Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide.
Militaries have spent more than a century operating with fuel and ammunition as limits of combat endurance. They are only beginning to treat batteries with the same operational seriousness, as small unmanned systems move from niche equipment to mass-consumption weapons. Recent bipartisan supply diversification efforts by Congress, the administration, and the Department of Defense provide initial momentum to ensure supply chain independence and resilience for drone batteries. Further targeted efforts can accelerate the establishment of a competitive, advanced battery and cell domestic and allied industrial base.
A drone battery can occupy three logistical categories at once. For a reusable reconnaissance drone, it behaves much like fuel, as it governs endurance and must be recharged or replaced before the next sortie. For a one-way attack drone, it leaves with the weapon and is expended with it. In a loitering munition held in inventory, it is also a shelf-life-limited component whose degradation can determine whether the weapon works years after it was manufactured. At scale, batteries transition from an electronic component inside an airframe to become part of a formation’s combat-consumption rate.
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence estimates that defense battery applications consumed 4.3 gigawatt-hours in 2025, against roughly 1.6 terawatt-hours across all uses, and that drones accounted for 39 percent of defense battery demand. The Department of Defense’s Drone Dominance Program is moving from tens of thousands of low-cost one-way attack drones in 2026 toward more than 200,000 by 2027, prioritizing development of domestic and alternative supply and moving away from Chinese supply chains. For the foreseeable future, the military battery market will remain commercially small, even as the number of battery-powered weapons becomes operationally enormous, since the commercial battery market is about two to three orders of magnitude bigger.
Consequently, defense is a price taker in a battery economy shaped by electric vehicles, grid storage, consumer electronics, and Asian manufacturing scale. While it cannot create an explicit battery ecosystem for military use in the near term, it also cannot afford interruption at the handful of points where a commercial supply chain can stop combat operations. The useful planning questions are what happens to military operations if a particular cell, material, process, or charging architecture becomes unavailable or very expensive, and how long would it take to recover.
A three-part drone battery resilience approach can organize ongoing industrial base efforts, and further derisk the impact of global supply chain disruptions. First, a strategic battery reserve could be established almost immediately, tailored to the specific performance needs of various defense applications and organizing initial defense-specific demand. Second, dedicated efforts to support domestic and allied battery manufacturing and associated supply chains can establish a competitive industrial base. Third, leveraging U.S. technological and private sector innovation, U.S. battery chemistry, and other research and development can enable advanced drones that provide enduring logistics advantages for the warfighter.
Military drone requirements will require a suite of battery solutions, depending on the use case. Reusable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems place more value on endurance, usable life, environmental performance, and rechargeability. First-person-view strike systems emphasize high power, low cost, availability, and adequate energy density. Loitering munitions need shelf life and storage stability as well as cruise endurance and adequate power for a terminal maneuver. Interceptor and long-endurance designs can impose far different demands on discharge, weight, thermal management, and safety.
The battery supply chain does not end when a pack reaches a theater of war. A reusable drone arrives with a finite amount of stored energy, and that energy has to be regenerated after every sortie. A force can possess thousands of drones and still lack equivalent combat capacity with a fragile battery supply chain.
Refueling, even in an electrical sense, is always difficult in combat situations. Remote sites may have limited grid access, and generators require fuel and create acoustic, thermal, and electromagnetic signatures. Charging times and spare-pack ratios can cap sortie rates. Heat and cold affect performance and storage. Damaged lithium batteries create fire and chemical hazards. A charging node that cannot be moved, concealed, or protected can become as operationally vulnerable as a fuel point. Ukraine exposed this tactical electrical burden, and a Pacific contingency could magnify it through longer resupply lines, dispersed island positions, and competition for scarce lift among fuel, munitions, water, sensors, spare parts, and batteries. Recent Army analysis of tactical energy lessons from Ukraine makes this clear, describing electricity as a tactical necessity and highlight rapidly depleting batteries, vulnerable generators, dispersed operations, and the need for resilient power management. For drone-heavy formations, electrical logistics system should be resilient.
Inventory (or stockpiles) can buy the time needed to restore production or qualify another source. However, unlike the strategic reserves of oil or ore, a hypothetical Strategic Battery Reserve requires careful planning beyond just finding a space to store batteries. Multiple storage locations and systems are likely needed to meet the short and medium-term needs that a reserve would support. Depending on their technology and storage conditions, batteries meeting performance requirements may have various shelf-lives. A well-designed strategic reserve would incorporate battery refurbishment or directly deploy upon nearing end-of-life. A sufficient number of batteries would need to be charged before use, but can be stored without drastically sacrificing their performance, and can offer resilience through short-term conflicts in the event of disrupted global battery supply chains.
Logistically, batteries in such reserves would be continuously replenished to ensure the reserve’s readiness and the replaced batteries being deployed in drones. With standardization of the battery packs toward a few selected form factors, the logistics of storage as well as charging infrastructure become manageable across government, primes, cell suppliers, and allied producers. Its purpose is to cover the interval between supply interruption and restored qualified production.
The department cannot solve this problem solely by becoming a larger battery buyer, as the percentage of the wider market will still be marginal. Commercial transportation and energy storage dwarf military demand, and will continue to. Where commercial products meet military requirements, and interruption would be tolerable or quickly recoverable, defense should standardize interfaces, aggregate demand, qualify multiple commercial suppliers, and buy from the broad U.S. and allied market.
The department has already moved in this direction. Its battery strategy and programs such as FASTBat emphasize commercial adoption, common form factors, and aggregation of otherwise fragmented military demand. Department guidance has explicitly described low-volume bespoke procurement as a barrier to affordability and secure sourcing, and has sought to use domestic and allied commercial production wherever practicable.
Two questions arise: What is the consequence if the dependency is interrupted, and how long does recovery take? Low-consequence dependencies with short recovery times should ride commercial scale. High-consequence dependencies that are commercially available but concentrated should have multiple pre-qualified U.S. or allied sources. High-consequence dependencies with long recovery times, few substitutes, or defense-specific performance requirements need protected capacity, through long-term contracts, capacity reservations, targeted capital support, or sovereign production where necessary. Strategic inventories are appropriate when they can bridge a disruption more cheaply and quickly than new production can be restored. This approach is what is typically referred to as “logistics left of boom.”
And still, a battery assembled by an American or allied company can still depend on Chinese cells, anode or cathode materials, electrolyte inputs, processed lithium or graphite, manufacturing equipment, or lower-tier suppliers invisible to the program office. Domestic assembly is not the same as full supply-chain independence.
Congress has already drawn one line at the finished-battery level. Section 154 of the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act bars the department, beginning Oct. 1, 2027, from procuring batteries produced by Chinese manufacturers CATL, BYD, Envision Energy, EVE Energy, Gotion High-Tech, Hithium, or their successors. Subsequent programs went further, with the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act and specific programs such as the Drone Dominance Program enacting various battery and cell restrictions related to foreign entities of concern.
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2025 that department mapping efforts provided much better insight into prime contractors and upper-tier suppliers than into raw materials, parts, and equipment deeper in the chain. The MQ-9 illustrates this problem, as its visible suppliers appeared concentrated in the United States and Europe, while a separate deep-dive analysis identified Chinese integration further down the sub-tiers. Batteries present exactly this kind of risk.
As domestic drone programs continue to grow in scale and complexity, the size and shape of defense industrial drone battery demand will shift. Broader commercial markets will largely follow commercial drivers, and without dedicated research efforts, specific defense needs in drone battery innovations may not occur. Hence, any wide-ranging industrial policy approach to achieve battery security should incorporate long-term research and development, as well as accelerated commercialization and government innovation programs.
New chemistries can sometimes reduce exposure as well as offer new drone functionalities (e.g., extended range, heavier payload), but only if the industrial base is designed for the chemistry. Lithium-sulfur and other emerging battery chemistries may avoid some materials concentrated in today’s lithium-ion chain. Silicon-rich anodes, lithium metal, semi-solid designs, and eventually solid-state or metal-air systems may offer different combinations of endurance, weight, safety, and sourcing.
In the meantime, standard cells and common form factors should exploit the existing much larger commercial market whenever qualification and supply assurance permit. Common interfaces and chargers, mutual qualification of suppliers, exportable designs, and predictable procurement pathways can turn allied industry into additional depth.
The battery in the rapidly growing drone market is becoming part fuel, part munition, and part industrial vulnerability. The military will need to take advantage of commercial scale where interruption has limited operational consequence and recovery is fast, and then diversify and qualify allied sources where concentration creates risk. Hold rotating inventories where they can bridge a disruption. Protect production capacity where failure would stop combat generation, and recovery would take too long.
Better batteries will extend range, increase payload, improve endurance, and enable new missions. But a technical advantage will matter only if it becomes a qualified product that can be produced, supplied, charged, and replaced at operational scale.
Mass drone warfare makes batteries a measure of combat endurance and a key to success in modern war. The force that can regenerate electrical energy, replace expended packs, and keep the critical sub-tiers of the battery supply chain operating will generate more sorties for longer.
Morgan Bazilian is a professor and director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines. He was previously lead energy specialist at the World Bank and a senior diplomat focused on energy poverty at the United Nations.
Alex Gilbert is principal and field director at Rocinante Fieldworks, catalyzing emerging industries including space nuclear, maritime nuclear, and space and seabed resources. He holds a Ph.D. in Space Resources. He formerly worked at Zeno Power.
Aashutosh Mistry is a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. His research creates new energy systems by translating promising materials to useful devices through a combination of physics-based theory, controlled experiments, and data-driven analysis.
Image: Cpl. Sawyer Carleton via DVIDS.
