Military analysts are captivated by how the material nature of war is transforming in Ukraine. Unmanned systems have captured Russian infantry units, battered Russian naval and commercial ships, and even, with the help of on-board AI, conducted autonomous strikes deep into areas where Russian jamming foils remote piloting. These technologies are powering a dramatic democratization of military capability, allowing a country to hold off an invader many times its size.
But that democratization is only part of the story, and is in fact driven by an equally dramatic consolidation. Strip down any of these battlefield-transforming tools, and you will find remarkably similar components, or “electrotech”: the integrated set of hardware and software that are transforming electricity from a physical flow into something that also can be digitally generated, stored, and directed. The batteries, motors, and embedded compute that animate these drones are essentially electric cars in miniature, and electric vehicles are themselves already smartphones on wheels. And AI tools and their accompanying offensive cyber capabilities practically guzzle electricity.
Suddenly, a whole stack of tools transforming war is converging on electricity. Any future battlefield will be drone-saturated, which will not only depend on excellent batteries and electric motors, but will likely also have its own electricity-intensive on-board AI models to keep operating in denied environments — requiring even more batteries. Offensive cyber operations, likely to be deployed in the opening phases of any such war, will hinge on AI tools for which compute is now directly measured in how much electricity you throw at it. And batteries and power electronics used in drones are simultaneously becoming critical to building the grid straining to develop the AI models underpinning cyber capabilities, on-board drone intelligence, or umpteen other military use cases. A very small tech stack has suddenly become central to the home front and battlefield alike.
Yet American leaders are dragging their feet in reckoning with this undeniable technological transition. Many of the electrotech components defining this shift are associated with either Beijing or maligned as belonging to the climate movement, slowing their adoption.
Building an American arsenal of electricity will require ending Washington’s agenda of self-sabotage, from strangling civilian electrotech markets as the Pentagon scrambles to rebuild them, to panicking about every Chinese component as though it were equally dangerous. The U.S. military and its industrial base should quickly learn to better navigate Chinese tech risk — and even make common cause with environmentalists — or be left fighting yesterday’s war with last century’s technologies.
Sign Up for Our Newsletter
The Electrotech Transformation of the Battlefield
As the economy electrifies, a new class of digital technologies that generate, store, route, and balance electricity is being deployed across every sector, including the defense industrial base. Cheap battery-powered drones, largely built on consumer foundations, are now responsible for the overwhelming majority of casualties in Ukraine. And aerial drones are just the start. In ground warfare, unmanned hybrid-electric vehicles are beginning to displace infantry in Ukraine, and Silicon Valley is already pitching AI-equipped robots to an AI-pilled Pentagon. Companies like Anduril are bringing battery-powered, increasingly intelligent offerings to higher-end defense segments, like “unmanned wingmen” adapted from electric air taxis and modularized, unmanned submarines.
These technologies illustrate how electrotech is forming the foundation of modern warfare: Batteries power the electric motors that turn their propellers; onboard compute guides them around obstacles and toward targets; and a software-defined comms link connects them to their operators. These flying smartphones share industrial heritage, tinkerer-friendly digital DNA, and concentrated supply chains that make them far cheaper and more modular than conventional military hardware. Electrotech’s globally common currency helped Ukraine, one of Europe’s poorest countries, become a world-leading defense tech innovator almost overnight.
This common currency is also working its way up the “weaponry value chain,” driving tighter integration between electrotech hardware and increasingly sophisticated software. Russian radiofrequency jammers are prompting Ukrainian drone pilots to develop platforms with enough onboard intelligence to find and strike a target independently. While the lightweight, open-source AI tools they are deploying may be free to download and customize, the watts to run them are not. Greater autonomy requires more onboard electricity storage, whether for rotors or for reasoning.
This transformation looks like a great democratization. But the common foundations beneath it are actually being consolidated by America’s chief strategic competitor.
Capability Democratization, Industrial Concentration
The electrotech stack’s industrial dominance is at once surprising and obvious, and its consumer-electronics DNA explains both how Beijing came to dominate it and why Washington is fumbling its response. This is not heavy industry — oil furnaces and steam turbines, as many would picture it — but manufacturing we now associate with Chinese dominance of laptops and smartphones, often employing the same chips, materials science, supply chains, and code. The same digital mastery of electricity that enabled computers and smartphones also produced the batteries, motors, and actuators that move the physical world.
That is why (predominantly Chinese) consumer electronics manufacturers, be they smartphone companies like Xiaomi or battery makers like BYD, found they could easily become electric vehicle, drone, and robot companies as well. Because these sectors share one industrial heritage, an advantage or dependency in any of them now propagates across the rest, incentivizing firms to place bets across diverse sectors and further turning key Chinese manufacturing advantages into self-sustaining investment flywheels.
No surprise, then, that Beijing has seen the electrotech stack’s potential boost to its military capability. Chinese President Xi Jinping elevated “intelligentization” into Chinese military doctrine in 2020, which quickly recognized its strategic significance. Earlier this year, the Chinese military demonstrated its new Atlas drone swarm system — a mass of coordinated unmanned strike assets, each industrially little more than a smartphone with propellers. They are also training against unmanned naval attack platforms in joint exercises with the Russians, preparing for a drone-saturated war over Taiwan.
Combined with Ukraine’s unfolding lessons, China’s industrial advantage in electrotech (and head start in autonomous doctrinal application) has finally sparked panic at the Pentagon. U.S. defense leaders are consequently developing their first serious battery strategy and have requested $54 billion for a crash drone production program while navigating a growing list of banned Chinese components. Private capital has reached the same conclusion, bestowing multibillion–dollar valuations upon defense startups like Anduril, Saronic, and Joby whose cheaper, modular, faster-to-iterate unmanned systems are built on those same consumer-electronics foundations — but will similarly need to navigate a minefield of Chinese component dependencies.
Unfortunately, Washington is scrambling to rebuild these supply chains with one hand while strangling them with the other. The United States recently had an electrotech industrial strategy of historic ambition, aiming to produce the batteries, motors, and software-hardware fusion the Pentagon now requires. But that program was in the Inflation Reduction Act, conceived by the Biden administration and enacted under the banner of climate change, which proved politically fatal. While battery manufacturing incentives narrowly survived last year’s partial repeal, consumer electric vehicle incentives were zeroed out, gutting the demand growth those factories were planned against — and with it, the industrial reserve the Pentagon now desperately needs.
This irony is particularly bitter because the obvious analogy is one of America’s most beloved national myths: Detroit automakers’ midcentury tooling and engineering culture proved a crucial industrial reserve for World War II-era bomber and tank production. Today, the same battery cells, motors, and code that turn a Rivian’s wheels also turn a Ukrainian assault bot’s tank treads. And as in the 1940s, that reserve can only serve military needs if built at civilian scale. Detroit became the Arsenal of Democracy only after selling generations of cars to families first: Consumer markets for electric vehicles, grid storage, or even laundry-folding robots will dwarf any Pentagon acquisition and will be the necessary ingredient for any successful effort at diversifying away from China.
Turning Watts into Weapons, and Pointing Weapons at Watts
The AI era is further collapsing the already-shrinking distance between electricity and military power. In April, Anthropic’s Mythos model kicked off a class of AI tools capable of autonomously discovering and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, and has already dramatically shifted the landscape for offensive and defensive cyber operations. Strikingly, the more wattage that Mythos-class models spend on vulnerability discovery, the more they find. These sorts of tools are bound to be used, particularly in the opening salvos of any future war. In a world where your cybersecurity model class’s output is dependent on the electricity available to it, it is a strategic vulnerability to have a grid already poorly prepared for today’s threats, much less tomorrow’s.
Luckily, American chips convert electricity into tokens — a metric of AI effort — far more efficiently than China’s, helping American companies still account for 80 percent of global compute capacity. That margin also comforts Pentagon cyber planners who have long feared being swamped by the sheer number of operators China could put behind keyboards.
The bad news is that compute is merely electricity by other means, which Beijing does well. China is adding whole countries’ worth of electricity to its grid every year, using authoritarian resolve to marshal watts, while the United States is stuck in a never-ending cycle of permitting hearings. Chinese chipmakers are also investing in large-scale chip orchestration, figuring that systems ten times less efficient, paired with ten times more electricity, can still narrow the gap. And while America’s higher-end chip advantages endure, the data centers that house them increasingly depend on ever-more-sophisticated combinations of batteries and power electronics to effectively integrate with our aging grid — in yet another reconfiguration of the same electrotech stack China wields with fluency.
So whether it is watts into cyberattacks, watts into intel analysis, or watts into robots, the ability to generate, store, and direct electricity is becoming the master metric of national strength. That consolidation will also make energy infrastructure our adversaries’ highest-value target. Beijing has spent years working to exploit our electricity infrastructure’s rickety hodgepodge of old and new technologies, pre-positioning destructive cyber capabilities in preparation for a potential war over Taiwan. That hacking campaign predates the AI boom and broader industrial electrification now straining our midcentury grid, which paints an even larger great-power bullseye on its back.
An Unlikely Alliance for an Arsenal of Electricity
Embracing this transformation — not just haltingly abetting it — will be the only way to simultaneously mitigate its serious liabilities while seizing its profound opportunities.
An interconnected and interoperable industrial stack growing our grid, training our AI, flying our drones — and, yes, perhaps folding our laundry — will be critical to launching the innovation and efficiency flywheels that will power the economy and geopolitical competition of the coming years. Deployed well, a more digitally-native grid with distributed, cloud-orchestrated generation, battery storage, and load flexibility, can grow and reduce the cost of energy even as it hardens against hacker and hurricane alike.
The fly in the ointment is that key technologies for this electrotech future are dominated by the same country seeking to sabotage our critical infrastructure and kneecap our military capability. The good news is that technical risk does not reside in a “Made in China” sticker, but in specific places defenders can find and mitigate. Dependence on graphite or wire from our principal strategic competitor is a long-term economic risk, but one that unfolds over weeks or months, often in predictable ways amenable to medium-term stockpiling or subsidies. The digitally active control layers, on the other hand — the software that governs battery systems or powers navigation computers — are where systemically consequential, even crippling, cyberattacks can manifest in a conflict’s opening hours, and where urgent scrutiny and creative solutions are most needed.
The defense industrial base already has the intuition for this “smart-to-dumb” risk prioritization. Even the F-35 is not free of Chinese-made parts, and blanket bans on foreign components have long been ruled not only unworkable, but unnecessary.
The Pentagon now advocates for broader latitude to license foreign battery technologies, and for tax incentives remarkably similar to their Inflation Reduction Act forebears. This reveals the real obstacles to a new American arsenal of electricity are not technical, financial, or even geopolitical – but cultural. The Inflation Reducation Act was ostensibly undone to make room for tax cuts, but Congressional leaders’ animus toward its climate goals made it their preferred target. The pieces that survived legislative repeal were those that had taken on a different character: supply-side credits subsidizing the factories and blue-collar workers building the batteries, not demand-side credits for the elite archetypes buying the cars those batteries propelled.
The CHIPS and Science Act stands in marked contrast as a far more durable act of industrial policy — and its national security coalition is likely why. While President Donald Trump regularly criticizes the bill signed by his predecessor, its implementation continues largely unencumbered by culture war because the coalition that passed it was so broad. Many holdouts came around explicitly from anxiety over geopolitical dependencies exploitable by a technologically ascendant Beijing, a narrative the U.S. semiconductor industry was all too happy to embrace.
Electrotech’s own ascendance as a national security imperative has not yet translated into similar political durability. Part of that is the head-spinning speed of that ascendance, but the bigger variable may be its stakeholders’ reluctance to embrace their newfound status as part of the defense industrial base. The field’s headline technologies were climate tech before they were defense tech, and the sector’s talent pipeline has long been more interested in global warming than global war. An open letter from influential environmental and clean energy advocates early in the Biden Administration urged the government away from competition with China, decrying “demonization” of Beijing as a barrier to tackling climate change.
Circumstances have changed for both the defense tech and climate tech communities. The battery and motor innovation ecosystem that the Pentagon is now scrambling to resuscitate was, until last year, thriving under the banner of clean energy, which defense procurement offices were happy to ignore until it became a political red letter. Similarly, China still dominates clean energy production and is increasingly willing to weaponize that dominance against its trading partners while in no hurry to phase out its worst carbon emissions.
But each community holds precisely what the other lacks. The defense ecosystem promises the political durability climate tech has long sought, while clean energy promises entrepreneurial energy and consumer scale the defense industrial base has spent decades hemorrhaging. Restoring demand certainty will be critical for U.S. and allied electrotech manufacturing to endure. And while renewed EV tax credits won’t be politically palatable anytime soon, all-purpose battery credits — be they for cars, home backup, or even kitchen appliances — could rebuild the industrial reserve the Pentagon needs while anchoring allied industrial interoperability. Threading the political needle will depend on the Pentagon making that connection explicit — and on climate entrepreneurs willing to code-switch as defense innovators.
While it may be politically inconvenient and culturally inorganic, this alliance is industrially obvious — and strategically imperative. The war hawks and climate hawks just have to be willing to take yes for an answer.
Write for Cogs of War
Harry Krejsa is the director of studies at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology. He joined Carnegie Mellon from the White House Office of the National Cyber Director, where he led development of the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy and established national modern energy security priorities. He previously co-authored the 2018 Defense Cyber Strategy and inaugural Cyber Posture Review and their shift toward disrupting adversary cyber campaigns. Krejsa previously worked at the intersection of technology, industrial strategy, and US-China competition for the Cyberspace Solarium Commission and the Center for a New American Security.
Phoebe Benich is a fellow at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology, focusing on US-China technology competition, energy security, and governmental collaboration with the startup ecosystem. Benich was previously director for strategic risk at the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director, where she oversaw Indo-Pacific partnerships and served as staff lead for developing and implementing modern energy security priorities. Prior to the White House, she was a senior program manager at In-Q-Tel and served on the staff of the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and Defense Innovation Board.
Image: Sgt. Jehu Martinez via DVIDS.
