Electric Dreams

Electric Tanks

Aren't The Problem
Electric Military

First General Order

LGBQT Uber Alles!
Electric Military

Changing the meaning of "charge!"

Granholm's Quest

Just when you thought bureaucrats couldn't get an dumber, along comes Joe Biden's Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, who says she supports requiring the U.S. Department of Defense to field an all-electric military by 2030.

In a sane world, the head of the Department of Energy would be a scientist, or industry expert. Instead, we have Granholm, an attorney, whose expertise runs towards campaigning and winning elections as part of the Democratic Party machine.

Canadian born Granholm, who has no military or engineering background, testified last Wednesday in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that she supported requiring the United States military to move to an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030.

That's less than seven years.

The Great Migration

As if the US military was not already crippled by woke activism at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, approaching the migration of America's fighting forces from internal combustion and diesel engines to electric battery power by slapping a completion date on the mission without understanding the complexity, the cost, or level of effort involved is insane.

Granholm is setting the stage for a visit from the dreaded unforeseen for the simple reason that most technological migrations don't have a very high risk of being interrupted by war.

There's something called "readiness," and there is no way on God's green earth for our military to maintain its readiness while seamlessly migrating to a new technology in seven years, force-wide. The migration will take time and resources away from training for the military's primary mission, the defense of the nation. There is no way to avoid that. Combat troops will be in garrison messing with the new equipment instead of in the field, training.

Granholm has no understanding of these issues and yet the complexity of this migration is so much greater. If the Army's plan was to do a phased, rolling migration, OK! Maybe!

Do one Army corps at a time. Work out the bugs. Field test the equipment, but don't do the entire Army all at once. Migrating the entire U. S. Army to a new core technology in a single burst is crazy, but to do the entire U. S. military at once is insane!

Stop What You're Doing!

All of our forces have their own agendas. Each branch of the military has commitments to its current goals, training schedules, members, contractors and suppliers. There are planned weapons and delivery systems that exist in every stage from conceptual drawings to field-testing prototypes that must be canceled to meet Granholm's schedule.

Large-scale, multi-continent training exercises, often including allies that are scheduled years in advance must be canceled or rescheduled -- and nobody even wants to talk about how events in Ukraine will affect the grand plan.

Granholm's announcement impacts all of that. Contracts will be canceled. Penalties will be paid. Sub-contractors will go bankrupt. Some industries may even disappear. Literally tens-of-thuousands of jobs are at risk.

None of this is considered because we're going for it!

"I do, and I think we can get there, as well," Granholm said. "I do think that reducing our reliance on the volatility of globally traded fossil fuels where we know that global events like the war in Ukraine can jack up prices for people back home… does not contribute to energy security."

A Plan For Failure

It should surprise no one that Granholm sat in front of Congress and said, with a straight face, that migrating the largest and most complex military on the planet to "living modern electrically" in seven years is doable.

Granholm knows zero about battlefield realities, and probably doesn't care. She's really just the messenger. There is little chance our military will successfully migrate to an all EV military in a mere seven years.

It took twenty-years to design, test and field the M1A1 Main Battle Tank, and that's just one tracked vehicle. These issues mean nothing to Granholm, she's going to be long gone when it's time to pay the Piper.

She really doesn't know any better. She's doing what she was told to do, but that stuff she says about our energy security is just not true. Every American knows the United States has an abundance of energy. We have enormous oil and natural gas deposits that have been put off limits by Joe Biden. What we don't have is a whole lot of lithium, the stuff they make batteries from, but do you know who does?

China

As things stand, right now, a successful migration would make our military almost completely dependent on the People's Republic of China for its source of energy. The Chinese Communists possess most of the lithium on the planet -- and they're aggressively acquiring more all the time.

Lithium has become a critical mineral in green technologies, with lithium-ion batteries used to power everything from smart-phones to electric vehicles, and to store wind and solar energy.

Like oil, lithium, is not evenly distributed in the world. Nearly 80% of known deposits are in four countries -- Argentina, Bolivia Chile, and Australia. China, which holds less than 7% of the world’s lithium reserves, is nevertheless the world’s largest importer, refiner and consumer of lithium, buying 70% of lithium compounds and supplying 70% of lithium production, largely to domestic lithium battery makers, six of which are among the top ten in the world. In other words, China is the emperor of lithium.

China’s lithium dominance has caused concerns. The United States and the European Union have prioritized building greater self-sufficiency in raw materials, lithium included, in their industrial policies, aiming to curb their reliance on China.

Characterizing batteries as the battlefield, Foreign Policy said that the next geopolitical contest may be over green technology, and China, for now, is poised to win control of those supply chains -- and the DoE is helping them.

Why Fund The Enemy?

The United States Department of Energy has been funding Chinese battery companies with hundreds of millions of American tax dollars?

Granholm's DoE awarded $200 million to Microvast, a lithium battery company that operates primarily out of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Microvast rents office space in a building at 12603 Southwest Freeway, Suite 300, Stafford, Texas, allowing them to claim they're a U. S. company, but all of Microvast's production is in the People's Republic.

Senator John Barasso says that the award to a company joined at the hip with the communist Chinese government is demonstrably antithetical to American law, and that the DoE’s actions directly undermine the United States’ position in its race against China for technological supremacy.

In the video clip, Granholm resorts to a lot of mumbledeygook about "vetting" and "wrong countries," obscuring the real problem -- funding the enemy! -- and since when has Communist China not been a "country of concern?"

Social Justice

As if the military's conversion to living modern electrically while funding Chinese battery production wasn't a daunting enough challenge, Biden placed a handicap on the migration earlier this month, by signing another executive order. This one "further embeds environmental justice into the work of federal agencies to achieve real, measurable progress that communities can count on."

Titled "Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All," Biden's order, according to the White House, makes it "clear that the pursuit of environmental justice is a duty of all executive branch agencies and should be incorporated into their missions."

The administration's efforts are already being carried out by the Department of Defense, according to the agency's online scorecard. The scorecard revealed the agency has "at least 640 staff that work on environmental justice, either in a full- or part-time capacity."

Other Issues

There's a thousand issues that are not even under consideration by the administration that will impact this effort.

If American troops have to be deployed, where would our forces find the charging stations? The military would need thousands of diesel-powered generators and the hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel to power them.

Every battalion would need an electrical generator company to keep everything running, and pray like hell some third world, illiterate guerrilla commander doesn't keep the battle going until all the batteries die. Then what?

Then there's electronic pulse weapons.

The military that Granholm and others envision is susceptible to electronic pulse weapons. EP weapons are not science-fiction. Boeing is building them for the U. S. Air Force right now, and that means that the Chinese at least have the blueprints, if not a working copy.

The point is, this hasn't been thought through and there are a million variables.

The Wrong People

The problem with this plan is the Pentagon itself. It is doubtful they have the people to do the job.

Obama fired 200 of the best war-fighting general officers in the military. Then, Biden got rid of thousands of battle-hardened commissioned and noncommissioned officers more with his vaccinations purge. What remains are over 600 diversity and equity officers running diversity workshops that will surely insert themselves into the migration process, guaranteeing that seven-year goal never gets met.

What we have here is situation, created by a bunch of civilians at a catered meeting in one of those big Washington buildings, who suddenly decided they're going to throw the switch. Full speed ahead. Damn the torpedoes.

It’s almost like they want us to lose.

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