This is Sirens, a new series brought to you by the ladies of bombshell, where we dissect the institutions of American power.

Join us as we sound the

alarm on technology, governance, and national security issues, and maybe lure some men to their

deaths. I'm Erin Simpson. I'm about it. I and Darplow. And today we are continuing our discussion

of the climate crisis, this time with a special guest, Aaron Sikorski. Hi, Aaron.

Hi.

Erin is the director of the Center for Climate Insecurity at the Council on Strategic Risks, and she has a new book out titled Climate Change on the Battlefield International

Military Responses to the Climate Crisis. Obviously, she's the perfect siren's guest,

and so we wanted to make sure we had her on both to talk about the book and some of the broader kind of security implications of climate change and climate policy. So welcome, Erin. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. I wanted to start just a little bit by way of background. Can you kind of tell us, you've had an

interesting career. You and I met several years ago at kind of a wonky national security

summer camp, basically. Thanks, Elliot Cohen. Can you tell us a little about your background and

like how you came to study climate and security? Sure. No, and that was a lovely summer camp many years ago. I love that. So I worked in the

U.S. intelligence community for a long time. I was an analyst at CIA, and I ended up leading teams that

were looking at counterterrorism issues in East Africa and the Middle East. And time and again,

as we were warning of attacks, looking at risks,

environment and climate issues kept coming up as a driver of instability, challenges that

governments couldn't manage, that extremist groups were able to take advantage of. And I just

became more and more interested in trying to understand those dynamics

and how we in the U.S. national security community could do a better job of unpacking them.

So my last job in the intelligence community was on the National Intelligence Council,

where I worked in the Strategic Futures Group on the Global Trends Project, which Tulsi Gabbard just killed, by the way.

I just saw that. I was going to say. Yeah, but I did the climate and environment analysis for the Global Trends 2040 and just got super interested in figuring out this new challenge and how we can best prepare for it. Awesome. So maybe you can

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