In my illustration above, featuring a high-tech laboratory scene showing engineers examining next-gen battery modules next to military robot prototypes.
Battery breakthroughs, more than dazzling AI algorithms or sleek airframes, will decide which countries lead the next era of military robotics and drones. Every robot that moves, senses, and communicates on the battlefield is constrained by one brutal question: how much energy can it carry, and how fast can it be replenished?
In a world of swarming quadcopters, loitering munitions, autonomous ground vehicles and sea drones, superior batteries become a strategic enabler on par with stealth or precision-guided munitions.
Today, China sits at the center of this contest. It dominates the supply chains for lithium-ion batteries, controls a huge share of the refining of critical minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel, and is pushing hard into next-generation chemistries such as sodium-ion and solid-state cells. States that fail to secure access to batteries and their raw materials will struggle to scale up military robotics, no matter how advanced their software or sensors.
Why batteries are the bottleneck for military robots and drones
Most small and medium-size drones, including many used in Ukraine and the Middle East, are powered by lithium-ion or lithium-polymer batteries because of their high energy density and power output. Academic surveys of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) power systems consistently find that Li-ion and Li-Po cells are the default for both civilian and military drones, with endurance and payload tightly capped by battery performance.
Defense engineers highlight the same constraint from the field side. A case study by equipment maker Galvion describes how battery management is “one of the primary challenges in powering military drones,” noting that most platforms are limited by flight time, the difficulty of recharging in contested areas, and the risks created when troops must expose themselves to swap packs or refuel generators.
A review of drone battery reliability published in July 2025 stresses that the energy system is now a critical safety and mission-success factor, driving intensive work on battery management systems, fault diagnostics, and improved chemistries.
Strategists are starting to connect those technical details to military power. In a widely cited War on the Rocks essay, Joseph Webster argues that batteries have become a “military enabler” on par with fuel logistics in earlier eras, underpinning everything from one-way attack drones to soldier-worn electronics and autonomous ground systems.
A companion analysis on the geopolitics site IDSTCH goes further, calling batteries “the critical element of modern military power” and linking the proliferation of smart munitions and small drones directly to advances in energy storage.
Even for more futuristic systems, batteries are central. Researchers working on structural batteries — where the airframe itself stores energy — have demonstrated cylindrical Li-ion structural cells for drones that carry load and power at the same time.
Such concepts point toward lighter, longer-endurance robotic platforms, but they all assume access to high-performance cells and sophisticated manufacturing.
In short: the limiting factor for drone range, payload, stealth (electric propulsion is quieter than combustion), and autonomy is overwhelmingly the battery.
Critical minerals: lithium, cobalt, nickel – and vulnerability
High-performance batteries don’t appear out of thin air. They depend on reliable access to a narrow set of critical minerals, especially lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite. Without secure supplies of these, no country can hope to scale production of EVs, grid storage – or the military drones that piggyback on the same industrial base.
A 2024 PBS report on energy-transition minerals notes that the world’s supply of lithium, cobalt, graphite and other clean-energy minerals is increasingly concentrated in a handful of countries, “most notably China,” creating serious vulnerability for the global economy. Cipher News visualized this dominance in three charts, showing China in control of the refining – and in some cases the mining – of nearly all key materials used in clean energy and defense technologies, including drones and stealth aircraft.
The cobalt story is especially stark. Investigations into the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces about 70% of the world’s cobalt, have described how Chinese firms built commanding positions in mines and processing, and how that cobalt feeds directly into global battery supply chains.
Testimony to the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission in April 2025 warned that China has spent two decades positioning itself as the pivotal player across critical minerals, with overseas mining projects tied back to domestic refiners that supply its EV and battery industries.
For militaries, this concentration is not an abstract trade problem. If lithium or cobalt prices spike or supplies are curtailed, civilian EV and grid projects will absorb scarce output first because that’s where demand is largest and contracts are deepest. Defense ministries trying to ramp up drone and robotics production could find themselves outbid or simply cut off.
Meanwhile, China is not only refining minerals — it is actively stockpiling them. Reporting from the Financial Times in 2025 described Beijing doubling its strategic nickel reserves, a metal crucial for many high-energy cathodes, even as it quietly increases holdings of lithium, cobalt and copper. For countries that rely entirely on imports for these inputs, that kind of stockpiling is a powerful lever in any crisis.
China’s lead in batteries and manufacturing scale
These mineral realities feed directly into manufacturing power. China has spent more than a decade building an integrated industrial base from mines to materials to cells to finished vehicles and storage systems.
NPR-affiliate WUSF, summarizing International Energy Agency data in 2023, reported that China produced roughly three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and controlled the lion’s share of processing capacity for key inputs.
A 2024 study by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) updated that picture: it found that Chinese firms accounted for about 77% of global EV battery manufacturing capacity in 2022 and produced around 75% of the world’s lithium-ion cells, with Chinese institutions also dominating high-impact battery research.
On the industry-analysis side, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s 2024 review of new battery technologies concluded that “China leads production, but the West is catching up,” noting that Chinese cell makers still control most large-scale production lines for advanced chemistries.
IDTechEx, in a 2025 report on China’s battery sector, described Chinese manufacturers as having “pulled ahead” in multiple technology races, including high-manganese cathodes and low-cost LFP variants, thanks to their scale and aggressive commercialization.
Major news outlets tell the same story. A Reuters Breakingviews column in 2024 characterized Beijing’s battery industrial strategy as a “global battery ram” that will be hard for the West to stop, given China’s vast capacity and cost advantage in everything from EV cells to stationary storage. Another Reuters piece compared top EV-battery makers and found that China’s CATL and BYD alone accounted for over half of global energy-storage battery sales in 2023, with Chinese manufacturers rapidly expanding into grid and industrial markets.
A 2024 Wall Street Journal analysis put it bluntly: China controls more than half of the global EV battery market and nearly 90% of some key battery materials, and any challenger will likely need a genuine technological breakthrough — such as commercially viable solid-state or sodium-ion batteries — to dislodge that lead.
This manufacturing ecosystem, built on top of China’s mineral leverage, is exactly the base you’d want if your goal were to mass-produce cheap, expendable drones and autonomous systems in wartime.
Battery breakthroughs: from fast charging to new chemistries
China isn’t just big; it is also innovating rapidly in battery technology — innovation that will spill over into military robotics.
A 2024 Business Insider deep dive on “five-minute EV charging” highlighted how Chinese firms such as CATL and Zeekr are leading the race to ultrafast-charging batteries, with CATL’s Shenxing Plus promising 600 km of range from a 10-minute charge and Chinese startups pushing silicon-enhanced and solid-state designs. Faster-charging, higher-power cells don’t just benefit cars; they make it possible to turn around surveillance and strike drones much more quickly at forward bases.
Carnegie’s 2024 report Winning the Battery Race emphasized that next-generation batteries — especially solid-state designs with lithium-metal anodes — could dramatically boost energy density, charging speed and safety. It explicitly linked these breakthroughs to military applications, arguing that high-performance batteries could “extend the range and potency of drones” and power new generations of uncrewed systems.
China is already positioning itself for that future. CEPA’s 2025 “From Mines to Motors” analysis describes how China now dominates the EV value chain from raw-material extraction to advanced battery development and vehicle manufacturing, creating a flywheel of scale, data and revenue that can be plowed back into R&D. Legal and policy commentary has similarly noted that China controls nearly 80% of some battery and solar-panel supply chains, reinforcing its ability to shape both prices and technology standards.
At the same time, Western and Asian firms are experimenting with radical ideas such as “weightless and invisible” structural batteries that merge energy storage into the body of vehicles and robots — concepts popularized in Wired coverage and already moving from lab to niche applications. As those concepts mature, whoever controls their production will be able to field lighter, longer-lasting drones and autonomous platforms.
Drones, batteries, and the emerging “electric arsenal”
On the battlefield, the connection between battery innovation and military capability is already visible.
Analysts of UAV power systems note that lithium-ion batteries’ high energy density and good charge/discharge characteristics have made them the default for multirotor drones, but flight time remains a major pain point, especially once you add heavy ISR payloads or warheads. A 2025 MDPI review on drone battery reliability argues that as missions get more complex and environments harsher, militaries will need cells with higher cycle life, better thermal stability and smarter battery-management systems to prevent catastrophic failures.
Industry responses are already underway. Reuters reported in May 2025 that Slovak startup InoBat is launching an E10 battery cell specifically designed for military drones, promising 60% longer flight time and 40% higher payload than existing cells, plus sub-15-minute charging — exactly the sort of incremental breakthrough that could transform drone operations if widely adopted. Galvion’s field-focused analysis points out that better batteries also reduce logistics burdens and the risks associated with resupplying units under fire.
Strategic thinkers now talk about an “electric arsenal” where robots, sensors and soldiers’ gear all run on rechargeable batteries rather than liquid fuels. War on the Rocks frames this as a shift in the logistics of power: instead of moving fuel forward, militaries must move electricity and high-performance cells, and whoever has superior batteries — from supply chains to chemistries — will unlock more capable drone swarms and robotic formations.
Why secure minerals and manufacturing matter more than clever code
It’s tempting to think that leadership in AI and autonomy software is the main prerequisite for dominating military robotics. But without batteries, algorithms are just lines of code.
China’s edge here is not only its head start in manufacturing and R&D, but also its grip on upstream resources. The PBS and Cipher analyses show how heavily the world leans on Chinese refining of lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite. ITIF’s numbers on China’s majority share of EV-battery manufacturing, combined with Washington Post reporting on its dominance in solar and other clean-energy hardware, underscore how far ahead Beijing already is in the broader electro-industrial stack.
For any other country hoping to lead in military drones and robotics, three pillars are essential:
- Secure access to critical minerals (aka rare earth) – through diversified imports, strategic reserves, recycling and, where possible, domestic mining. The cobalt saga in Congo and China’s nickel stockpiling are warnings about relying on a single supplier.
- Advanced cell and pack manufacturing – not just pilot lines, but gigafactories capable of producing automotive-grade and defense-grade cells with consistent quality. Benchmark and Reuters both suggest that the gap here is still wide.
- Sustained R&D in next-generation chemistries and drone-specific designs – from safer, temperature-tolerant solid-state packs to structural batteries and high-power cells tailored for vertical-lift UAVs and loitering munitions. Carnegie, MDPI and Wired all point to how transformative these technologies could be.
Countries that treat batteries as a marginal industrial policy issue — rather than as core defense infrastructure — risk discovering in a crisis that they can’t build enough robots, or keep them flying long enough, to matter.
Conclusion: The quiet race that will decide the drone age
The most decisive contests in the age of military robotics won’t always be visible in dramatic combat footage. They’ll play out in mines and refineries, in gigafactories and R&D labs, where nations battle over lithium brines, cobalt contracts, nickel reserves and cell designs.
China’s current advantage is the result of deliberate strategy: securing minerals, dominating refining, building massive manufacturing capacity and pushing into new chemistries, from cheaper sodium-ion cells to ultrafast-charging and structural batteries. That industrial depth gives Beijing an enormous head start in any competition to field vast numbers of autonomous systems.
For other countries, catching up will require thinking about batteries the way previous generations thought about oil and steel: as foundational to national power and military capability. Whoever wins the battery race will not just dominate EVs and clean energy — they’ll also command the drones, robots and autonomous weapons that shape tomorrow’s battlefields.