Green DoD

Many of us are projecting our hopes onto Barack Obama's new administration. I have a specific proposal that I hope gets noticed or has already been thought of: make energy security, especially alternative energy, a national security issue. We can literally do this with making green fuel and fuel efficiency a high priority for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The U.S. military is the world's largest fuel consumer. The image of U.S. troops and materiel occupying or being based in oil rich nations is all the more poignant when we realize that fuel supplies security are not just a priority for U.S. consumers but also for the military, which runs on oil. The U.S. learned this lesson in World War II when we beat Rommel to the Mid-East's oil producers, and it was Franklin Roosevelt who established the U.S.' relationship with the number one source of oil, Saudi Arabia.

The D.o.D. spends millions, perhaps billions of dollars, on vehicle development and military research. Two great outcomes of that research include manned spaceflight, basically putting a can of men on top of a huge missile, and the Internet, originally DARPANet, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency project connecting cold war researchers through a non-hierarchical network that would continue working after a nuclear attack. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, impressed by the Autobahn and its ease for his tanks advancing across Germany sponsored the U.S. Federal Highway development.

The military could and should put its considerable funding behind the search for alternative fuels.