Electric War

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I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.

The history of warfare, from hot oil to catapults, from tanks to drones, from artillery to missiles, on land and underwater, is fraught by technological invention. Most recently, preparation for war and its waging has been mostly a function of oil, to generate the energy to make the steel, manufacture the guns and ammunition, transport weaponry to the field of battle, and wage combat directly face-to-face. When I was in the US Army I was trained in hand-to-hand fighting; now, more often, the enemy is never seen beyond perhaps a ghostly surveillance image or an acquired target blip on a screen. And more recently still, as in Iran today, almost all engagement is remote, delivered by missiles and drones operated from distant command centers, now often assisted by AI in targeting, assessment, and delivery.

If war was once a function of oil, it is now a function of electricity as its foundational resource. Inherent in this shift is a functional dependency on generation, distribution, and constant availability, enabled by the grid which is, by its limited loads, interrupted viability, inadequate storage capacity, and de-limited access is presently unable to meet today’s ever-increasing demand.

In an article by Morgan Basllian and Jahara Matisek of the Center for International Maritime Security, the disconnect is described with statistics that reveal the needs and requirements of such a system of warfare mis-matched with the available generation and availability. “At the tactical level,” they write, “hour-by-hour management of peak loads dictates whether radar networks, command centers, and various weapons systems can operate without rolling brownout. At the strategic level, precision munitions, advanced materials, and micro-electronics take electricity intensive sites that take years to plan and build…production that cannot be surged during a crisis…” “For the Iran war, the Pentagon has utilized Anthropic’s tool Claude and Palantir’s Maven to process the sensor data for multi-domain awareness and to identify targets” produced by data centers already over-whelmed by demand, with requisite new centers facing growing civilian opposition because of their inordinate energy demand, volumetric need for cooling water, heat release, and diversion from already taxed local supply for civilian consumption.

Further, this new warfare is creating fierce competition for certain materials – copper, for example, without which existing systems and the enormous electricity demand to come cannot be sustained without new mines, more energy expended to extract and process, and the strategic failure implicit in the limited supply chain and additional time and cost. The US government is caught in a contradiction of its own making: its ignorant retrograde energy policy, unwillingness to finance major renovation and expansion of the grid, and lack of political will, up against its declared strategic need for manufacture and replacement of weapons inventory now at levels unable to sustain existing levels of foreign adventure. The paradox is painful and dangerous to combatants and future missions, as if we’ve have started a war we cannot finish, endless by definition leaving personnel, equipment, and political objectives unachievable on land and sea. And what of the future? As the authors conclude, “If America cannot generate and deliver power at scale, it will lose the next war before the first shot is fired.”

Military use is but one new use for electrical supply. Where is what we already need to come from? Our critical demand for new energy technology has been already limited, victim to climate denial, ideology, oil politics, and narrow self-interest. Political decisions have already inexplicably curtailed response to existing need without the amplified factor of new tactics for another foreign war. Where is all that new energy to come from? And is making war the best reason for finding it? This is an existential question. What if we used all our energy - present, future, and personal - for promoting alternative source and supply, building community, and making peace?

We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.

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[outro music, ocean and wind sounds]