The US must assure its energy-secure future
Meredith Berger is the former assistant secretary of the US Department of the Navy for energy, installations, and environment. This essay is part of the Global Energy Agenda.
Energy is both a tool and a weapon. At the US Department of the Navy, energy security is mission assurance, and unless we meet this critical requirement, we cannot protect our national interests. It is the responsibility of the Navy and Marine Corps, and the civilians who serve the department, to make sure that we are ready—that we have what we need for whatever comes our way, regardless of time or task, to defend our nation.
Our 2022 National Security Strategy acknowledges and prioritizes this energy requirement, calling upon the country to start an energy revolution: to accelerate our diversified, reliable, redundant, independent energy portfolio; to advance technology and talent; and to generate renewable and clean energy sources that reduce climate threat and conflict, as well as emissions and waste. Energy security provides warfighting advantage, deterrence, economic benefit, a healthy, safe environment, and geopolitical stability. Our sailors and Marines are the world’s first responders; dangerous changes to the physical environment put them at heightened risk.
During my tenure as assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations, and environment, I have focused on energy security as a critical driver of mission success: a catalyst for climate action, a defense for critical infrastructure, and a source of resilience for our communities, our homeland.
On climate action
Reliable, clean, resilient, independent energy allows us to keep mission first, so we are prepared to fight and win in any environment. Climate change generates extremes: floods, droughts, temperatures, stronger storms, and fewer resources. These are the conflict generators that make the world a more volatile place.
A more volatile world increases exponentially the demands on the Navy and Marine Corps, while simultaneously decreasing their ability to respond to those demands. In the Department of the Navy, climate readiness is mission readiness, and energy reliability and resilience are critical to mission success. Reliable, resilient energy ensures that our forces are trained, equipped, and ready so that at a moment’s notice, they can launch, fight, and win. As we focus on this decisive decade, we are mindful of the pacing threat that shapes our mission, and the climate threat that shapes how we operate and execute our mission. By advancing and diversifying our energy sources, technology, and supplies, we reduce our emissions, logistics tails and vulnerabilities, and increase readiness and adaptability.
On critical infrastructure
The means to our ends—our ports, roads, runways, depots, barracks, and utilities—they connect us, sustain us, prepare us, and ultimately, they protect us. Our installations in the United States and abroad are essential platforms from which we project our military power, and we need reliable, uninterruptable energy to assure physical and cyber protection of this infrastructure. As we confront the new truth that the homeland is no longer a sanctuary, we must continue to defend against a key vulnerability: inadequately protected, aging energy infrastructure that often lacks redundancy, leaving military mission, commerce, health, safety, livelihood, and lives at risk.
On communities
This is our homeland: shared spaces between installations and town halls, not divided by a fence line, but instead united by values, traditions, and resources. They are the ecosystems that allow us to thrive, succeed, and achieve. Communities are also connected by vulnerabilities, and when it comes to utilities such as energy, single sources and dependencies yield a comprehensive threat, whether it is the Department of the Navy’s national security mission or the community mission of health, safety, and welfare.
Energy is life or death: We learned that lesson the hard way in the Department of the Navy. During a three-month period in Afghanistan in early 2010, the United States suffered a Marine casualty for every fifty convoys of fuel. Seven years earlier, then-Major General James Mattis, while serving as commanding general of the First Marine Division in Iraq, and who later served as Secretary of Defense, pleaded with leadership to “unleash us from the tether of fuel.” He knew that single reliance is a single point of failure, and, despite his warning, we saw the cost of inaction paid in young Marines’ lives.
As we execute our energy future, we cannot afford a single point of failure, and we cannot compromise our own position. My job every day has been to make sure that when Marines and sailors raise their hands and volunteer for our defense, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our nation, values, and freedoms, I take on every known threat, prepare for every contingency, and clear a path toward mission success. For energy security, we have done that at the Department of the Navy through integrated, advanced investments in renewable, reliable energy; we’ve taken actions that question the status quo, and increase mission success and quality of life for our forces, bases, and surrounding communities. The US needs to take that same approach for the nation: build an energy portfolio for the future we anticipate and defend against the threats we know so that we can face the ones we don’t see coming. Energy is a matter where everyone has a strong stake in our collective security: defense, finance, environment, climate, health, and safety. Through our energy revolution, we must be ready as a nation to assure our most critical missions no matter what form they take.
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Image: The crew of the Navy’s newest Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John Basilone (DDG 122) brings the ship to life during the ship's commissioning ceremony in New York City Nov. 9, 2024. (DoD photo by EJ Hersom)