Senator James Inhofe’s recent protest in these pages against the U.S. military’s field-proven use of secure, advanced biofuels overlooks both the bipartisan origins of the program and the black-and-white realities of powering the world’s largest fuel consumer in an age of unstable petroleum prices.
Today the military is dependent on a single source of fuel for most of their operations, a vulnerability for our troops and our nation. Advanced biofuels promise to be a dependable, affordable source of fuel for our military – a reality first recognized in the previous administration, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created a task force to explore options for reducing the military’s dependence on fossil fuels.