"US Air Force installations are overly reliant on the commercial power grid to provide high quality, reliable electrical energy for facilities and infrastructure critical to sustaining airpower's role in national security and homeland defense missions. However, history has shown the grid to experience unscheduled, intermittent outages of varying size and duration that place these missions at risk. To overcome this vulnerability, the US Air Force should reexamine current energy management precepts to prioritize security of its facility energy supply as a primary objective alongside ongoing mandated initiatives to reduce energy consumption and integrate renewable energy sources. There are several distributed energy technologies and initiatives available to aid this refocused effort and bolster US Air Force facility energy security ahead of the emerging cyber threat that portends extended unavailability of the commercial power grid. Microgrids are one such technology that will enable US Air Force installations to sever grid connections and rely on locally generated electrical energy, which maximize renewable energy sources to provide the US Air Force an energy security solution for mission critical infrastructure. The net zero energy basing initiative encompasses microgrids but is overreaching in its effort to make military installations completely self-sufficient especially in the current fiscally constrained environment."--Abstract.