Coal, Cannons, and Carbon: America’s Military Marches Boldly Back to 1897
With Donald Trump plugging the Pentagon into yesterday’s power grid, the world’s most advanced fighting force prepares for a glorious future of soot, steam, and strategically deployed nostalgia.
With Donald Trump plugging the Pentagon into yesterday’s power grid, the world’s most advanced fighting force prepares for a glorious future of soot, steam, and strategically deployed nostalgia.
If you listen closely, you can hear it now: the gentle crackle of patriotism, the soothing hiss of carbon, the reassuring cough of nineteenth-century progress.
Because according to Donald Trump, the future of American military power apparently runs not on microchips, satellites, or clean energy — but on lumps of coal and fond memories of soot.
Yes, the Pentagon may soon be powered by something last seen fueling steam locomotives and Dickensian poverty.
Under the new plan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reportedly being directed to plug America’s most advanced fighting force into yesterday’s ashtray.
This is what strategic innovation looks like now: “Gentlemen, our hypersonic missiles are ready.
Has anyone stoked the furnace?”
The White House assures us this is “energy dominance,” as explained by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who presumably delivered her statement by carrier pigeon to stay on brand.
Nothing says 21st-century leadership like reviving the power source of the Titanic.
One can only admire the commitment to historical reenactment.
If coal is back, what’s next?
Wind-powered aircraft carriers?
Cannonballs instead of smart bombs?
Morse code for battlefield communications? “Enemy approaching. Stop. Please send reinforcements. Stop. Also more coal. Stop.”
Critics, sadly, insist on spoiling the fun with facts.
Erin Sikorsky of the Center for Climate & Security at the The Council on Strategic Risks notes that coal is expensive, outdated, and risky. In other words: perfect.
Meanwhile, experts at the Stimson Center have suggested boring alternatives like resilient microgrids and distributed energy systems. How dreary.
Where is the romance in a solar panel when you could have a smoking chimney and a heroic layer of grime on every uniform?
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has even had the nerve to show that solar plus batteries works at “little to no added cost.”
But where’s the nostalgia in that?
No black lung.
No black clouds.
No sense of living inside a Turner painting of industrial despair.
Of course, the plan comes with subsidies — $175 million here, a recommissioned plant there — sprinkled lovingly across coal country like carbon-flavored confetti.
And for his efforts, Trump is reportedly receiving an “Undisputed Champion of Coal” award from the Washington Coal Club, which sounds less like an honor and more like a professional wrestling belt made of slag.
Meanwhile, competitors are rudely modernizing.
Wood Mackenzie reports China is cutting coal use while expanding renewables.
The International Energy Agency predicts solar dominance.
Other nations are racing toward the future.
America, under this plan, is proudly jogging backward into a coal bunker.
The Pentagon itself admits it needs billions to adapt to climate risks.
Hurricanes flatten bases.
Floods wreck infrastructure.
Wildfires roast training grounds.
And the response is: more fossil fuel.
It’s like treating smoke inhalation with cigarettes.
Still, one must admire the thematic consistency.
If America is going to relive the past, why stop at energy?
Let’s bring back flintlock rifles.
Semaphore flags.
Horses instead of Humvees.
A Department of Defense barbershop quartet singing “Don’t Fence Me In” while shoveling coal.
In this brave new old world, the U.S. military won’t just project power. It will emit it — one nostalgic plume at a time.