The clean energy transition is about a lot of things, but not incidentally, national security.
It’s not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia’s bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out battery-powered toys.
Again, the world has changed, almost overnight.
The American military is much better than the Russian military, but it’s ultimately not that different — it’s built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy “platforms” like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks. Each F-22 stealth fighter, still widely considered the best plane in the sky, cost about $350 million to build. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion each. An M1A1 Abrams tank costs more than $4 million, and so on.
That’s the amount of value that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed. Except the true value lost will be much higher, since — like Japan in World War 2, or Russia now — the U.S. now has extremely limited defense manufacturing capacity, and thus won’t be able to easily replace what it loses.
As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.
That’s obviously a terrifying thought. How can the U.S. defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield.
The other question we need to be asking is: Why can’t the U.S. just do the same thing to China, in the event of a war? We have drones, right? Weren’t we the inventors of drone technology? Don’t we have innovative startups like Anduril, and Skydio, and lots of others racing to arm our military with the world’s best drones?
Well, OK. The U.S. did invent drone technology. But most of what we currently use are lumbering, expensive systems like the MQ-9 Reaper:
Each one of these giant drone planes costs $33 million. During the recent U.S. conflict with the Houthis — a conflict in which the U.S. was essentially defeated — the ragtag Yemeni militia shot down at least 7 of these Reaper drones, and possibly as many as 20. America in total has only a few hundred.
The kind of drones used in the Ukrainian raid, on the other hand, are “FPV” drones — that stands for “first person view”. These are small battery-powered plastic copters equipped with explosives. There are many types, but here’s one example:
These drones cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, depending on the type. Ukraine is currently producing thousands of these drones per day, and says it expects to be able to produce over 10,000, although either the base drone (before weapons and other military hardware are added) or the parts used to make the drone typically come from China.
Why so many? FPV drones aren’t just useful for the kind of long-range surprise attack that Ukraine just carried out. In fact, they’re steadily replacing every other type of weapon on the battlefield. FPV drones can take out tanks, including America’s best tanks. They are now estimated to cause 70% of the casualties on the battlefield — more than artillery, the traditional “god of war”.
An FPV drone is basically:
- some injection-molded plastic parts
- some trailing edge computer chips (microcontrollers, sensors, etc.)
- an electric motor made of rare earth permanent magnets
- a lithium-ion battery
The U.S. can still make plenty of trailing-edge computer chips, but the rest of these items are all China, China, China.
China does a large fraction of the injection molding in the world — about 82%, according to one 2024 estimate.2 Currently, I know of no government plan to restore America’s lost capacity in injection molding. In fact, Trump’s tariffs — if they ever go into effect — are expected to severely damage the U.S. injection molding industry, by cutting American injection molding companies off from imports of the specialized equipment they need.
China also makes most of the electric motors in the world. This is because China makes most of the magnets, and an electric motor is basically just made out of magnets.
The magnets for electric motors are made out of materials called “rare earths”, which are almost entirely mined and processed in China.
In fact, China recently slapped export controls on its sales of rare earths to the U.S., causing chaos in a number of U.S. industries, and probably contributing to Trump’s decision to pause his tariffs. So far, U.S. efforts to mine and refine rare earths have fallen short (which itself is a topic for another full post).
Finally, and most importantly, we have batteries. A battery is the essential component of an FPV drone — it holds the energy that makes the thing go. Larger drones can use combustion engines, but to get something as small and cheap as an FPV drone, you need a battery.3
China makes most of the batteries in the world. In 2022 it had 77% of global manufacturing capacity. Here’s a projection out to 2030:
Even this projection, which shows America catching up just a little bit, is probably way too rosy. It was made at a time when Joe Biden’s industrial policy — specifically, the Inflation Reduction Act — was dishing out huge subsidies for American battery factories.
This wouldn’t have put American battery-making capacity on par with China, but it would have given us a fighting chance.
Now, though, Donald Trump and the Republicans are canceling the policies that were promoting American battery manufacturing:
A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans…would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks.
Electric vehicles are crucial for battery manufacturing capacity, because in peacetime, they’re the main source of demand for batteries. Pump up the EV industry, and you pump up the battery industry too — just as the chart above shows Biden doing. Kill the EV industry and you kill the battery industry too, just as Republicans now want to do. Harming the solar industry will also harm the battery industry, because some types of batteries are used to store solar energy for when the sun isn’t shining.
GOP policies are already mauling the American battery industry:
[M]ore [battery] projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 than in the previous two years combined. Those cancellations include a $1 billion factory in Georgia that would have made thermal barriers for batteries and a $1.2 billion lithium-ion battery factory in Arizona…“It’s hard at the moment to be a manufacturer in the U.S. given uncertainties on tariffs, tax credits and regulations,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars in additional investments appear to be stalled, he added, but haven’t been formally canceled yet.
In fact, the whole boom in American factory construction that happened under Biden appears to be halting and going into reverse under Trump, thanks to a combination of tariffs and the expected cancellation of industrial policies.
The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.
The good news is that as China now inevitably defeats the US, mostly through patience, industrial capacity, and the many advantages of electrified renewable energy, (not to mention having 4 1/2 times more people) it will be the sane people defeating the climate denying delayalists. The sooner they defeat us, the better chance civilization and millions of species have of surviving.
Don’t rely too much on Chinese being “sane” people. They’re just as prone to cognitive failures as the rest of us.
Hell, Emperor Xi doesn’t seem to have made arrangements for transfer of power after his death, and we know how fast things can break once regimes change.
I’m the last person to defend the Chinese government in general, which is horrendous in many ways. But so is the US’s. At least the Chinese seem almost completely sane on climate catastrophe, even if they’re only doing it because it aligns with their program to stop dying from pollution, and, you know, conquer the world. And despite their remarkable speed, still doing it too slowly like every other country in the world. And still building coal and nukes. (But seen that EV market share recently? Holy crap, Batmobile!)