Defense Industrial Base Requires Energy Security

This article was originally published in National Defense Magazine.

The Iran war has exposed what military planners have long feared — the United States is consuming munitions and critical materiel faster than it can replace them.

Catching up will require energy infrastructure that underpins the defense industrial base.

History offers a cautionary lesson. In both World War I and World War II, the United States came dangerously close to energy shortfalls that could have decided the outcome of the wars. Factories producing critical munitions and materiels faced energy curtailments, resulting in production limitations. It was not simply because the country lacked generation capacity, although that happened in some cases. No, the bigger liability was the lack of transmission infrastructure to move power from where it was produced to where it was consumed.

This same structural misalignment — inadequate transmission — defines the challenge facing the industrial base today. The companies that design, manufacture, test and field U.S. weapons depend on reliable, uninterrupted electricity to run precision machine tools, power environmental controls in manufacturing facilities, operate enterprise systems that manage supply chains and run the data infrastructure that drives modern acquisition.