America’s commander in chief just laid another egg.
President Joe Biden wants all Pentagon vehicles to be electric by 2030—in just six years and seven months. America’s fearless leader previewed this policy on Earth Day 2022.
“We’re going to start the process where every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle, is going to be climate-friendly—every vehicle,” Biden said in Seattle on April 22 last year. “I mean it.”
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm just reiterated that objective.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, asked Granholm late last month at an April 26 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, “Do you support the military adopting that EV fleet by 2030?”
“I do, and I think we can get there,” Granholm replied.
Those who have worn America’s uniform find this jaw-droppingly stupid.
“Anyone who has even a little experience in military logistics recognizes Joe Biden’s EV mandate as a political farce,” House Armed Services Committee member Jim Banks, R-Ind., told me. The Navy Reserve officer and Senate candidate added: “As an Afghanistan war veteran, I wish Biden [Defense Department’s] top brass had the courage to put our national security before Green New Deal fantasies and call out this harmful and ridiculous order.”
“I encountered a lot of [improvised explosive devices] on dirt roads in Afghanistan, but no charging stations,” said Matt Pottinger, who served three combat deployments as a Marine and later as deputy national security adviser. “We rely on China for most of our EV supply chain, and that trend is worsening. It was hard enough when we depended on Middle Eastern allies for our energy needs. To put those needs—even for our military—in the hands of our chief adversary is, to use a technical term, pretty dumb.”
Biden’s pretty dumb political farce raises numerous unintentionally hilarious questions:
- Where exactly would one plug in a Jeep, truck, tank, or armored personnel carrier in a blistering desert or steamy jungle?
If such charging stations existed, wouldn’t the enemy neutralize them, to hobble U.S. armed forces?
If American GIs discovered functioning charging stations, would they halt their advance for, say, 30 to 45 minutes to recharge—at least once or twice daily?
- Would U.S. troops bring travel adapters to plug their EVs into overseas charging stations?
“Imagine going to war, you’re in an all-electric Humvee, your batteries are low, and it’s time for a charge, but you’re behind enemy lines,” one Louisianan hypothesized on Twitter. “You pull up to the nearest charging station controlled by the enemy. They let you charge before starting battle. The war continues.”
- How would the Allied march from D-Day to Berlin have looked if George S. Patton, Maxwell Taylor, Bernard Law Montgomery, and other commanders had had to rely on electric vehicles? Would Adolf Hitler have left charging stations conveniently connected to the grid and ready for the Third Army to refresh its Sherman tanks en route to the Battle of the Bulge? Or, more likely, would der Führer have ordered SS saboteurs to dynamite every one of those damn things as the Nazis retreated, from Burgundy to Bastogne?
Alternatively, Patton and his men could have hauled mobile, solar-powered charging stations, so tanks and other vehicles could boost their voltage while dodging incoming Wehrmacht artillery.
Allied troops also would have confronted, in Monty Python’s words, “a teensy problemette.”
The skies above the Battle of the Bulge were notoriously cold, dark, and overcast in December 1944. The clouds were so thick that Allied pilots could not parachute supplies to friendly forces who were invisible beneath the dense gray.
Theoretically, had Patton roared into Nazi-occupied Belgium under an EV mandate, tapping into a woke, solar-powered grid would have been useless. There and then, particularly around the winter solstice, the sun’s rays were as scarce as synagogues.
Obviously, 2023 is not 1944. That said, relying on the enemy’s green infrastructure or schlepping solar- and wind-power generators would cripple U.S. troops as they attacked hostile combatants.
“This is more lunacy from the jet-setting climate grifters with zero basis in science or common sense,” said John Ullyot, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former spokesman for the National Security Council. “EVs have no place on the battlefield unless it’s aiding the enemy. They would slow us down, crimp our tactical options, and make our forces easy targets against the weakest of adversaries. If Biden steers us into this woke cul-de-sac, taxpayers should insist that every military EV be delivered with a ‘Coexist’ bumper sticker already pasted on the back.”
So, what’s next from the geniuses at Biden’s Green New Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the guardians of America’s nuclear arsenal?
Why not an electric-ship mandate?
U.S. Navy aircraft carriers could stop every two days in mid-ocean, plug into solar-powered buoys, wait 12 hours, and then proceed on their merry way.
Why? “Climate!”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online. Original here. Reproduced with permission.
