Filling the U.S. drone gap will, unfortunately, take quite a bit of scrambling.
How war is fought is changing. If the U.S. is to build drones on the scale that, if only for prudential reasons, will clearly be needed, one obvious question is how those drones are going to be powered. And one obvious answer is that those drones could be powered by batteries built in the electric vehicle (EV) factories that the U.S. taxpayer has been subsidizing at such enormous expense. But is that obvious answer the right one?
After reading this report in The Economist, it seems to me that the answer to that is no.
It is true that both shorter-range drones and EVs typically use lithium-ion battery technology, but that does nothing to provide a “national security” justification for the enormous subsidies that taxpayers have been handing over to the EV sector.
Most Ukrainian drones are single-use, short-range “kamikaze” ones that travel just a few kilometers before blowing themselves up — more akin to munitions than aircraft. The batteries of some store a mere 77 watt-hours of energy, compared with the 20,000-100,000wh common in EVs. Meanwhile, production lines have become less flexible owing to the high-tech nature of modern EV-making. “It is unimaginable . . . that a Tesla factory would be anywhere near as useful for production as a Detroit factory was in the second world war,” says the boss of a defense firm.
China has grown closer to Russia, so Ukrainian drone producers have found their old Chinese suppliers less keen to do business. Several, including Wild Hornets, now import battery cells from South Korea and assemble their own packs. Pawell, another firm, is working on its own battery chemistry. Already, building batteries in Ukraine is only a little more expensive than buying them from abroad. Wild Hornets sells its ones for simple drones at $90 a piece. Drone batteries, it turns out, are simpler to make in wartime than an EV industry is to nurture in peacetime.
Inevitably, Ukraine, under attack by Russia, has had to improvise. The U.S. is not facing that sort of challenge, meaning that its drone manufacturing effort can be less ad hoc. An effort to build the arsenal of drones that America needs is already underway and seems set to be accelerated. Good. A scramble to build drones after the U.S. is at war would be a scramble too late.
Building that arsenal ought to be something that America’s private sector, working in conjunction with the military, could do. If subsidies are required to achieve this aim sufficiently quickly (I’m not clear why they would be), they should be paid directly to the manufacturers involved rather than being filtered through a vast subsidy-industrial complex such as the one that has been created to manufacture the electric vehicles that Americans have to be bullied or bribed to buy. The amounts involved would be far smaller and represent far better value than the billions being thrown EVs’ way. Scrapping the subsidies being paid to support the latter ought to easily cover the cost of the former.
But there is a catch. It concerns motors, not batteries, and it involves those minerals of the moment, rare earths. As The Economist explains, those motors “need magnetic components containing rare-earth metals that are produced and refined by China. More mineral refining, not manufacturing, is the solution.” And (as the magazine’s writers acknowledge elsewhere) more mining, too. When it comes to assembling a supply chain to satisfy America’s requirements, the lion’s share of these activities must be located in the U.S. And the U.S. is nowhere near having that in place.
Filling the drone gap in the meantime will, unfortunately, take quite a bit of scrambling.