SecNav: Cut half of oil use by 2020

SecNav: Cut half of oil use by 2020
By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Oct 14, 2009 18:33:12 EDT

Navy Department leaders issued a set of ambitious new plans to boost the Navy and Marine Corps’ energy efficiency Wednesday, including the goal of fielding a completely sustainable carrier strike group dubbed “the Great Green Fleet.”

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus cited the example of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, which announced the arrival of American sea power by circling the globe in 1907, and said a new focus on energy would augur just as big a turning point for the service.

Mabus wants the Navy to demonstrate that it can sail a “Great Green Fleet” by 2012 and deploy it by 2016, he said, to prove the U.S. can exert influence at sea without the need for foreign oil. He compared the impact of an energy-friendly fleet of tomorrow with the Navy’s switch from sails to coal, and then from coal to oil.

The so-called green fleet’s carrier and submarines, already in the fleet, would be nuclear powered. Its surface escorts would either have hybrid power plants — as the Navy built aboard the amphibious assault ship Makin Island, and plans to test aboard Arleigh Burke-class destroyers — or use alternative bio-fuel in their original engine rooms. And the aircraft in the strike group, including fighter jets and helicopters, also would burn only alternative fuel, Mabus said.

(Although it would show the Navy could function without imported oil, the fleet wouldn’t be “green” as many environmental groups use the term: Its nuclear ships still would eventually produce radioactive waste, and its conventional ships and aircraft still would produce greenhouse gas emissions.)


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/10/navy_energy_efficiency_101409w/

why can't they deploy fewer ships? I mean why do we have to patrol the seas when we have a much better way of spying, keeping an eye on, paying attention too or whatever one likes to think for themselves, on the open seas and that's by satelite, I for the life of me can not understand why the big show of force we, the usa, feel we/they have to do.