Fuel convoys kept D-Day’s army moving, but slow-moving supply lines won’t survive tomorrow’s contested battlefields. The Janus Program bets on nuclear microreactors instead.

You’ve probably never heard of the Red Ball Express. No flashy HBO miniseries. No Netflix special. 

Yet, you undoubtedly know about the D-Day invasion, where the US Army drove into France with a million men. That US Army required a staggering logistical lifeline. Their armored divisions alone consumed 800,000 gallons of fuel every single day. With French seaports and railroads blown to bits, the Army engineered its own solution: they built artificial harbors and cleared two parallel, one-way roads toward Germany. To avoid traffic, each road would be one-way only, one for eastbound traffic and the other for westbound traffic. Atop those roads was the Red Ball Express, with a fleet of 6,000 trucks carrying 12,500 tons of supplies to the front daily. Without the fuel, food, and medical supplies they delivered, all the courage in the world wouldn’t have been enough for American soldiers to free Europe from Nazism.

Logistics aren’t sexy. Hollywood doesn’t clamor to make movies about quartermasters and supply depots. But logistics make the decisive difference in winning wars. No organization understands logistics better than the US Army. When the Covid-19 pandemic required the fastest vaccine deployment in history, it was the US Army that stepped forward, shattering records by planning the logistics of delivering over 30 million doses in the first month alone. 

Today, under Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s leadership, the US Army is taking on its next great logistical challenge: Powering the electrified battlefield. Because of capabilities like drones, high-energy lasers, active radars, signal jamming, and artificial intelligence (AI) compute at the tactical edge, the energy used per US soldier has grown by a factor of 20 since 1945.

But electricity isn’t magically generated. Today, its reliability is overwhelmingly bought with fossil fuels. The US military uses a baseline of over three gigawatts of electricity and burns more than 12 million gallons of liquid fossil fuels daily. Because the commercial power grid is inherently vulnerable, our critical infrastructure relies entirely on liquid-fueled backup generators, primarily diesel.  

In 1944, the Army largely enjoyed uncontested control of the skies and roads. We cannot assume that same luxury in a future global conflict. Tomorrow’s war will require moving supplies across vast oceans and flying through contested airspace monitored by adversary sensors. If we’re forced to fight across massive distances without safe supply lines, slow-moving fuel convoys aren’t just a logistical hassle—they’re sitting ducks.

To survive and win, we need an energy game-changer. Nuclear energy offers the only proven way to replace massive fossil fuel consumption with uninterrupted, clean baseload electricity. A single kilogram of uranium-235, around the volume of a golf ball, holds the stored energy of over 650,000 gallons of gasoline.

The challenge lies in bringing this immense power directly to the battlefield, or deploying it to domestic installations that serve as our strategic power projection platforms. While conventional nuclear plants are engineering marvels designed to provide massive power to civilian regional grids, the military requires extreme mobility and localized resilience. Microreactors bridge this gap. Small enough to fit inside standard shipping containers, these compact, plug-and-play units can be shipped directly to remote bases and operate within days. They provide the reliable baseload electricity required for our highest-tech capabilities without the vulnerable tether of daily fuel convoys. 

This strategic imperative drove the launch of the Janus Program. In October 2025, the Army announced the Janus Program as the vehicle to turn nuclear microreactors into operational reality. We aren’t building science experiments, prototypes, or publicity stunts. We are developing actual commercial capability, scalable to meet future military needs. 

Now, alongside our partners at the Defense Innovation Unit, the Army is taking the next critical step. Over $2 billion will be invested over the next five years to deliver more than 20 nuclear microreactors to military installations, beginning with the first reactor at a US Army base in the fall of 2028. 

The future is electric, but electricity requires a secure, untethered source. Nuclear energy dominance and raw power will determine national preeminence.

The US Army intends to win that future.

About the Author: Dr. Jeff Waksman

Dr. Jeff Waksman is the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment. Previously, Dr. Waksman was a program manager at the Strategic Capabilities Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he led Project Pele and Project Triso. He received a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a master’s in both nuclear engineering and physics. He has a BA in applied physics from Columbia University. 

The post The Power to Win: Why the US Army is Betting on Next-Gen Nuclear Power  appeared first on The National Interest.