The U.S. military is under pressure from environmentalists and this administration to develop alternative energy, such as biofuels, solar and wind power. As shown below, this is wasting valuable resources the military needs for defense.
The recent report A National Strategic Narrative by Captain Wayne Porter (USN) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (USMC), who provide advice to the Joint Chief of Staffs, proposed a new national strategy so as to cut CO2 emissions. This report was an affront to every American who has any knowledge of American history.
In a rebuttal to their report we wrote:
“We believe the draft NSN [National Strategic Narrative] is rooted in naivety and ignorance regarding key issues, and would render the United States of America dangerously vulnerable to real-world dangers that actually do exist.”
(Links to referenced papers are shown below.)
Executive Order 13514, issued by the President in 2009, established marching orders for the Department of Defense (DOD) that requires it to embrace alternative energy, with an emphasis on cutting CO2 emissions.
In August 2010, DOD issued a Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan (SSPP) that was intended to comply with Executive Order 13514.
The military has instituted many efforts to develop alternatives to fossil fuels and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars that should have been spent on weapons and on salaries for our service men and women.
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus directed that half of the energy used by installations will come from alternative sources by 2020. This will increase costs and divert funds from the Navy’s ability to defend our country.
He has also called for a special task-force of carriers and escort vessels to be fueled solely by biofuels and nuclear.
Here is what RAND, an independent research organization, concluded about whether DOD should spend money on alternative fuels.
The RAND report opens with the following statement:
“Over the past few years, the U.S. Department of Defense has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the development, testing, and certification of alternative fuels that can substitute for petroleum-derived fuels used by the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, and Air Force in their tactical weapon systems.”
Here are their findings beginning with page 83:
Findings on Military Use of Alternative Fuels
There is no direct benefit to the Department of Defense or the services from using alternative fuels rather than petroleum-derived fuels.
And on page 84:
Defense Department technology-development efforts overemphasize early demonstration and underestimate the difficulty of developing alternative fuel technologies that offer acceptable economic and environmental performance.
And:
Large-scale testing and certification of hydrotreated renewable oils is premature.
Elsewhere in the RAND report, it says that diesel fuel can be produced using the Fischer-Tropsch process, but at great cost. (This was an obvious conclusion since Nazi Germany fueled its tanks with diesel fuel from this process during WWII.)
The report also confirms the obvious, that green house gases can be reduced at great cost. However, also on page 82, it makes the contradictory statement:
It is highly uncertain whether seed oils can be affordably grown in appreciable quantities in the United States without causing land-use changes (direct or indirect) that result in large releases of greenhouse gases.
All in all, the RAND report confirms that DOD is wasting its money on trying to develop alternative fuels.
The main stream media and reporters like Friedman of the New York Times ignore the RAND report.
We have a budget crisis, so why shouldn’t DOD be told to stop wasting money on the development of alternative fuels.
Links to the papers cited above:
A National Strategic Narrative by Captain Wayne Porter (United States Navy) and Colonel Mark Mykleby (United States Marine Corp)
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/A%20National%20Strategic%20Narrative.pdf
And:
Rebuttal of A National Strategic Narrative by: Donald K. Forbes, Captain, USN, retired and Donn D. Dears, GE Company Executive, retired.
http://www.tsaugust.org/images/Final%20NSN%20Rebuttal%2011-06-23.pdf
And:
RAND, National Defense Research Institute, Alternative Fuels for Military Applications.
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG969.pdf
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Additional TSAugust web sites:
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