Obama's Skewed National Defense Priorities - Orders U.S. Navy to Waste Billions on "Great Green Fleet"

As the Department of Defense (DoD) faces drastic budget cuts,
the last thing the military needs is to be forced by President Obama to
spend billions of taxpayer dollars on an expensive green energy agenda.

This week President Obama’s green regime at the Pentagon will be in
the spotlight as the U.S. Navy’s “Great Green Fleet” – a strike group
that the Obama administration hopes to run completely on alternative
fuels by 2016 – sets sail as part of training exercises in the Pacific.
One would think the fleet would take to the seas with a great deal of
fanfare, but the Navy has kept it quiet and it’s not difficult to figure
out why. President Obama clearly doesn’t want the American people to
know how much his plan to green the military will cost. As Wired
magazine uncovered, a recent DoD report revealed that their biofuels
program will amount to an extra $1.8 billion a year in fuel costs for
the Navy alone.

This ludicrous pricetag is not surprising:
through Congressional oversight efforts, we found that in 2009, the Navy
paid an outrageous $424 per gallon for 20,000 gallons of renewable
diesel, and in December 2011, the Navy purchased 450,000 gallons of
biofuel for $12 million, equaling about $27 a gallon. The Navy is not
the only service being subject to this great greening agenda: last
month, the Air Force bought 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel at $59
a gallon, twice as much per gallon as what the Navy was forced to
spend. And all of this is being done by the Obama administration while
the president guts our military.

DoD has been forced to
drastically cut its personnel, the number of brigade combat teams,
ships, fighters, and airlift, and it has had to eliminate or postpone
critical military modernization programs. Thanks to President Obama, DoD
can’t afford business as usual yet they are being coerced into spending
$27 a gallon? Secretary Panetta has been warning repeatedly that
President Obama’s deep cuts will have a devastating effect on our
military. Knowing this, how can anyone support depleting another $1.8
billion from an already stretched budget?

In justifying their
completely skewed priorities, President Obama and his administration
have maintained that they are moving forward with this green push so
that the military won’t be subject to global spikes in the price of oil.
Obama’s climate chief Heather Zichal defended the green fleet by
arguing that even a $1 dollar rise in gas prices would cost DoD $30
million. Well, if every $1 dollar rise in gas prices costs $30 million, a
$27 increase in fuels costs due to the forced use of biofuels would add
up to about $660 million, so that argument falls completely flat.

Realizing
that their economic angle is a political loser, they have tried to say
that it’s about national security and getting us off foreign oil. They
continue to use their old chestnut argument that the United States only
has 2 percent of the world’s reserves, hoping that saying it enough
times will make it true. But that argument completely fails in the face
of a recently released United States Geological Survey (USGS) report
revealing that America has 26 percent of the world’s recoverable
conventional oil resources and almost 30 percent of the world’s
technically recoverable conventional natural gas recourses. This USGS
report strengthens what we already know from a recent Congressional
Research Service report which revealed that America possesses the
largest combined oil, natural gas, and coal resources on earth. If
President Obama were serious about energy security and national
security, he would open up these vast resources for development,
ensuring that our military has access to reliable, affordable energy –
and he would immediately approve the Keystone pipeline so we could
obtain more resources from our friend and neighbor Canada rather than
the Middle East.

So if it’s not about national security then
what is it about? Secretary Panetta is the only one who has given us an
honest answer – he recently pledged that DoD will be pouring more than
$1 billion into alternative fuel technologies in order to combat global
warming. The supreme irony is that even if you buy into global warming
alarmism, some of the most far-left environmentalists have taken issue
with biofuels, worrying that they could actually harm the environment.
As Wired magazine further pointed out, “Biofuels might be cleaner to
burn. But those reduced emissions could come with a heavy cost: dirty
water, eroded soil, pricier food.”

It turns out that the great
greening of the military is not-so-great for national security or the
environment – it is yet another massive failure, following down the path
of the complete collapse of companies like Solyndra.

Instead
of pushing forward with this disastrous agenda, the better way is to
work with Congress where we have common ground. Everyone agrees that
energy efficiency in the military is a worthy goal – efficiencies in
usage, infrastructure, equipment and alternative energy solutions that
are affordable and make sense are worth pursuing. But biofuels still
face challenges because the technologies remain unproven, and DoD should
not have to serve as its testing ground.

The sailing of the
Great Green Fleet is another wake-up call for Congress to stop President
Obama from forcing his green energy agenda on DoD – and we’re are
already well on our way. In May, Senator McCain and I introduced
amendments to the Defense Authorization bill that would prevent
President Obama from making DoD go green at a prohibitively expensive
price tag, while he forces cuts to essential military programs. I was
pleased that these amendments passed in committee with strong bipartisan
support, and the House has passed similar legislation in a bipartisan
fashion.

The Obama administration’s aggressive push is too
much too fast and it must be reined in. It’s far more important to have a
modern force of aircraft, ground vehicles and ships than an anemic one
because funds are being directed to experimental technologies; our
priority should be to have a strong, formidable fleet rather than a
not-so-great Green Fleet.

Inhofe is a senior
member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the ranking member of
the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.