Offshore wind farms were labeled a national security threat, but defense experts say the opposite may be true since turbines are already being turned into forward surveillance platforms protecting allied coastlines
When a government invokes national security to halt an offshore wind project, the warning lands with weight. Turbines rising from the sea — structures tall enough to scrape low clouds, blades spinning wide enough to shadow a city block — do look like something a radar operator should worry about.
But what do defense experts actually see when they look in that direction? For over a decade, militaries on both sides of the Atlantic have been quietly working through that question. The answers are more complicated — and more surprising — than the alarm suggests.
A Security Argument With a Long History
The Trump administration’s decision to freeze offshore wind construction on radar and sonar interference grounds made it sound like a newly discovered danger. It wasn’t. The United States, Taiwan, and numerous European nations have been managing exactly these conflicts for more than a decade — quietly, methodically, and largely successfully.
Sweden joined NATO in 2024, giving its military access to Finnish, German, and Polish air defense radar networks that already provide unobstructed Baltic coverage.
“It’s not a choice of whether we go for wind farms or security. We need both,” says Ben Bekkering, a retired vice admiral in the Netherlands and a current partner of the International Military Council on Climate and Security. Tue Lippert, a former Danish special forces commander and CEO of Copenhagen-based security consultancy Heimdal Critical Infrastructure, agrees. Both argue that framing wind energy as an inherent threat to defense simply isn’t supported by the operational record.
The real picture is more nuanced: interference is real, measurable, and — critically — manageable.
How Turbines Actually Interfere With Radar
The physics are straightforward. Wind turbines are large structures that reflect radar signals, and their spinning blades create a Doppler effect that can mimic a moving aircraft — triggering false positives on radar screens. Older line-of-sight systems can also be blinded to objects positioned behind a turbine array, a genuine concern when those objects might be aircraft, missiles, or drones.
The European Defence Agency’s Symbiosis Project, a €2 million initiative, confirms that “measurable degradation in radar performance, communication clarity, and situational awareness” does occur near offshore wind farms. That language deserves attention. So does its limit, according to media such as IEEE Spectrum.
“Measurable” isn’t the same as “mission-ending.” A 2024 U.S. Department of Energy report found that American radar monitoring agencies have continued to operate “without significant impacts” from wind turbines — the result of field tests, technology development, and mitigation steps taken since 2012. As Lippert puts it: “It is true that they have an impact, but it’s not that big.”
Modern Radar Technology Is Already Closing the Gap
The most immediate fixes are software-based. Algorithms can identify a turbine’s specific radar signature and filter out the false positives it generates, reducing noise on existing systems without new hardware. Careful siting limits the problem at the source — during the Biden administration’s most recent Atlantic wind zone designations, the proposed area off Maryland’s coast was reduced by 79 percent specifically to minimize defense impacts.
Hardware upgrades go further. Solid-state phased-array radars — which steer beams by shifting the timing of hundreds or thousands of individual radio waves — produce higher-resolution signals and track multiple objects more reliably than conventional mechanical systems. “Most modern radars can actually see through wind farms,” says Lippert.
The Trump administration, despite its public posture against offshore wind, quietly illustrated this point. One of its first moves in overhauling civilian air traffic control was a $438 million order for phased-array radar systems from Collins Aerospace — a company that explicitly markets wind farm mitigation as a central feature of its products.
Wind Farms as Military Assets, Not Liabilities
Here’s where the conventional security argument runs into its sharpest contradiction. Rather than treating offshore wind farms purely as obstacles, several European militaries are actively incorporating them into defense infrastructure.
In 2021, Swedish defense contractor Saab and Danish wind developer Ørsted tested Saab’s Giraffe 1X combined surface-and-air-defense radar aboard the Hornsea 1 wind farm, 120 kilometers off England’s Yorkshire coast. The installation extended situational awareness “beyond the radar horizon of the ground-based long-range radars,” according to Saab. The U.K. Ministry of Defence subsequently ordered 11 of those systems.
Poland has gone further still. The country mandates that all offshore wind farms include defense-relevant sensors. Its first Baltic project — set to begin operating this year roughly 200 kilometers south of Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave — carries radar specified directly by Poland’s Ministry of Defense. Belgium and the Netherlands are pursuing similar “dual use” arrangements, turning offshore infrastructure into forward surveillance platforms. “You’re changing the battlefield,” says Lippert, “but it’s a change to your advantage if you use it as a tactical lever.”
Sweden and the U.S.: The Cost of Saying No
Sweden offers a cautionary parallel to the current U.S. position. In 2024, the country rejected 13 Baltic offshore wind projects on national security grounds — citing concerns about missile detection near Kaliningrad. The argument drew an immediate rebuttal from an unlikely source: Saab’s own CEO told a Swedish newspaper that the company’s radar systems “can handle” wind farms.
Tobhias Wikström, a former Swedish Air Force lieutenant colonel, points to another flaw in that reasoning. Sweden joined NATO in 2024, giving its military access to Finnish, German, and Polish air defense radar networks that already provide unobstructed Baltic coverage. “You will always have radars in other locations that will cross-monitor and see what’s behind those wind turbines,” he says. Politics — including the pro-nuclear stance of some coalition parties — may be driving the restrictions as much as genuine defense calculations.
The deeper cost of avoidance may be strategic. Lippert, who regularly works alongside U.S. forces as a reserves liaison with Denmark’s Greenland-based Joint Arctic Command, frames it starkly: “The Chinese and Taiwanese coasts are plastered with offshore wind. If the U.S. Navy and Air Force are not used to fighting in littoral environments filled with wind farms, then they’re at a huge disadvantage when war comes.”
That observation is worth sitting with. The question was never really whether turbines pose risks — they do, in the same way any large structure in a contested environment does. What matters more is who learns to operate inside that environment first, and who refuses to try.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.
