosperity”.

Khem has recently published a new report titled A Lucas Plan for the Twenty First Century, which sets out to understand how the UK could transition from military to civilian production. To do so, Khem interviewed trade unionists to understand how they see their role in the industry, and how they think such a transition could occur.

Andrew Metheven: To start with, it would be helpful to understand how you see the relationship between military spending and the climate crisis? Aren’t they two separate things?

Khem Rogaly: Military spending is a climate problem, and a massive, multi-layered climate problem. We can understand that in several ways.

Firstly, military spending means spending on military operations, infrastructure, and maintenance of military capacity, by a state. That has an emissions impact. Globally, the military sector is responsible for about 5.5% of emissions. If you take the UK for example, its military sector is responsible for more emissions that 60 countries. The emissions from not just maintaining the capacity to fight a war, but in the UK’s case – because its a large military spender, the 6th highest in the world – to intervene globally, has a big emissions impact.

About half of those emissions come from private industry, in the production of weapons for the British military. The other half comes from energy use, primarily fighter jets and warships. I’d really emphasise that fighter jets are an essential part of that, because they are burning jet fuel at a high altitude, which has a cumulative climate impact.

But that’s only maintaining military infrastructure – the second layer is fighting a war. The environmental and ecological impact of that is obvious too. We can see the most obvious example of that in Gaza now. The term “ecocide” was invented to refer to the American war in Vietnam, and the particular strategy that the American military took, to destroy the relationship of a people to their land. The same tactic is being used by Israel in Gaza, and has been done historically by the Israeli military, but they have accelerated the process since October 2023.

And the final aspect, beyond the ecological destruction that is both inherent to war and has now been adopted as a modern military tactic, is cold war. And I think the best way to frame this is that “cold war is a hot problem”. Basically because, you have geo-political competition – currently led by competition between the US and China – which results in greater military spending and the buildup of the military infrastructure which we’ve already discussed has an emissions impact.

In addition to this, there is economic warfare, and when we’re in a moment of climate crisis and the global economy needs to be decarbonised rapidly, and in a coordinated manner, that is another climate problem. Because what you have are decisions, like those taken by the Biden administration, to put tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles – a policy made to prioritise the interests of the American automotive industry over decarbonisation. To rapidly decarbonise the highest emitting sector in the US economy, you would need to expand public transportation, but you would also need to replace a lot of conventional vehicles with electric vehicles, and the country that is leading the manufacture of these vehicles is China. So there we can see that Cold War style competition is getting in the way of how US policy tackles the climate crisis.

AM: You’ve recently published a report called “A Lucas Plan for the Twenty First Century” - could you summarise what your new report outlines?

KR: The Lucas Plan was a proposal by trade unionists at a military company called Lucas Aerospace, which they published in 1976 to demonstrate that it was possible to convert production from military aircraft components to 150 different civilian products. The plan was extremely innovative, because within that set of products they were looking at converting production from aircraft parts to wind turbines and solar cells. So even in the mid-1970s they were aware of the ecological costs of industrial production and were designing early renewable technologies. It was innovative in another sense because they argued that they should be able to oversee the transition process. They felt, as the people undertaking production and doing the work they were best placed to understand what the transition would look like.

The other point that is important to make about the Lucas Plan is that its often held up as this single example, but really it was part of a long tradition of trade union organising within the military industries in the UK, Europe and US, which stretches back to the wake of the First World War. For example, in Barrow in Britain – at the shipyard that now builds nuclear submarines but previously made conventional warships – trade unionists came up with an alternative plan for a shift to civilian production in response to the devastation of the First World War. This agenda had another huge political resurgence in the wake of the Second World War.

So my report takes a degree of inspiration from the Lucas Plan and aims to explore how that transition could be feasible in today’s military industry in the UK. To do that I spoke to 21 workers within the UK military industry, and interviewed them about their experience of work and the feasibility of a transition.

There are three key takeaways I want to highlight.

1. The UK has maintained a much higher level of military spending than most European countries consistently over the past decades. The justification that’s often given to maintain a high level of military spending is that it’s necessary from an economic perspective, because there are communities across the country who are reliant on military production for good quality manufacturing jobs, and the wider economic benefits that are brought to their local communities from those jobs. My report shows that more than half of these jobs have been lost since 1980, that many of my interviewees had experienced highly insecure work, with hundreds of people fired on the same day. Even up to the present I heard about how a site was going to be relocating imminently, with the threat of redundancies. My interviewee there wished that there had been a transition because contracts with the Ministry of Defence can be highly variable.

2. On the feasibility point: what the interviewees showed, through their experiences, is that a transition is eminently possible. That was particularly stark in the naval shipbuilding sector, where I found four of the UK’s naval shipyards are already undertaking work in offshore renewables supply chains. There are close adjacencies between the skills needed to work on wind turbines, but also to fit out underground trains and to work on the production of public transport infrastructure. Interviewees spoke of the idea of the transition as if it were something normal and their companies would do take on civilian work when they deemed it beneficial. So it's feasible from a technological stand point.

3. For all of this to be possible it would require a reordering of state priorities, away from the level of military spending that we have at the moment. The reason for that is that moving production into a civilian market means you need to demonstrate that there is sustained market for the new products, so that jobs are secure. It was very clear from the interviewees, that they felt that there would have to be a reallocation of public investment towards civilian procurement in order to make that happen.

AM: In the report you’ve made it clear that “the UK’s military industries are viable only because of constant public investment”, and that resources should be redirected towards green industries, but in our current political climate the idea of a politician coming out and saying “we should cut military spending” feels like a career-ending move! What, in your mind, would this process look like?

KR: You can flip it on its head: the only heavy manufacturing sector in the UK that has the government as its main customer is the military industry. What that means is that the Ministry of Defence – along with the export partners that it approves - dictate what is produced in the British military industry. Through its procurement programmes the Ministry of Defence directs production. In the military sector you normally have more specialised production of a more limited set of products than the mass manufacturing line in something like the automotive industry, where you are producing a consumer good at a mass scale. So you have a broad base of people who are working on a few specialised products, that have skills that can be redirected. As I outlined in my report, there is an opening for the state to redesign its manufacturing base, and because its responsible for what’s made in this private industry it can also oversee a transition.

However, as you say, the political challenge is immense: politicians at the moment don’t want to oversee that transition, but its more to say that in political/economic terms it is definitely feasible, just as it is in technological terms. The thing I would add is that it’s important not to suggest it would be easy and smooth. A lot of the interviewees identified that the type of specialised work they’re undertaking has strict requirements that you don’t get in the civilian sectors. You’re making very hi-tech and bespoke pieces of kit, mostly for well funded global military powers, and they have exacting standards. That requires work. There would be a challenge in ensuring that the transition moves to something that is equally labour intensive.

My suggestion, as a starting point, is to set up a state-holding company – not dissimilar to how Labour have setup a National Wealth Fund. The key difference is that it would acquire 100% ownership of sites, while the NWF is taking smaller equity investments. Through this company you could take over specific military production sites and guide their production towards the needs of public sector companies, like transport and energy companies, and use that as a sustained base of demand, coordinating with other companies within the public sector.

As an example, consider Harland & Wolff, which famously owns a Belfast shipyard and went into administration a couple of months ago. All four of its shipyards are at threat, and jobs are at risk. Trade unions are obviously trying to protect their workers, but the government, rather than taking those sites into public ownership as they easily could (because they are operating on contracts from the MoD primarily, as well as some production of products for off-shore renewables), is instead trying to entice a Spanish state-owned company to buy the shipyards. The UK government looking at paying that company £300m to sweeten the takeover. There is an alternative here: the government could save its £300m, take the site into public ownership, and use that ownership to oversee a transition towards renewable energy, public transport infrastructure, or other civilian projects that are urgently needed.

AM: What would you say to those who argue that we must maintain a strong military industrial base, in order to maintain the UK’s security and that of our allies? Wouldn’t this just benefit other companies in other countries?

KR: The UK is an outlier in the level of military spending it has maintained over the last decades – we spend more of our GDP than many comparable countries. Maintaining our level of military spending is not about security, and I say that because military spending, as it is currently formulated, doesn’t go towards national defence, or defending the British Isles from attack. The Government’s Defence Command Paper sets out that the British military needs to be a global force, that it needs to be able to intervene anywhere in the world, at any time, in any domain (land, sea, air, nuclear), and that it needs a constant forward presence beyond Europe. That means military bases in the Persian Gulf and across the world, but projecting British military power globally doesn’t serve British defence. Instead, as we’ve seen with the brutal consequences of British interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or being a crucial supportive partner to Saudi Arabia or Israel, it has brutal consequences for the people who face these military interventions.

Another reason I would add, if you look at the procurement spending of the British military, which is now around £37bn each year – far more than Labour said was too much for the climate – often it’s completely wasted. It’s spent on projects that are delayed, overspent, get cancelled. If you look at the Ajax tank for instance, a £5.2bn project that has been eternally delayed and has injured the military personnel that have been testing it. So the idea that spending is the route to security is flawed from that perspective.

AM: The brutal one! How realistic do you think this is? Are there any signs of hope that this will occur?

KR: To be realistic, we’re living in a time of rearmament, through a moment of heightened geopolitical competition, of genocide in Palestine, of expanding wars in different contexts, so it feels very far away. Especially in Europe there is political pressure to increase military spending – a position that is supported by both major political parties in Britain.

In the British context, we have to be realistic about the fact that we haven’t cut military spending in real terms following the end of the cold war. We’ve actually maintained it. We’re not in the situation that continental European countries are, so the idea that we need to rush into massive increases in military spending just doesn’t stack up. I think before we touch on points of hope, it’s important to note that this kind of transition, or demonstrating that this kind of transition is possible, that building a coalition between antiwar movements, trade unions within the military industries, and climate movements is an essential way of undercutting the idea that military spending is necessary for economic reasons. I think it’s necessary, in those terms, as a counterweight to the industry, and to the military and foreign policy establishments that will promote constant increases to spending.

In terms of hope: there have been hopeful moments within trade union politics over the last year, that have indicated that within the military industry there are trade unions and trade unionists who want to build towards this kind of transition. The best example that I would give of that is the United Auto Workers in the US, a major trade union in the US military industry as well as automotive, who represent workers making armoured vehicles and munitions. In response to the genocide unfolding in Palestine they called for a ceasefire, but also mandated their members to explore transition away from military production, and towards a just transition. I think seeing examples like that is very hopeful.