I was sitting on a panel about stranded assets in Davos last month—sandwiched between a very anxious climatologist and a man who sells artisanal carbon offsets to European royalty—when my phone buzzed with the news. The Ministry of Defence has formally objected to a planned onshore windfarm in County Durham, citing fears that the spinning blades will cause “unacceptable interference” with military radar. My fellow panelists, a chorus of naive NGO directors, groaned in unison. But I simply nodded. Finally, I thought. Someone in Whitehall is taking the real threat to our net-zero transition seriously: the tragic, unchecked proliferation of renewable energy infrastructure blocking the flight paths of our fighter jets.
In the past year alone, the MoD has bravely stood up to at least four of these wind projects. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is reportedly furious, leaking breathless complaints to the press and claiming this puts the government’s climate pledges at risk. But sure, let us prioritize a few megawatts of clean power over the RAF’s God-given right to practice flying very fast and very low over the north of England. The absolute hubris of the environmental lobby never ceases to amaze me.
The science here is settled, even if the wind industry refuses to acknowledge it. When a turbine blade spins, it creates a radar signature. When a military aircraft flies past that spinning blade, the aircraft might temporarily vanish from the screen of an air traffic controller sitting in a bunker three hundred miles away. Let that sink in. We are blindly rushing to decarbonize the grid, and in the process, we are creating a terrifying tactical blind spot exactly where an invading armada is most likely to strike: a sheep pasture in rural Durham.
I had drinks recently with a senior defense official—off the record, naturally, though he had the good grace to order the sustainable sea bass—who laid out the sheer scale of the crisis. He explained that the RAF’s Low Flying Areas are highly sensitive, meticulously curated zones where pilots learn to evade advanced surface-to-air missile systems by buzzing local agricultural workers at 250 feet. If we clutter these vital training grounds with three-hundred-foot towers of fiberglass and steel, the pilots will have to pull up. They will have to look out the window. They might even have to fly around the obstacle. Is that the kind of woke, coddled military we want?
At COP last year, I found myself sharing a taxi with the CEO of a major North Sea fossil fuel conglomerate. He was the only one making any sense amid the hysteria. He astutely pointed out that an offshore oil rig has never once interfered with a military radar. A drill ship sits low on the horizon, quiet, and perfectly stationary. It is the polite, respectful way to extract energy. It knows its place. Wind turbines, by contrast, are flashy, arrogant, and constantly spinning their massive blades as if aggressively demanding our attention. It is exactly the kind of obnoxious, performative showboating that disrupts the solemn duty of airspace monitoring.
Naturally, the greenwashing peddlers at the energy department have suggested the MoD simply upgrade its radar technology to filter out the turbines. It is exactly the sort of glib, tech-utopian solution you would expect from people who don't understand the nuanced realities of national security. Why should the defense establishment be forced to update its mid-century software just because the rest of the country is trying to prevent a global climate collapse? The burden of the transition must fall on everyone, which means the windfarms must politely cease to exist.
If we allow civilians to build massive, spinning structures that generate electricity, the enemy will simply hide their fighter jets behind the clean energy.
Brigadier Sterling is absolutely right, and frankly, his courage in speaking out against the all-powerful onshore wind cartel is refreshing. While the IPCC prattles on about tipping points and scope-three emissions, we are ignoring the immediate threat of a radar screen looking slightly cluttered. What good is a stabilized global temperature if we lose our ability to detect our own aircraft over the Pennines? A habitable planet is a luxury; unobstructed airspace is a necessity.
Look at the other three windfarms the MoD has successfully torpedoed this year. Each one was a disaster waiting to happen. One was too close to a coastal base. Another threatened to cast a shadow over a runway at exactly 4:15 PM in late November. These are not minor inconveniences. These are existential threats to the operational readiness of the British armed forces. We cannot offset our carbon footprint if we are simultaneously offsetting the RAF’s ability to practice doing loop-the-loops.
I have spent my entire career warning that the path to sustainability would require hard choices and shared sacrifice. I just assumed the sacrifice would be borne by the working class, not the Ministry of Defence. If saving the planet means asking a supersonic jet to adjust its heading by two degrees, then perhaps the planet is not worth saving. The climate transition will simply have to wait in a holding pattern until the military gives us clearance to land.