(Bloomberg) — The Pentagon is sounding alarms over Biden administration plans to advance offshore wind projects along the central Atlantic US coast, warning that almost all of the new terrain eyed for development conflicts with military operations.
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The Pentagon has identified challenges operating around wind turbines that would be installed into the seabed in Atlantic waters near many of its operations and facilities, including North Carolina’s Dare County bombing range, used for training fighter jet crews, and a weapons station in Yorktown, Virginia. They are documented vividly on a map of Navy and Air Force concerns, dated Oct. 6, 2022, and circulated with industry and state stakeholders this month.
Four of six potential wind lease areas outlined by the ocean energy bureau last November are completely shaded red, including two deep-water parcels that might require floating turbines. The remaining two tracts, in yellow, are identified as requiring further study. The areas deemed highest priority by the Pentagon span a large portion of potential lease areas off the Maryland and North Carolina coasts.
The Defense Department official said the representations were designed to pinpoint areas that present the most challenges — generally where the Pentagon would be unable to continue its mission as currently conducted in the space. The focus going forward is on finding ways to accommodate wind development, including by adjusting operations to allow the activity, the official said. That could take the form of shifting the location of military exercises and other steps — such as optimizing radar processing systems — to minimize interference from turbines.
I’m not a fan of subsidized wind projects, but…
“Have to adjust our training exercises” =/= “threaten national security”
I’d imagine these will also add additional backscatter for the hydro acoustic networks that will degrade the near-shore military applications of underwater digital communication and eavesdropping, IC data collection, and civil shipping safety. This tech has been very expensive to develop and deploy.
The uppermost echelon of decision makers whose job it is to reconcile such priority conflicts are failing spectacularly. It sure looks like they’re being intentionally siloed and marginalized from below as a damage control effort. The recent balloon debacle and the clumsy Ukraine related “leaks” have made this glaringly obvious. There’s serious conflict near the top.
Well Merlin, you can’t have an overarching political plan of purposely dividing the people of a nation without unintended consequences like national security breaches here and there. Just one of the problems is that the believers in the ranks really fear and want to hurt the ‘enemy’ and our political media machine has made the opposite party the greatest and virtually the only enemy. It is not the USSR or China or any other foreigners today. The enemy is the other half of the US population. Heck, by media hype foreigners are our greatest friends according to one side.
So we Americans spy on, hate, try to hurt, fear, etc. half of our own people and look at no one else. And the people with any standards or even just independent thought can’t really vote for anyone anymore.
(And yes, I used USSR purposely even though long defunct, because it had the right flavor. Everyone knew they were a real enemy of the US.)
If you don’t occasionally visit J.E. Dyer (theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com), you really should. Honest analysis of world events from a former naval intelligence analyst sans the usual political spin. She had an in-depth piece back in February dealing with the very real projection of China’s global military muscle veiled as commercial expansion. Not something you want to read right before going to bed.
I have been reading through that site. Thanks for the tip!