Clean Manufacturing Could Strengthen DoD's Industrial Strategy

Climate hawks frequently invoke national security as a rationale for transforming American industry. Unless the United States makes clean steel, electric vehicles and so on, they say, climate refugees and water wars will dominate our future.

Tenuous at best and foolish at worst, this logic makes it more difficult to build appropriate and sustainable linkages between the national security establishment and clean manufacturing. A smarter approach would emphasize resilience, flexibility and deterrence – three priorities of the recently released National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS).

The greens are right that climate change is a national security threat amplifier. But some of these effects are already inevitable, and they will continue to grow until the whole world stops emitting greenhouse gases. The United States contributes only about 15% of global emissions, and that share is decreasing. Even the immediate and total elimination of U.S. emissions would do no more than delay the onset of these threats by a few years.

The United States must therefore be prepared for a more volatile future regardless of its climate policy. Defense planners are obligated to adopt the most effective strategies to address these looming threats. Those in harm’s way deserve no less. Whether these strategies reduce emissions or not is irrelevant.

The ill-fated Obama-era Great Green Fleet illustrates what can go wrong when actions to address climate and security risks are conflated. This $200 million initiative sought to replace petroleum-based fuels with drop-in biofuels. It failed because the technology was not mature enough to be scaled up. Ten years later, barely a drop of the cleaner substitute has reached U.S. ships and planes, emissions are unaffected and valuable defense dollars have gone down the drain.

Priority 1: Resilient Supply Chains

It’s not surprising, then, that the Department of Defense (DOD) resists serving as a guinea pig for clean manufacturing experiments. To avert this reaction, climate advocates should concentrate on opportunities that clearly advance the national security mission while coincidentally accelerating the low-carbon transition.

The new, first-of-its-kind National Defense Industrial Strategy points the way. Although climate change is hardly mentioned in it, the NDIS’s objectives will frequently be advanced if defense manufacturers run cleaner operations and make cleaner products.

Resilient supply chains are the DOD’s first priority. The pandemic revealed vulnerabilities that have been amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. DOD plans to rebuild domestic and allied manufacturing capabilities to reduce these risks.

New production methods drawing on advanced technologies figure prominently in this strategy. Energy- and materials-efficient, digitally enabled factories – which also happen to have much smaller carbon footprints than those they will replace – offer the best chance to achieve resilience. This modernized industrial base must be supported by reliable, resilient power grids. Low-carbon energy resources can help diversify electricity generation, reducing vulnerability to disruption.

Priority 2: Flexible Acquisition

Flexible acquisition is a second pillar of the NDIS. DOD seeks to field systems that are sufficiently customized to meet its needs while still allowing it to utilize commercial capabilities for spare parts and maintenance and to surge production when needed.

Modular, open product architectures that allow “plug and play” upgrades to be introduced easily lie at the core of such systems. Electrification, the spine of the clean manufacturing economy, is highly congruent with flexible acquisition. Warfighters rely on an ever-growing array of digital systems that must draw power from mobile platforms.

“On Navy ships,” wrote former DOD officials Dorothy Robyn and Jeffrey Marqusee, “the proportion of energy consumed by onboard systems is approaching that used to propel the ship.” Clean energy resources—such as batteries, solar cells and even small modular nuclear reactors—provide this functionality better than generators that rely on continuous re-supply of fossil fuels.

Priority 3: Economic Deterrence

Economic deterrence is third on DOD’s list. The NDIS calls out predatory practices employed by China to dominate critical markets and hollow out industries in the United States and allied nations. To fight back, the DOD plans to limit dependence on companies controlled by foreign adversaries and to fortify its technology alliances.

To do so, it will have to focus on clean manufacturing, because China has run its economic playbook to perfection in these markets. Chinese firms control a commanding share of every stage of the battery and solar PV supply chains, for instance, and have designs on many others, including nuclear power. This thrust is sure to continue because clean energy, broadly defined, has emerged as the leading driver of the Chinese economy.

Resilience, flexibility and deterrence mutually reinforce DOD’s interest in clean manufacturing. Supply chains that are less dependent on foreign entities of concern will also be less vulnerable to disruption and more open to modular upgrades if they use clean processes and energy.

To be sure, some clean manufacturing priorities lie outside DOD’s strategy. For instance, construction materials that are major sources of emissions, like concrete and steel, pose few national security risks. Perhaps certain DOD units and projects will see it in their interest to join civilian “first movers” who are willing to pay higher costs for cleaner materials. But forcing such costs, and potentially poorer performance, on the DOD as a whole, is a recipe for backlash. When clean materials are just as cheap and work just as well as dirty ones, DOD will undoubtedly use them. Climate advocates should focus on other pathways to achieve this important end.

National security is closely linked with the consequences of climate change, but only loosely linked with its mitigation. To pretend otherwise is counterproductive. Defense and climate policy can both be strengthened if realistic, sustainable linkages, based on true national security imperatives, are built between them.

David M. Hart is professor of public policy at George Mason University and author of a series on U.S. industrial strategy for the Bipartisan Policy Center.