President Joe Biden wants to overhaul the Pentagon ’s infrastructure to go green within the next few decades.

Those goals could be difficult and costly to make reality.

The Defense Department requested more than $5 billion for climate policies in its budget for the next fiscal year, a major increase from the $3 billion it asked for the previous year.

Much of that money was slated to go toward updating military bases and facilities around the world with clean energy technology and adapting them to what the Pentagon predicts will be future damage from climate change.

At least $100 million would be set aside to “incorporate climate risks into wargames, exercises, and other planning tools” that the Pentagon would use to research how climate change might affect its operations in the future.

And billions of dollars across all the military branches are going toward controversial efforts to purchase all-electric noncombat vehicle fleets by 2030.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in April that replacing existing military vehicles with electric vehicles was, in a way, helpful to national security.

“Reducing our reliance on the volatility of globally traded fossil fuels, where we know that global events like the war in Ukraine can jack up prices for people back home,” is a priority, Granholm said .

But critics note that investing heavily in electrifying the military would effectively increase reliance on China, another adversary, while potentially contributing more to climate change.

“Right now, China makes more of the batteries and the components, and China has advantages over the United States,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.

“First of all, it’s not bound by any climate restrictions,” she said. “So they have massive amounts of coal-fired power plants that’s cheaper than the United States.”

China makes as much as 85% of the top components that go into an EV battery.

Chinese greenhouse gas emissions are more than double American emissions, meaning that increasing demand for Chinese manufacturing could add to the climate problem that electrifying military vehicles is supposed to solve.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) has led a bipartisan push to stop the military from relying on electric vehicles made in part using slaves or child workers, which would significantly curb the Pentagon’s ability to build up its nontactical vehicle fleet of EVs as quickly as the Biden administration wants.

“Sourcing U.S. military equipment from communist China and slave and child labor is completely unacceptable,” Ernst said last year.

Electrifying vehicles that could be used in combat zones comes with more basic complications as well.

They often can’t go as far as existing vehicles, and charging them in combat zones without any charging stations could prove challenging.

“When you load them up, the range diminishes, and when it’s very cold, the range diminishes,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “So, these are not vehicles that are particularly resilient.”

The weight of the batteries required to offer military vehicles the range they need could also make transporting them around the world more difficult, wrote Vikram Mittal, an associate engineering professor at the United States Military Academy, in 2021.

“Many of these vehicles are already at the upper limits for the allowable weight on some roads and for air-transport,” Mittal said of current military vehicles that run on traditional fuel. “To maintain the existing weights, the vehicles would have to sacrifice its range, weapon systems, or armor.”

Critics question why the Pentagon is spending so much time and money on green energy projects when the military faces more pressing problems, such as its struggle to recruit new servicemen and women.

The Biden administration has said it views climate change as an equally dangerous threat as China, and the scope of its climate work reflects how important the green agenda has become to the Pentagon.

From focusing on “replacing energy-intensive bulbs” with green lightbulbs in Army installations to a Marine Corps base in Georgia that invested in a power grid fueled by tree bark to expensive research on climate change modeling and planning, the military has, under Biden, incorporated a climate angle in much of its work.

It has also heavily promoted its climate-related activity to the public related to other efforts, lending critics even more fodder for their claims that the Pentagon has abandoned more important preparations.