Hawaii and California put Pacific Fleet Logistics in Peril

The Hollow Logistics Chain

The Navy wrote the book on destroying an enemy's fuel supply. The Pacific War's most decisive campaign was waged not against enemy fleets but against enemy tankers. Eighty years later, the adversary has read the same history — and the United States Navy's own logistics chain exhibits the vulnerabilities it once exploited.

By Lt Stephen L. Pendergast, U.S. Navy Reserve, IEEE Senior Life Member

The author is a former naval reserve officer and defense systems engineer with experience in Pacific Fleet logistics and force readiness. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a contributor to research on defense-industrial energy policy.

In September 1944, Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's Mobile Fleet lay at anchor in the Lingga Roads, a sheltered anchorage in the Dutch East Indies south of Singapore, barely 400 miles from the oilfields it now depended upon for survival. The battleships and carriers of the Combined Fleet — including Yamato and Musashi, the most powerfully armed warships ever built — could no longer afford the fuel to steam to Japan's home waters. By that point U.S. submarines had destroyed two-thirds of Japan's tanker fleet.¹ The oil was in the ground beneath Sumatra and Borneo. The ships were in the harbor. The sea lanes between them belonged to the United States Navy. The crews of the superbattleships, idle month after month, had a name for their ship: Hotel Yamato.²

By July 1945, the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy had retreated to Kure on the Inland Sea. The fleet was not conducting operations. It had no fuel with which to conduct operations. The surviving ships were immobilized by fuel shortages and were being used only as stationary anti-aircraft batteries. On 24, 25, and 28 July 1945, U.S. Third Fleet carrier aircraft attacked Kure and sank a fleet carrier, three battleships, and five cruisers at their moorings. The once-formidable Combined Fleet ended the war not in a final decisive battle but on the bottom of a harbor, destroyed without being able to fight back, because its tankers were gone.

The United States Navy accomplished this. Less than two percent of the Navy's total force — its submarine fleet — was responsible for more than 56 percent of all Japanese merchant tonnage sunk during the war, including 124 tankers.³ By April 1945, Japanese oil imports had dried up completely.⁴ The Strategic Bombing Survey, despite its institutional interest in crediting airpower, conceded that the submarine campaign against tankers was decisive: had it been conducted with greater focus earlier, Japan's fuel crisis might have become acute a full year sooner.⁵ The Navy wrote this history. It published it. It taught it in its professional schools. It debated it in these pages.

That history has a direct bearing on the strategic situation the United States Navy faces today — not as inspiration but as warning. The People's Liberation Army Navy has read the same history. Its anti-ship missile systems — the DF-21D at 1,500-kilometer range, the YJ-18 at 500-plus kilometers — are specifically sized and targeted for high-value logistics assets.⁶ INDOPACOM and Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments wargames consistently model fleet oilers as early-phase attrition targets, precisely because their destruction cascades into loss of operational endurance for the strike groups they sustain. The PLA does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy in a fleet engagement. It needs to do to American oilers in the Philippine Sea what American submarines did to Japanese tankers in the straits of Luzon. The lesson the Navy taught the world in 1944 is the lesson a peer adversary is now prepared to apply against us.

Three compounding vulnerabilities make that lesson applicable. California's regulatory-driven destruction of in-state refinery capacity has created an "energy island" supplying the Pacific Fleet's home stations from a progressively diminishing and import-dependent industrial base. The decommissioning of Red Hill — 250 million gallons of hardened, pipeline-direct strategic reserve at Pearl Harbor — was executed without a validated replacement. And the Combat Logistics Force, the oiler fleet on which any replacement strategy depends, is operating on what Admiral Samuel Paparo publicly called "narrow margins," short by dozens of hulls and several thousand mariners against wartime requirements. Taken together, these vulnerabilities describe a logistics chain with no slack, facing an adversary who has made that chain the centerpiece of its anti-access strategy.

The Playbook We Wrote

The Pacific Submarine Campaign — Final Account

• U.S. submarine patrols/ships sunk: 350/180 (1942) → 350/335 (1943) → 520/603 (1944)
• Japanese tankers sunk: 124 — the decisive target class
• Share of all Japanese merchant tonnage sunk by submarines: 56%
• Japanese tanker fleet destroyed by mid-1944: two-thirds
• Japanese oil imports — April 1945: zero
• Japan's merchant fleet surviving the war: 12% of prewar size
• IJN Combined Fleet — July 1945: immobilized at Kure for lack of fuel; sunk at anchor
• U.S. submarines as share of U.S. Navy: less than 2%
• Highest U.S. casualty rate of any service branch: submarine force — 22% of those who went on patrol did not return

The history deserves examination in detail, because the mechanism of Japan's defeat is precisely the mechanism the PLA is now constructing against the United States.

Japan in 1941 was as dependent on imported petroleum as it is today — and far more so militarily. The U.S. oil embargo of August 1941 gave Japan's navy an 18-month operational fuel reserve and its army 12 months.⁷ That calculation drove the Pearl Harbor decision: Japan needed the Dutch East Indies oilfields, needed to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet to take them, and needed to accomplish this before its reserves ran out. The Pearl Harbor strike plan was, at its strategic core, a fuel logistics calculation.

The intelligence preparation for Pearl Harbor underscores how long fuel infrastructure has been a primary target. The IJN intelligence officer at Pearl Harbor, Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa, had been studying methods and operations of the U.S. Pacific Fleet for seven years. In addition to reporting on ships and aircraft, he drew detailed maps of Pearl Harbor showing the locations of the fuel-storage depots. Energy infrastructure was a priority target in 1941. It remains one today. The question Admiral Nagumo fatally declined to answer on December 7 — whether to strike the fuel tank farms at Pearl Harbor on a third wave — would haunt Japanese planners for the rest of the war. Had those tanks burned, the Pacific Fleet's recovery would have been measured in years rather than months.

The Americans were slow to return the favor. Early submarine operations against Japanese economic targets were, in the postwar assessment, "at best inconclusive and at worst very poor."⁸ Prewar doctrine had not fully committed to commerce warfare; torpedoes were defective and the fact was denied for two years; intelligence on Japanese convoy routing was sparse until codebreaking matured. It was not until 1943 that U.S. submarines began aggressively targeting Japanese oilers, and losses exceeded Japanese production each year from 1943 through 1945. The Strategic Bombing Survey's post-war judgment was blunt: a coordinated campaign against tankers beginning in mid-1942 could have brought Japan's fuel crisis a full year earlier.

When the campaign did focus on tankers, the results were decisive and rapid. American submariners sank more than 600 Japanese ships — nearly three million tons — in 1944 alone, more than in 1941 through 1943 combined. The Navy deployed submarines in the Luzon Strait, astride Japan's main oil lifeline from the East Indies. Wolfpack tactics, night attacks, and SIGINT-enabled targeting of convoys combined with a working torpedo to produce an industrial-scale destruction of the Japanese tanker fleet. By mid-1944, American forces had cut Japan's oil lifeline by half. When the war was over, Japan's merchant fleet had been reduced to 12 percent of its prewar size, and only half of the surviving ships — 312,000 tons of mostly minor vessels — were in operation, due to fuel shortages.

The operational consequences at the fleet level were total. Ozawa's Mobile Fleet based at Lingga Roads could not fuel in Japan — the tanker chain was broken — so it based near the oilfields instead, surrendering the initiative and splitting its forces fatally before Leyte Gulf. By July 1944 the IJN tanker fleet was mostly gone, and the East Indies provided the only practical fuel supply. Yamato's final sortie to Okinawa in April 1945 — a one-way mission with fuel for the outbound voyage only — was not a tactical decision. It was the arithmetic of an empty tanker fleet. By July 1945, the remaining ships at Kure — two new carriers without aircraft, three battleships, two heavy cruisers — were essentially immobilized due to lack of fuel. They were sunk at their moorings by aircraft they could not intercept, because they had no aviation fuel either.

The lesson the Navy drew — and published in these pages as early as 1956 — was that logistics warfare against an island nation dependent on seaborne supply is the most decisive form of naval warfare available.⁹ Two percent of the force, attacking the right target class, ended the war's outcome before the atomic bombs were dropped. The lesson was institutionalized in doctrine, in Naval War College curricula, in the professional literature. It apparently was not institutionalized in the Navy's own logistics planning.

The PLA does not need to defeat the U.S. Navy in a fleet engagement. It needs to do to American oilers in the Philippine Sea what American submarines did to Japanese tankers in the Luzon Strait. The Navy wrote this playbook. An adversary is now prepared to run it.

California: The Energy Island

West Coast Fuel Logistics — Key Figures (2026)

• California refineries: 11 operational, down from 23 in 2000
• Capacity lost 2025–26: ~20% (Phillips 66 LA + Valero Benicia)
• Jet fuel output reduction: 600,000+ gal/day
• Foreign crude dependency: 60% of refinery input
• Military installations affected: 44 in California; 12+ in Hawaii
• Red Hill strategic reserve: 250 million gallons — decommissioned
• John Lewis-class oilers fleet-deployed: 0 as of Dec. 2025
• MSC mariners available vs. required: ~5,500 vs. ~10,000

California is the United States' primary continental fuel logistics base for Indo-Pacific operations. The state hosts 44 military installations — more than any other — including Naval Base San Diego, the principal homeport of the Pacific Fleet; Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps' primary West Coast expeditionary hub; Travis Air Force Base, the largest air mobility operation in the Air Force; Vandenberg Space Force Base; and Edwards Air Force Base. Every installation depends on fuel refined in California, because California is an energy island from which there is no continental escape.

No crude oil pipeline crosses the Sierra Nevada. Every barrel refined in California must be produced in-state, shipped from Alaska, or imported by ocean tanker from Brazil, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Ecuador, or Asia. California's unique reformulated gasoline blend specification prevents substitution from Gulf Coast refineries even in a domestic supply emergency — there is no pipeline workaround. When California's refinery capacity contracts, replacement fuel must travel longer sea lines of communication through waters a peer adversary is actively preparing to contest.

That capacity has contracted severely. The state had 23 refineries in 2000. By May 2026, 11 remain operational.¹⁰ The Phillips 66 Los Angeles refinery — 147,000 barrels per day — produced its last barrel in October 2025. Valero's Benicia refinery — 145,000 barrels per day — ceased operations on January 31, 2026, after Valero absorbed a $1.1 billion write-down rather than continue under California's regulatory environment.¹¹ Together these closures eliminated approximately 20 percent of California's remaining refinery capacity and reduced jet fuel output by an estimated 600,000 gallons per day. The Department of Energy's April 2026 fact sheet stated that state policies have left "more than 30 U.S. military installations vulnerable" and noted California's foreign crude dependency has tripled over 20 years, reaching 60 percent.¹²

The strategic implication deserves explicit statement. In a Taiwan contingency requiring sustained multi-carrier and amphibious operations launched from California installations, the logistics chain sustaining those forces runs through a refinery system the state has deliberately reduced, drawing on imported crude arriving by tanker on sea routes China's forces are specifically equipped to interdict. The in-state refinery capacity that would have been geographically immune to Pacific interdiction — the barrel produced at Martinez or Benicia and delivered by pipeline to Travis or NAS North Island — is the capacity that no longer exists. The Navy's own tanker vulnerability is thus preceded by a vulnerability in the continental supply chain that feeds it.

Hawaii: The True Energy Island

Hawaii's vulnerability is structural rather than policy-induced, which makes it simultaneously less politically contestable and harder to remedy. The islands sit 2,390 miles from the California coast with no land connections to any energy source on earth. The Hawaiian Electric Company generates most of Oahu's electricity by burning low-sulfur fuel oil from a single refinery — Par Pacific's 94,000-barrel-per-day Kapolei facility — under a contract whose price tracks directly to global crude markets. In November 2020, HECO received a 50-year contract valued at $638.5 million to supply electricity to 12 Army installations in Hawaii, embedding Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Schofield Barracks, Fort Shafter, Wheeler Army Airfield, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii into a commercial grid running on imported oil, with a failure mode demonstrated catastrophically in the 2023 Lahaina wildfires.¹³

The University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization documented the real-time exposure in April 2026: during the Middle East conflict-related fuel spike of early 2026, very low-sulfur fuel oil reached $145–150 per barrel, adding approximately 8–10 cents per kilowatt-hour to HECO's costs — a direct passthrough to every military installation on Oahu at the moment when those installations' operational demands would be highest.¹⁴ Oil price disruption caused by adversary action is not merely a consumer affordability issue. It is a military readiness cost imposed on the home-station installations of the fleet the United States intends to project into the Western Pacific.

Red Hill: The Irreplaceable Asset Replaced by Nothing

Red Hill was not simply a large tank farm. It was 250 million gallons of hardened, pipeline-direct, hardsite-protected strategic reserve at the hub of Pacific Fleet operations — 20 steel-lined concrete tanks bored into volcanic rock beneath Oahu, immune to air attack, gravity-fed through a 2.5-mile tunnel to Pearl Harbor's fueling piers. Red Hill was built precisely because the Pearl Harbor attack demonstrated that surface fuel storage was a primary adversary target. The engineers who designed it in 1940 understood that lesson immediately. A 2018 Environmental Protection Agency review found its capacity "essential to the conduct of wartime and peacetime Pacific theater operations."¹⁵

A November 2021 fuel leak contaminated the Navy's drinking water system, sickening thousands of military families. Secretary Austin ordered permanent closure in March 2022. Defueling completed in March 2024. Permanent closure is targeted for August 2027. The decision to close was defensible given the human cost and the documented infrastructure neglect. What is not defensible is the absence of a sequenced replacement strategy as a condition of closure. The closure order contained no timeline for validating a replacement. The RAND Corporation analysis of alternatives — commissioned by Congress — was completed in 2024, two years after the decision was irreversible.¹⁶

Representative Mike Gallagher, then chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, wrote to the Secretary of the Navy in January 2024: "It remains unclear how the Navy will replace Red Hill's capacity and redistribute fuel in the region. The Navy appears to be short — by several dozen — ships that will be needed to transport and deliver fuel to our bases and forces operating across the Indo-Pacific."¹⁷ The official response has been to assert that distributed storage — Darwin, Guam, Papua New Guinea, Japan, Singapore — combined with afloat tanker storage provides greater resilience than centralized hardsite storage. This argument contains a logical error the Pacific War history makes plain. Distribution requires distribution. Moving fuel from Papua New Guinea to a carrier strike group in the Philippine Sea requires oilers. Those oilers are the target. The replacement strategy depends on the most constrained and most threatened element of the logistics chain.

The Combat Logistics Force: Narrow Margins Understated

Admiral Paparo's "narrow margins" characterization of the Combat Logistics Force was accurate. The quantitative picture behind that phrase has direct bearing on every contingency plan in INDOPACOM's portfolio.

The Henry J. Kaiser-class fleet oilers, backbone of the CLF, were commissioned between 1984 and 1996. Most have exceeded or are approaching their intended service lives. Their replacement — the John Lewis-class T-AO-205 program — has been significantly delayed. As of December 2025, five hulls had been delivered: USNS John Lewis through USNS Lucy Stone (T-AO-205 through -209). None had deployed as a fleet asset.¹⁸ Initial operational capability, originally planned for February 2024, was pushed to March 2025; full-rate production was delayed to July 2026.¹⁹ The September 2024 block-buy contract awarding NASSCO $6.8 billion for eight additional hulls is the correct direction; it does not close the gap on any timeline relevant to a near-term contingency.

The more acute problem is personnel. Military Sealift Command operates its CLF with civilian mariners — merchant marine-credentialed professionals who cannot be interchanged with sailors and cannot be rapidly produced. As of late 2024, MSC operated with approximately 5,500 civilian mariners against a stated requirement of approximately 10,000 to fully man 140 logistics ships.²⁰ The mariner-to-billet ratio stood at 1.27. MSC drafted plans to sideline 17 support vessels — including fleet oilers, replenishment ships, and expeditionary fast transports — to reassign their crews to higher-priority hulls, reducing the operational logistics fleet to address a manning shortfall. Each John Lewis oiler requires 99 civilian mariners. The Merchant Marine Academy and six state maritime academies produce approximately 1,500 licensed graduates nationally per year, competing against commercial shipping that pays substantially more for equivalent sea time. This is a decade-scale problem being addressed on an annual procurement cycle.

The Heritage Foundation's wargame analysis makes the threat explicit: PLA DF-21D and YJ-18 systems are optimized for high-value logistics targets, and INDOPACOM and CSBA wargames consistently model oilers as early-phase attrition objectives precisely because their loss cascades into loss of fleet operational endurance.²¹ To compensate for oiler shortfalls, MSC has chartered commercial tankers for limited underway replenishment. These vessels lack specialized rigging, pump capacity, crew training, and survivability of purpose-built Navy oilers. In the A2/AD environment the PLA is constructing, commercial tankers are soft targets requiring escort that further strains an already stretched surface combatant force. The IJN's tanker fleet in 1943 was also composed partly of merchant conversions with military inadequacies. The U.S. submarine force did not find them harder to sink.

The Compound Chain

Logistics vulnerabilities are most dangerous when they compound. Each element analyzed here is serious in isolation. Assembled as a system, they describe a supply chain in which adversary action at any single node cascades into failure across every other.

Consider the baseline for a Taiwan contingency today. Three carrier strike groups and two amphibious ready groups deploy from West Coast ports. Travis AFB begins maximum-effort airlift to forward staging. Camp Pendleton's I MEF begins embarkation. The fuel required is refined from crude that is 60 percent imported by tanker — arriving from the Persian Gulf through the South China Sea or from Korea and Japan via the Western Pacific, on sea routes whose security is precisely the question. California's refinery system has 20 percent less capacity than in 2024. The strategic buffer that would sustain operations through a supply disruption — Red Hill's 250 million gallons — is empty. The oilers needed to sustain deployed strike groups draw on a fleet where no John Lewis-class hull has completed a deployment cycle, 17 support ships have been sidelined for manning, and civilian mariners stand at 55 percent of requirement.

This is not a worst-case projection. It is the documented current baseline, assembled from unclassified sources. An adversary who has read the same sources — and the PLA intelligence apparatus certainly has — understands that early-phase action against the oiler force or California's fuel infrastructure would cascade simultaneously through every link of this chain. Ozawa based his fleet at Lingga Roads because the tanker chain was already broken before the decisive battles of 1944 began. The question is whether the United States is constructing an analogous vulnerability before its own decisive battles arrive.

Recommendations

The vulnerabilities described here are remediable at cost and over time, if treated with the urgency they warrant.

Declare the CLF a strategic emergency program. The mariner shortage and oiler delivery backlog must be addressed with mobilization-scale urgency, not peacetime acquisition patience. This means NASSCO block-buy contracts funded at rates maintaining continuous production, mariner recruitment and retention incentives competitive with commercial shipping, and Merchant Marine Academy capacity expansion scaled to fleet requirements — not national demand. The Navy knew by 2020 that the Kaiser-class was aging out. It had a decade to build the replacement workforce. The next decade must be used correctly.

Build a hardened Pacific strategic fuel reserve. Distributed storage in Darwin, Guam, and Papua New Guinea provides valuable operational flexibility and complicates adversary targeting. It does not replace Red Hill's function: hardened, large-volume, hardsite-protected storage directly accessible to the Pacific Fleet's primary homeport without tanker transit. The Navy should commission a wartime throughput analysis for a Taiwan-scenario fuel requirement and fund construction of the minimum hardsite capacity needed to sustain operations through the phase in which tanker routes are most contested. That analysis should have preceded the Red Hill closure decision. It cannot be deferred further.

Treat California's refinery capacity as defense industrial base infrastructure. The Defense Production Act invocations of April 2026 established the legal predicate for federal intervention. The executive branch should use that authority — including designation of California refinery operations as "essential to national defense" under 50 U.S.C. § 4533 — to maintain refinery capacity at levels sufficient to meet military fuel requirements independent of state regulatory outcomes. This is not a position on California's climate policy. It is a position on the federal government's responsibility to maintain the logistics infrastructure required to execute its own defense strategy.

Accelerate military installation energy resilience on Oahu. The termination of $39 million in federal funding for a microgrid at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam was fiscally trivial and strategically counterproductive.²² Every dollar invested in reducing military dependence on the HECO commercial grid — through distributed generation, battery storage, and small modular reactors on the longer horizon — denies an adversary the ability to degrade military readiness through commercial energy disruption. This is a national security investment regardless of its relationship to any broader clean energy policy debate.

Commission an integrated West Coast-Pacific logistics vulnerability assessment. The vulnerabilities described in this article are visible from open-source analysis. The classified picture is presumably worse. INDOPACOM, N4, the Defense Logistics Agency, and OSD should commission a scenario-specific assessment of the West Coast-Pacific fuel logistics chain under contested conditions — Taiwan Phase I through Phase III, with explicit fuel throughput calculations at each phase. The result should drive force structure, basing, pre-positioning, and industrial base decisions with the rigor applied to kinetic capabilities. That assessment has not been published. Its absence is itself a data point.

Conclusion

In 1944 and 1945, U.S. submarines did something that aircraft carriers, battleships, and amphibious assaults could not do alone: they made the enemy fleet unable to fight by making it unable to fuel. Less than two percent of the Navy's force, attacking tankers rather than warships, produced the decisive strategic result of the Pacific War. The crews of the Imperial Japanese Navy's most powerful ships spent the last year of the war inventing nicknames for their immobilized vessels. The lesson was published in these pages in 1956. It has been taught at Newport ever since.

That lesson has a second chapter that the Navy has not fully absorbed: a logistics-dependent fleet is itself vulnerable to the same campaign. The PLA has studied the first chapter carefully. Its missile systems, its submarine force, and its anti-access architecture are specifically constructed to execute against U.S. logistics what U.S. submarines executed against Japanese logistics eight decades ago. The target set is different — oilers rather than tankers, refinery infrastructure rather than shipping lanes — but the strategic logic is identical. Cut the fuel; strand the fleet.

California's progressively hollowed refinery base, Red Hill's decommissioned reserve, and the CLF's documented personnel and equipment shortfalls have together created a logistics chain that cannot sustain the Indo-Pacific strategy it was built to support. The chain's weakness is not classified. The adversary's awareness of it can be assumed. Admiral Mahan observed that the history of sea power is largely the history of communications — of the ability to move force and to sustain it. The Navy understood that lesson profoundly in 1944 when it applied it against Japan. The question now is whether it will apply it to itself before an adversary applies it for us.

The chain is hollow. The playbook is written. The clock is running.

Notes

1. Stephen L. Wolborsky, "Choke Hold: The Attack on Japanese Oil in World War II" (Air Command and Staff College thesis, 2004), DTIC ADA425684; United States Strategic Bombing Survey: The War Against Japanese Transportation, 1941–1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947).
2. Naval Encyclopedia, "Yamato Class Battleships (1941)," naval-encyclopedia.com. The nickname "Hotel Yamato" arose from the crew's prolonged harbor-bound idleness in 1944–45, including the period at Lingga Roads and the Inland Sea, where flammable linoleum was removed for safety and crewmen slept on bare wooden planks.
3. Wikibooks, "World War II/Submarine Warfare," citing Combined Fleet postwar assessment: U.S. submarines accounted for 56% of Japanese merchant tonnage sunk. See also "The Lost Merchant Fleet of Japan," Proceedings, December 1956, Vol. 82/12/646: "Of all Japanese losses at sea, both merchant and navy vessels, 54.6 per cent were sunk by United States submarines."
4. Wolborsky, "Choke Hold," citing USSBS: "By April 1945, oil imports dried up completely."
5. United States Strategic Bombing Survey: "Had submarines concentrated more effectively in the areas where tankers were in predominant use after mid-1942, oil imports probably could have been reduced sooner and collapse of the fleet, air arm, merchant shipping and all other activities dependent upon fuel hastened … and the fuel shortage might have been acute at the end of 1943 rather than a year later." Cited in Mark D. Karns, "Controversial Victory: The 'Tanker War' Against Japan, 1942–1944," Open Military Studies 3:1 (2022).
6. Heritage Foundation, "Appendix I: U.S. Underway Replenishment Ship Capabilities and Constraints," January 20, 2026, heritage.org/tidalwave, citing CSBA "Sustaining the Fight" study on DF-21D (1,500 km range) and YJ-18 (500+ km) optimization for logistics targets.
7. Center for International Maritime Security, "Pearl Harbor 1941: The First Energy War," cimsec.org, January 30, 2019: "By August, 1941, there was only a 12-month supply of fuel left for the army, and an 18-month supply for the navy."
8. War History Online, citing postwar U.S. assessment: early submarine operations against Japanese economic targets were "at best inconclusive and at worst very poor." Karns, "Controversial Victory."
9. "The Lost Merchant Fleet of Japan," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1956. This article, appearing in these pages 70 years ago, documented in detail exactly the campaign whose lessons are relevant today.
10. U.S. Department of Energy, "Fact Sheet: California's War on American Energy Impoverishes Residents and Harms National Security," April 9, 2026.
11. OPIS Insight, "California Refinery Transitions," September 10, 2025; Breakthrough Fuel Intelligence, "How Closing Oil Refineries in California Will Impact Prices," October 28, 2025.
12. DoE, "Fact Sheet," April 9, 2026; Rep. Vince Fong (CA-20), "Newsom's War on Energy Is Crippling California and Undermining Our Military," Fox News, December 8, 2025.
13. The Diplomat, "Hawaiʻi's Role in the US Indo-Pacific Energy Security Dilemma," February 4, 2025.
14. UHERO, "Hawaiʻi's Fuel Cost Problem: What the LSFO–LNG Price Comparison Really Shows," April 14, 2026.
15. U.S. EPA, "About the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility," epa.gov/red-hill/about, citing 2018 EPA alternative sites review finding Red Hill's capacity "essential to the conduct of wartime and peacetime Pacific theater operations."
16. Stephen M. Worman et al., Analysis of Alternative Uses for the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, RAND Corporation, RR-A2719-1 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2024).
17. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, letter from Chairman Mike Gallagher to Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, January 18, 2024.
18. USNI News, "General Dynamics NASSCO Delivers Oiler USNS Lucy Stone to Navy," December 17, 2025.
19. Congressional Research Service, Navy John Lewis (TAO-205) Class Oiler Shipbuilding Program: Background and Issues for Congress, CRS Report R43546, updated 2025.
20. Army Recognition, "General Dynamics NASSCO to Build More John Lewis-Class Oilers," November 12, 2025; Stars and Stripes, "The Navy Will Buy More Oilers. Now It Needs Enough Mariners to Crew Them," September 18, 2024.
21. Heritage Foundation, "Appendix I," January 20, 2026.
22. The Garden Island, "Editorial: Hawaii Gouged by Energy Clawback," October 14, 2025.