Installations and Operational Energy: The Margin of Victory in Great Power
Competition
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Tobias Naegele:
Wow, we've got lights in our faces. Welcome back from lunch. This session is titled "Installations and
Operational Energy: The Margin of Victory in Great Power Competition." So, I'm going to just start.
I'm not going to bother with titles, but we do have the assistant secretary here, whose life is energy and
installation. How does Great Power Competition fit into the installation perspective and why does that
matter?
Dr. Ravi I. Chaudhary:
Hey, thanks a lot for having me here today, and thank you to the entire AFA team for putting this
particular event together. It's quite simple, and our secretary and all of our leadership, our chief, our
CSO, couldn't have put it clearer yesterday and today. We are in for the fight of our lives, but I can't
think of a better service, a better department more prepared and ready than this one.
Think about it. It's in our DNA to be ready for changing times. Who we are as Airmen goes all the way
back to 1941, and I'll still quote from Hap Arnold who said, "Our air bases are the determining factor in
air operations," so we better be ready. We better make sure our installations are ready. If you think
about what the PRC has done over the past couple of decades, they've established a rocket force.
They've established a support force to do two things. One, come at our infrastructure and we, as a
department, have got to be ready for that. That's my job and I'm going to do it with each of you, but I
need your help. Let's talk about some of the challenges we face, challenges in critical infrastructure.
Critical infrastructure has been identified in our National Security Strategy and National Defense
Strategy, as a portfolio that our adversaries are going to come after.
So we need to think about that and be ready for that moment. What are we going to do about it? It's
simple, and our secretary and our two chiefs laid it out. We're going to be ready to fight the base in
three areas. Technology, thought and organization. Start with the organization. We're organizing a base
command so our commanders have the unity of effort and unity of command to execute in an
environment, which will no longer be benign.
That goes for deployed, that goes for CONUS, in garrison, Space Force, Air Force, and just about any
other installation that executes our missions and projects combat power. A thought, we're going to
think about how we do this in the coming months. But most importantly, we've got to understand how
we manage our energy, and that's the core of what we do in the Air Force.
As a former pilot, everything I did in my previous job was to learn how to collect, manage and discharge
that energy for one reason, in order to be decisive when it counts. When it comes to energy at our
installations, we're looking at new technologies, starting off with microgrids. We know that microgrids
give us an edge because it allows us to plug in and out of the community. It hardens our infrastructure
against cyberthreats.
It ensures that we can distribute our energy the way we need it when we need it, and it gives vital
redundancies. That's one technology, but then we're going to move into an innovation space that we've
not done before, that our nation has not done before, and your DAF is leading the way. That's with
microreactors, geothermal technologies. Essentially, we're going to science the shit out of this problem.
