From CFACT

By Kevin Mooney

Enemy submarines and drones could exploit points of vulnerability, experts warn.

Offshore wind projects could potentially enable foreign adversaries to hide submarines in U.S. territorial waters and penetrate U.S. air defenses, according to national security and energy policy analysts.

For this reason alone, they would like to see President Donald Trump’s administration pull the plug on projects up and down the East Coast located near to where military exercises take place. The U.S. Air Force and Navy have in the past expressed concern over how wind farms might impact radar and sonar operations to the point where they compromise defensive and offensive capabilities.

The Trump administration seems to be listening.

Officials have already reversed at least some of the prior approvals President Joe Biden’s administration extended to offshore wind plans. Trump’s January executive order called for a temporary cessation and immediate review of federal wind leasing and permitting practices. The decision dealt a blow to several projects that were either already in motion or in the planning stages.

“The U.S. Navy has good reason to be concerned with offshore wind because there could be interference with Navy sonars. Imagine a scenario where China and Russia could park their submarines in the seabed right outside the Chesapeake Bay because our sonars cannot operate as they should.”

Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), operating under Trump’s Interior Department, explicitly cited national security concerns when it halted “all ongoing activities related to” the Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The BOEM order letter said the agency “is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

In New Jersey, the Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind project has also come to a halt, largely in response to legal pressure from Save Long Beach Island (LBI), a grassroots conservation group that includes homeowners, residents, and business owners. The Atlantic Shores project, a partnership between Shell New Energies U.S. and the French-owned EDF Renewables North America, had envisioned building up to 200 wind turbines positioned as close as eight miles off the coast of Long Beach Island (LBI), Brigantine, and Atlantic City in southern New Jersey.

Save LBI also cited national security among its long list of concerns in a new study released in June critiquing offshore wind. Dr. Bob Stern, the president of Save LBI, and an engineer who previously managed environmental reviews for the U.S. Department of Energy, has sent letters to environmental groups asking them to reconsider their prior support for offshore wind based on the findings in the SAVE LBI report.

NORAD Air Defense Under Pressure from Offshore Wind 

The air defense systems located in Gibbsboro, New Jersey, and Riverhead, New York—all part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)—are of particular concern.

“Possibly, the offshore wind turbines could create corridors for drones to come into our airspace undetected,” Stern told Restoration News in an interview. “So, we are just not talking about the environmental and economic damage, which is all very real, there’s also a national security risk with offshore wind.”

Save LBI cites a BOEM study that analyzes the impact the Empire Wind project off the coast of New York could have on the Riverhead Radars. The federal agency determined that “smaller aircraft, which might include drones, would not be detected at lower heights above the turbines.” BOEM also found that “return signals from smaller aircraft at higher elevations, or from larger aircraft, would be detected but obscured by the presence of numerous false targets created by the turbine operation.”

In New Jersey, the height of the blades for the proposed Atlantic Shores project are particularly problematic, Save LBI explains, because these blades would be “within line-of-sight of and will interfere with” radar operations at military bases in Gibbsboro, the McGuire Air Force Base, and the Atlantic City Airport Surveillance Radar. The impacts on radar from the offshore wind would, the Save LBI report says, “include clutter resulting in a partial loss of primary target detection and a number of false primary targets over and in the immediate vicinity of the proposed WTGs [wind turbine generators].”

Stiles also points back to the Chinese spy balloon incident of 2023 where a high-altitude balloon from China flew across North American airspace before the U.S. Air Force shot it down over U.S. territorial waters off the coast of South Carolina.

“I think what we’re going to find out is the balloon was soaking up information as it was passing over cell towers, and then downloading information to cell towers,” Stiles said. “That’s how the information is getting back to China, because the cell phone towers are made with Chinese parts.”

Save LBI also cites a letter from the U.S. Defense Department to BOEM dated Dec. 15, 2020, that said the Atlantic Shores project “will adversely affect NORAD’s missions by hampering or degrading air surveillance radar performance.”

Ken Stiles, a former CIA analyst who now teaches about national security issues in Virginia Tech’s geography department, is calling on policymakers to become more attuned to unconventional methods of attack and espionage. The problems with offshore wind, he said, provide insight into how foreign adversaries could exploit existing infrastructure.

“The U.S. Navy has good reason to be concerned with offshore wind because there could be interference with Navy sonars,” Stiles said. “Imagine a scenario where China and Russia could park their submarines in the seabed right outside the Chesapeake Bay because our sonars cannot operate as they should.”

Stiles also points back to the Chinese spy balloon incident of 2023, where a high-altitude balloon from China flew across North American airspace before the U.S. Air Force shot it down over U.S. territorial waters off the coast of South Carolina.

“I think what we’re going to find out is the balloon was soaking up information as it was passing over cell towers, and then downloading information to cell towers,” Stiles said. “That’s how the information is getting back to China, because the cell phone towers are made with Chinese parts.”

Stiles calls this technique “espionage on the cheap” since it relies on hardware that already exists instead of making use of expensive spy satellites.

Will Thibeau, director of The Claremont Institute’s American Military Projects, is particularly concerned with how drones have altered the modern-day battlefield and envisions certain scenarios where offshore wind intermixing with drone flights could become a liability to U.S. defenses. Thibeau has been taking a hard look at “fiber optic drones” that make use of what he calls a “long fishing line.” He sees both sides putting them to use in the Russia-Ukraine war. Since they essentially operate as guided missiles, fiber optic drones are used, Thibeau explained, with the intention of not getting them back.

“Think of a world where someone has to use fiber optic drones, and they are being used either against us, or we are using them, and there are these wind turbines all over the place,” he said. “These drones could either destroy the wind turbines and create environmental catastrophes or disrupt drone flights that are necessary.”

‘The Greenpeace of the Right’

Another major initiative that has stirred controversy is Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project. The electric utility headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, plans to build 176 wind turbines located 25 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. The project is already underway, but it has also encountered legal challenges. The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and other free market outfits filed suit against the federal government and Dominion Energy, arguing the Virginia wind plan violates the Endangered Species Act. The New Jersey and Virginia suits both build on “Save the Whales” campaigns that invoke studies showing how offshore wind harms marine life.

CFACT president Craig Rucker told Restoration News each wind tower off the Virginia coast would be taller than the Washington Monument with turbine blades longer than a football field. He describes his group as a “Greenpeace of the Right” devoted to “free market environmentalism.” He views the grassroots conservation efforts aimed at saving whales, and other marine species, as a potential game-changer.

“I find it interesting the way the large environmental activist groups are only concerned about whales when it comes to Navy sonars and other U.S. military exercises that boost our national security,” Rucker observed. “But when it comes to offshore wind, they don’t care about the whales at all. In fact, they are actively supporting these environmentally degrading wind turbines that studies show threaten whale populations and that are responsible for an increasing number of whale deaths. I think it’s obvious who the real conservationists are and it’s not the big green groups.”

The concentration of military assets along the Virginia coast should have made offshore wind a nonstarter, Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, told Restoration News. But with Dominion’s project now well underway, he recommends the Trump administration should continue to seize on national security questions. Cohen said:

“From a national-security standpoint, the co-location of Dominion Energy’s Virginia Offshore Wind project and vital U.S. Navy installations is indefensible. Coastal Virginia is home to several major Navy installations, including the world’s largest naval station, Naval Station Norfolk; the East Coast’s Master Jet Base, Naval Air Station (NAS) Oceana; and Joint Expeditionary Base (JEB) Little Creek-Fort Story. These sensitive facilities will be sharing the same air and sea space as the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, with its 176 turbines rising 482 feet above the ocean’s surface and located just 27 miles east of Virginia Beach.”

He added:

“To say that these giant turbines and their spinning rotors, which will produce nothing more than intermittent electricity, will in no way interfere with key Naval operations such as surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence collection, force protection, interdiction, training, and testing is to close one’s eyes to reality. The Biden administration greenlit the offshore wind project in January 2023; the Trump administration is under no obligation to allow this folly to go forward. Yes, the ill-conceived project is well under construction, and its cancellation would create stranded capital that would be borne by Dominion Energy’s ratepayers. This is regrettable, but the national security costs of the offshore wind project could be incalculably higher.”

Policy analysts operating in the energy space have informed Restoration News that the U.S. Navy filed a report in 2017 that showed how damaging offshore wind could be to national security, but because the report contains sensitive information it is not publicly available.