Posted on February 2, 2026
By Andrew Follett
Virginia Democrats want to quintuple their state’s offshore wind power and greatly accelerate its construction timeline. What they fail to see — or admit — is that this approach would pose a huge risk to American national security.
In January, Democrats in the Virginia State House proposed House Bill 920, expanding offshore wind power by a factor of five while accelerating the target date by two years, at the cost of America’s Navy. Norfolk, Va., is the primary home port for America’s Atlantic fleet and our largest naval base, hosting around 75 warships and submarines, including five of America’s eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Hundreds of U.S. warplanes are stationed at nearby bases like adjacent Chambers Field and Langley, and the Navy constructs new carriers at the nearby Newport News Shipbuilding facility. Together, these make up the densest collection of national security facilities on American soil.
As I’ve previously written, Department of Defense studies show that industrial wind farms greatly hamper U.S. military readiness by crippling nearby radars, greatly increasing the risks to American pilots and of hostile infiltration of U.S. bases by drones. “It makes no sense that the entire Dominion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, approximately 40 nautical miles from Naval Base Norfolk, was never evaluated by the Federal Aviation Administration for a full Determination of No Hazard of all turbines within the lease area, simply because it sits outside territorial waters, as if radar physics and line-of-sight risks stop at twelve miles,” Bonnie Brady, policy director of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, told National Review.
The massive rotating turbine blades and highly reflective towers create radar clutter, unwanted interference, and false signals that infiltrating drones could easily exploit to spy on U.S. assets in Virginia. The blades can obscure legitimate moving targets such as aircraft, missiles, or vessels and generate false positives in the area around the wind farm.
“Virtually all the lease areas that have been approved were approved under that same format expanding projects like this off Norfolk, home to the largest naval base in the country, or along any other coastline where national defense and national security matter, deliberately multiplies danger and makes this nation less safe,” Brady continued. “If Governor Spanberger is not aware, as a former undercover national security CIA officer she desperately needs to be brought up to speed before she signs something she will regret.”
The structures themselves would also box out the Navy’s ability to mass-sortie during a crisis, creating a dangerous choke point. Avoiding the creation of such a choke point is the reason that the region is spending $4 billion constructing new underwater traffic tunnels, funded by state sales and gas taxes. So essentially, Virginia has been spending billions to avoid a naval disaster, only for Virginia Democrats to try to re-create the exact same problem with offshore wind.
“Our Commonwealth should rethink allowing just anybody to emplace seabed infrastructure along SLOCs [Sea Lines of Communications] for the largest naval base in the world, particularly since my understanding is offshore wind is currently dominated by foreign and especially Chinese firms,” a former defense contractor who wished to remain anonymous told National Review. “Offshore generation would be inherently more vulnerable across the spectrum of threats than onshore generation, which can be better hardened against a wider variety of vectors, in both the physical and cyber domains.”
The small number of existing turbines has proved to be a huge boon for Chinese intelligence, allowing at least some spying we know about on both Naval Station Norfolk and Newport News Shipbuilding. Swarms of unknown drones have used existing wind facilities to survey the base so frequently that U.S. Air Force General Mark Kelly described it as sounding like a parade of lawn mowers. The American defense apparatus could do nothing to prevent them from penetrating this secured and highly sensitive airspace, both because the Obama administration ignored military objections to wind farms near bases and due to legal concerns. These potential wind turbines could cover for espionage or a major drone assault on America’s military similar to what Ukraine did to Russia’s strategic bombers during Operation Spiderweb.
It is not an exaggeration to say a country like China could exploit these proposed turbines to cripple America’s military as the first shots of any conflict. This may sound like a Tom Clancyesque scenario, but the communist country is already clearly constructing armed civilian ships packed with missiles and drones in nondescript shipping containers designed to make precisely this hybrid warfare sort of attack.
Equally disturbing, China utterly dominates global supply chains for many wind turbine parts, raising worries about embedded vulnerabilities, cybersecurity back doors, and sabotage risks in critical infrastructure near bases.
Offshore turbines are, by their very nature, connected to the power grid, located in the ocean, and necessitate regular maintenance by a horde of small boats, each of which could be easily exploited by Chinese intelligence. It’s hard to believe that China wouldn’t want to exploit such an opportunity to gather sensitive information about the U.S. power grid and the operations of naval vessels, which would be used against America. The maintenance of offshore turbines near America’s largest naval base creates a great excuse for China’s “maritime militia” of nominally civilian vessels to get close. We’ve already seen the communist country use such tactics.
Offshore wind could cripple America’s Navy in a crisis with China, while generating very few benefits to justify the strategic costs involved. Virginia Democrats should withdraw their legislation, and if they fail to do so, federal officials should act to safeguard America’s national security over the selfish desires of green politicians.
