The Pentagon finds itself in the “shocking and eye-opening” position of needing more electrical power to protect distributed naval and ground forces from long-range attack at a time when China dominates the global production of advanced batteries needed to meet that mission, a panel of security experts said Thursday.
Heather Penny, a senior fellow at the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute, said that as a pilot, “electricity was just as important as jet fuel” in laying out and reviewing missions. Yet, she pointed out that China’s dominance of the production end is matched by its control of mining ventures extracting cobalt, lithium and manganese critical to manufacturing advanced batteries with long lives for electrical power in combat.
Speaking at the Hudson Institute online forum, Bryan Clark, director of Hudson’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said “that distribution [to spread out forces] has a lot of costs” to keep them operating when under and after an attack. The advantage comes in complicating an adversary’s attack plans.
Clark added the Defense Department “hasn’t really thought through the different ways to distribute energy” under the changed conditions of long-range missile threats to positioning forces.
The pressing question for future logisticians involves the Pentagon figuring out how to distribute that energy when under threat of attack, he said.
As retired Army Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley said, the “the range, lethality and targeting” the...
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