As this recent National Defense article describes, you can lead a nascent industry to a fleet of ready vehicles, but you cannot make it make their fuel. This is DOD's experience to date with both land based vehicles as well as aircraft. The Army has tens of thousands of vehicles ready to run on flex fuels, and the Air Force recently completed synth fuel (natural gas/JP-8 blend) certification activities across its entire inventory. Yet today less than half of the Army's ready vehicles and non of the USAF planes have ready suppliers for alternative fuels.
Next up for USAF is the selection of one or two leading bio fuels candidates and the resumption of inventory certification processes. If someone's going to respond with scalable offerings, now might be a good time to let DOD know. Otherwise, there are a few more important energy security objectives it can pursue.
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