Americans often think of energy in terms of gasoline, utility bills, or heating costs. But energy is also a national security issue. The central question is not simply whether the United States produces enough energy, but whether it can reliably generate, refine, transport, store, and deliver the energy needed to keep society functioning under stress.
Electricity powers homes, hospitals, water systems, communications networks, factories, financial institutions, military bases, and data centers. Petroleum fuels transportation, agriculture, construction, emergency response, and military operations. Diesel is especially critical because it powers trucks, farm equipment, construction machinery, locomotives, ships, military vehicles, and backup generators.
If electricity stops flowing, modern society begins shutting down almost immediately. If gasoline and diesel become unavailable, transportation and commerce soon follow: supply chains stall, store shelves empty, emergency response weakens, and military mobility suffers.
Energy independence does not mean cutting America off from world markets. It means maintaining enough domestic capacity, diversity, redundancy, reserves, and protected infrastructure that no foreign government, hostile power, cartel, cyberattack, natural disaster, or domestic bottleneck can turn an energy disruption into a national crisis. Resilience gives the United States the ability to keep operating when an adversary or disaster tries to make it stop.
Wars Are Fought With Energy
History shows that weapons and strategy are not enough to win a war. Armies must move, aircraft must fly, ships must sail, and supplies must reach the front—all of which requires energy.
By World War II, fuel and ammunition made up roughly two-thirds of the average daily supply tonnage required by ground and air forces, according to an official U.S. Army logistics history. Germany repeatedly suffered from inadequate petroleum supplies. Its strategy depended partly on capturing oil-producing regions, but advancing forces consumed fuel faster than it could be replaced. In North Africa and during the 1944 Ardennes offensive, shortages and failed efforts to capture Allied fuel undermined German operations.
Japan faced a similar problem. Its dependence on imported petroleum helped drive its expansion into Southeast Asia and its attack on the United States and other Western powers. Although Japan captured oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, it still had to refine, transport, and protect the fuel. American submarines and aircraft destroyed Japanese shipping, creating shortages that crippled pilot training, naval operations, and military mobility.
The Allies, especially the United States, possessed major advantages in oil production, refining, shipping, and industrial capacity. American energy resources became American combat power.
The lesson is clear: wars can be lost far from the battlefield—at an oil field, refinery, pipeline, port, power plant, substation, or fuel depot. Disrupting an enemy’s energy system can eventually achieve what a direct assault cannot. Energy resilience is therefore preparation not only for economic emergencies but also for deliberate attacks on the systems that sustain military and civilian power.
America Cannot Afford to Fall Behind
The United States remains a major energy producer, but production alone is insufficient. Crude oil must be refined, natural gas converted into usable energy, and electricity delivered to consumers. Energy security depends on the entire chain: production, generation, refining, transmission, storage, pipelines, ports, substations, distribution, and transportation.
After more than a decade of relatively flat demand, U.S. electricity consumption is rising again. The Energy Information Administration reported in 2025 that data centers, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, air conditioning, and broader electrification are adding major loads. Demand can no longer be treated as stagnant.
Other nations are moving quickly. China is expanding generation while investing heavily in transmission, distribution, storage, nuclear power, renewable energy, and coal-fired backup capacity. The International Energy Agency estimated that China would invest approximately $88 billion in transmission and distribution during 2025 alone. China understands that industrial and military strength depend on abundant electricity.
America has vast resources and technical ability, but generating projects and transmission lines can take years to approve and connect. A power plant is useless if the grid cannot deliver its electricity, and critical facilities cannot operate on promises of future power.
Reliability also depends on distribution. In 2024, U.S. electricity customers experienced an average of about eleven hours without power—nearly twice the average of the preceding decade—with major storms accounting for most interruption time. Stronger infrastructure, vegetation management, protected substations, local generation, microgrids, additional transmission routes, backup fuel, and faster restoration can reduce this vulnerability.
Cybersecurity and physical security are equally important. Attacks on pipelines, refineries, transformers, communications systems, or generating stations could cause disruption far beyond the initial target. Large transformers are difficult to replace quickly, while concentrated pipelines and refineries create single points of failure. Spare capacity and alternative routes are essential.
Crude Oil Is Not Enough
Consumers and the military do not use crude oil directly. It must be transported to refineries, converted into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, and then moved through pipelines, ships, barges, railcars, trucks, terminals, and local distribution networks.
As of January 1, 2026, the United States had 130 operable petroleum refineries, but the newest American refinery with substantial downstream processing capacity began operating in 1977. The nearly five-decade gap illustrates how difficult and costly it has become to add large-scale refining capacity.
A proposed project in Brownsville, Texas, could eventually change that pattern. Developers have described plans for a new refinery or refinery complex intended to begin operations around 2030. If completed, it would be the first significant new U.S. refinery in more than five decades. The project remains prospective, however, and its capacity, permits, financing, construction schedule, and commercial operation must be verified as development proceeds. Until then, the United States must rely primarily on its existing refinery fleet.
Much of that fleet is concentrated along the Gulf Coast, creating efficiency in normal times but vulnerability to hurricanes, accidents, sabotage, cyberattacks, port disruptions, and pipeline failures. Refineries are also designed for particular crude types and product mixes, so one facility cannot automatically replace another. The United States can therefore produce abundant oil and still face regional shortages of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel when refining or transportation is disrupted.
Diesel deserves special attention because so many essential activities depend on it. When supplies tighten, the effects spread through farms, warehouses, hospitals, grocery stores, and military installations.
An Energy-Security Doctrine for America
The United States needs an energy policy centered on reliability, resilience, affordability, and national survival—not a simple contest between fossil fuels and renewable energy. National security requires an all-of-the-above system with enough diversity and redundancy to withstand the loss of any one source or route.
America should expand dependable generation, modernize transmission, strengthen local distribution, protect critical substations, develop microgrids for essential facilities, and maintain sufficient dispatchable power when weather-dependent sources are unavailable. Nuclear, natural gas, coal, hydroelectric power, solar, wind, geothermal energy, and battery storage can all contribute, but reliability must be measured honestly and continuously.
The nation must also protect domestic oil and natural-gas production, preserve and expand refining capacity, support the timely and responsible development of projects such as the proposed Brownsville refinery, maintain adequate gasoline and diesel inventories, strengthen pipelines and ports, and reduce excessive regional concentration. Strategic reserves matter, but stored crude cannot replace functioning refineries and intact distribution systems.
Energy policy deserves the urgency normally reserved for defense policy because it is defense policy. Every aircraft sortie, naval deployment, armored movement, emergency response, communications network, and weapons-production line depends on energy. A nation that cannot keep its energy system operating under attack or disruption cannot reliably defend itself, sustain its economy, or protect its population.
The central national-security objective should therefore be energy resilience: the capacity to absorb disruption, maintain essential operations, and recover quickly without allowing an energy failure to become a broader national failure. America has the resources, workers, and technology to build such a system. What it needs is the national will to treat energy infrastructure and supply as strategic assets rather than merely commercial commodities.
Energy is the foundation beneath nearly every function of a modern nation. Because the ability to defend the country depends on that foundation, energy resilience is an essential component of national security.
Sources
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, “After more than a decade of little change, U.S. electricity consumption is rising again,” May 13, 2025.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Hurricanes in 2024 led to the most hours without power in the United States in 10 years,” December 1, 2025.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Refinery Capacity Report, data as of January 1, 2026.
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, “When was the last refinery built in the United States?”
- International Energy Agency, World Energy Investment 2025: China.
- U.S. Army Center of Military History, United States Army Logistics, 1775–1992: An Anthology.
- Public project information and developer announcements concerning the proposed Brownsville, Texas, refinery project, including its stated target of beginning operations around 2030.