America’s New National Security Threat: Farmers With Wind Leases

Michael Barnard

Apparently the United States can manage aircraft carriers, satellites, nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, hypersonic missiles, cyber commands, and a colossal defense budget, but it now needs emergency protection from farmers leasing land for wind turbines. That is the story Washington is asking Americans to take seriously. The Trump Administration has reportedly stalled about 165 onshore wind projects on private land, citing national security. The projects reportedly represent nearly 30 GW of potential generation, enough to matter to grids, counties, landowners, and tax bases.

There are real military siting issues around wind energy. Wind turbine blades move. Moving blades can create radar clutter. Tall structures can affect flight paths. A wind farm in the wrong place can complicate a low-level training route, a test range, a base approach corridor, or a radar mission. None of that is new. None of it required Donald Trump to discover national security in a soybean field.

The United States already has a process for this. The DoD Siting Clearinghouse has reviewed energy projects for military compatibility since 2011. It looks at wind, solar, transmission, and other infrastructure. Its job is to identify specific conflicts, coordinate with affected military stakeholders, and work through mitigation. In infrastructure, boring is good. Boring means written concerns, engineering fixes, defined timelines, and adults doing adult work.

The record matters. An Air Force legal article says the Clearinghouse had reviewed thousands of wind energy projects and had made only one “unacceptable risk to national security” determination out of those thousands. One. Not one per year. Not one per state. One out of thousands. Some projects were adjusted. Some turbine heights changed. Some layouts changed. That is how a serious review system behaves.

If 165 projects have become national-security problems at once, either America has discovered a wind-turbine threat of startling scale, one missed by years of radar studies, siting reviews, and military practice, or the politics changed. Sadly, no prizes are available for guessing which explanation fits better.

The serious concerns are narrow. Radar clutter can matter near air-defense, missile-warning, weather, or test-range radars. Training routes, test ranges, base approach corridors, and cumulative effects around sensitive installations can matter too. These are legitimate issues. They are also exactly the kinds of issues the Clearinghouse was built to handle.

Legitimate does not mean unlimited. The serious version of the argument is not that foreign aircraft are about to sneak across Kansas behind a turbine blade. The serious version is that some projects, in some places, can complicate radar, training, range instrumentation, or flight operations. Treating that as a reason to freeze private-land wind projects at scale is like banning pickup trucks because one day somebody might need to park.

The off switch exists. Wind farms curtail operations all the time for grid constraints, negative prices, maintenance, icing, storms, wildlife, noise agreements, and grid-operator instructions. Public examples of DoD mitigation agreements include language requiring wind-farm operators to immediately curtail turbines when requested by DoD or NORAD for national-security or defense purposes. If the concern is a specific training exercise in a specific area during a specific time window, the obvious mitigation is not a national freeze. It is a phone call, a turbine list, and an operating instruction. Engineers have discovered a cutting-edge technology called turning them off.

If the issue is radar line of sight, study the radar and change the layout, heights, software, or operating rules. If the issue is a training route, define the route and negotiate the limits. If the issue is cumulative impact, show the cumulative study. If no mitigation works, issue the formal finding and defend it. Do not hide behind silence, canceled meetings, and vague invocations of national security.

The private-land point matters. A farmer leases land for oil and Washington calls it energy security. The same farmer leases land for wind and Washington calls the Pentagon. Yeah, no. That is not conservative governance. That is Washington picking winners and losers.

Private property does not mean every project must be approved. If a turbine interferes with a named military mission and mitigation cannot solve the problem, the government has a role. But the federal government should have to give a specific reason, use a defined process, and apply the same standard across energy technologies. Vague security fog should not be enough to freeze rural income, county revenue, construction jobs, power contracts, interconnection positions, and American electricity supply.

The double standard is glaring. Wind is being treated as a threat. Gas, oil, LNG, and pipelines are treated as security assets. Solar has been hit through broader renewable-specific permitting choke points, especially at Interior, but the Pentagon national-security angle appears aimed at wind in a special way. The rule seems to be that a private energy project is patriotic if it moves molecules, suspicious if it moves electrons, and terrifying if it has blades.

If wind turbines are dangerous because they are tall and inconvenient to radar, then America needs a full War on Tall Things. Cell towers, grain elevators, oil pumpjacks, refinery stacks, gas compressor stations, transmission towers, cranes, water towers, church steeples, and inflatable tube men should all report to the Pentagon by Monday. Grain elevators are rural, vertical, and suspiciously full of carbohydrates. Surely we cannot be too careful.

A serious national-security process would produce a table, not a vibe. For each project, there should be a name, state, MW, developer, land status, interconnection status, affected mission category, review status, mitigation status, date of last DoD communication, and legal status. How many projects have formal unacceptable-risk determinations? How many are in mitigation? How many had verbal approval? How many were waiting for final letters? How many were pulled into review under a new interpretation? How many considered curtailment and why did it fail?

The capacity question matters too. The reported 165 projects represent nearly 30 GW, or about 180 MW per project on average. Reporting in the Financial Times suggests 35 projects had completed Pentagon negotiations and were awaiting written approval, 30 had verbal approval but lacked formal confirmation, about 50 were stuck in negotiations, and about 50 had become uncertain despite being considered low risk. If those projects were average-sized, the 65 closest to approval would represent about 12 GW. That is a rough estimate, not a disclosed capacity table, which is the point.

Delay kills infrastructure even when it loses in court. Wind projects depend on interconnection queue positions, power purchase agreements, turbine procurement, financing terms, construction seasons, tax-credit deadlines, local approvals, land leases, and transmission availability. A project does not need a formal denial to die. Silence can do the job. Canceled meetings can do the job. A missing sign-off can do the job.

The military does not need this embarrassment. Actual military professionals have enough real problems without being drafted into a political theatre production about scary farm equipment. The United States has cyber vulnerabilities, munitions questions, shipbuilding gaps, transformer risks, and drone warfare lessons arriving from Ukraine. Against that list, pretending that private-land wind projects are suddenly a national-security crisis at scale makes Washington look less serious, not more.

If the administration has 165 project-specific findings that mitigation cannot protect named military missions, it should release the count and the process status. If it cannot, the national-security claim deserves the respect due any other claim without evidence: very little.

The republic is not endangered by farmers with lease income. It is not endangered by turbines that can be curtailed for a training exercise. It is not endangered by a process that reviewed thousands of projects and produced one reported unacceptable-risk determination. It is endangered when politicians discover that national security can be used as a costume for prejudice, delay, favoritism, and market sabotage.

Michael Barnard

Michael Barnard works with executives, investors, and policymakers to navigate the pathways toward decarbonization. He helps make sense of complex transitions by combining insights from physics, economics, and human systems, turning them into practical strategies and clear opportunities. His work spans sectors from sustainable building materials and aviation fuels to grid storage and logistics, always with an eye on how they fit together in the larger picture of the clean economy. Informed by projects across North America, Asia, and Latin America, his perspective is both global and grounded in real-world application. Michael shares his thinking through regular publications on technology trends, innovation, and policy frameworks — not as final answers, but as contributions to an ongoing conversation about building a sustainable future.