Trading climate action for warfare
On the militarization of the battery industry
This week’s article was written by Shyam S. Sharma, a PhD researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment. His research focuses on critically and honestly examining the environmental, social, and ethical implications of technologies and industries. At present, he is working to understand how the mineral extraction that feeds electric vehicle production threatens ecosystems and biodiversity.
The battery industry has found itself at a critical juncture. Against a backdrop of shifting financial incentives, changing global politics, and rapid deterioration of international law, more and more actors in the sector are straying from the vision of building a clean energy future, lured into the orbit of something far darker: warfare. This essay is an attempt to call attention, and hopefully start to build opposition, to the ongoing militarization of the battery industry.
Over the past decade, batteries have become widely recognized to be important tools for supporting planetary wellbeing. We often spotlight the many positive impacts battery technologies have both environmentally and socially. Impacts that I feel clearly in my day-to-day life, when I hop on one of London’s many battery electric double-decker buses. These buses are a force for public good on many fronts - not only as a low carbon transportation option, but as an affordable and accessible service for the city’s many residents. Impacts that we’re also seeing take shape around the world, in countries like Pakistan. After making headlines last year for adopting solar power at a scale far beyond what anyone expected, Pakistan is now also importing batteries at speed. This could allow many of its population to have clean, cheap, and reliable electricity for the first time.
At the same time, we are also facing a surge of batteries being developed for more troubling purposes. Technologies that could be the building blocks for a more sustainable and equitable world are instead being designed to power machines of violence and surveillance. Rather than catalysts for global peace, cells of the future risk becoming abettors of destructive wars. Increasing mineral extraction to feed these batteries could further threaten our planet’s precious ecosystems and leave historically marginalized communities to once again pick up the pieces, all while the original goal of preventing climate collapse remains deferred.
Electric vehicles (EVs), stationary energy storage, and consumer electronics are overwhelmingly the bread and butter destinations for most battery technologies. They accounted for around 93% of the world’s lithium-ion battery capacity in 2024. However, alongside these three applications, there is an entity that heavily consumes batteries but tends to fly under the radar: the military-industrial complex. From everything from submarines to night vision goggles, battery manufacturers have long produced a variety of customized packs for military use. Yet, to date, most battery companies have regarded this as a niche, non-essential focus area for their products. That is no longer the case.
Citing slowing EV sales in the US and Europe alongside rising military interest in energy storage, many Western battery manufacturers are refashioning their tech, once destined for clean energy purposes, under the brandings of “defense” and “national security”. Geopolitics and economic forces are significant drivers of this change in priorities. With China firmly established as the global leader in battery production and having strategic control over most of the battery supply chain, cell manufacturing in other markets is not cost-competitive in many cases. For military applications, however, cost is not an issue in the eyes of Western governments, who have expressed a willingness to pay a premium for domestically produced batteries that don’t rely on imports from a perceived adversary.
Combat drones in particular, also called “unmanned aerial vehicles” or UAVs, are becoming one of the most sought-after military end uses for batteries. Militaries primarily use combat drones to conduct surveillance and carry out "targeted" attacks while soldiers control them from afar. At present, many of these drones are powered by combustion-based propulsion, not batteries. This is because they often have sizes too large and ranges too long for existing battery technologies to support. However, numerous battery companies, particularly those developing next-gen chemistries, are trying to leverage the lightweight, energy-dense nature of their cells for building advanced, electrified military drones.
Lithium-sulfur manufacturer Lyten, for example, have announced their intention to build high-endurance, “combat-proven” drones and launched a “drone propulsion unit” dedicated to serving the U.S. military’s interests. Last year, NEO Battery Materials unveiled an ultra-high energy silicon anode cell primed for “one-time use” combat drones (also called “kamikaze” or “suicide” drones) and recently acquired a massive site specifically to build drone batteries. And just last month, Sion Power announced they would be transforming their lithium-metal batteries, initially developed for EVs, into ones for advanced suicide drones and other UAVs. With combat drone manufacturing becoming an increasingly profitable endeavor, how many others might decide that they too want to cash in?
Proponents of combat drones argue that their “high-precision” allows them to conduct strikes on combatants with minimal risk of civilian deaths or injuries. However, this characterization of drone warfare as somehow safe or humane is heavily disputed, with substantial evidence to the contrary. The US’s barrage of drone strikes throughout the 2010s, which took the lives of hundreds of civilians across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, might be the most well-documented example. And, more recently of course, the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, in which thousands of people have been killed. Drones have been used so ubiquitously in this war that technologies like the US’s LUCAS and Iran’s Shahed have become household names.
With battery electric UAVs still in their relative infancy and often spoken of as “technologies of the future”, it would be easy to dismiss concerns about their potential danger as premature or alarmist, especially when comparing them to long-established, conventional UAVs. However, battery-powered combat drones are not just an idea on a corporate R&D lab’s whiteboard. They already exist and are increasingly being engineered to inflict harm on innocent people. One technology in particular has made frequent appearances in recent war zones: the quadcopter.
Quadcopters, as the name suggests, are small drones (often weighing only a few kg) with four rotors that can be remotely controlled by a person meters or miles away, typically using what’s called a “first person view” (i.e. virtual reality) camera. Most current quadcopters are equipped with lightweight, lithium-polymer batteries and many models are available for commercial use. They are often marketed for innocuous purposes like aerial photography, agriculture, and postal delivery. However, despite their unimposing appearance, more and more quadcopters are being manipulated into agents of mass killing.
These buzzing bots have particularly made a name for themselves in Ukraine, where the invading Russian forces have relentlessly attacked civilians with swarms of quadcopters over the past several years. Often rigging them to drop hand grenades or dive directly at people, Russia have employed quadcopters at dramatic scale as part of an “intentional and coordinated” effort to intimidate residents and force them to flee from their homes. Russia’s use of short-range drones on Ukrainians is so prevalent that, in addition to being given a frightening descriptor by locals - the “human safari” - it is actually the leading cause of frontline civilian deaths in the war (over 80%).
Ukraine is not the only place where quadcopters have been wielded to perpetrate war crimes. The Israeli military have also widely employed quadcopters armed with lethal weaponry to commit appalling atrocities against Palestinians, as part of its ongoing genocide in Gaza. From everything ranging from psychological torture to systematic killings, Israeli forces have found a horrifying array of ways to use this technology on innocent civilians (watch: detailed analysis of Israel’s quadcopter use in Gaza). One of the most disturbing trends doctors in Gaza have reported is patients, often children, being shot by quadcopters that have been fitted with sniper guns – many times directly in the head. In some even more abhorrent instances, Israeli quadcopters have been seen hovering over recently bombed areas and shooting children lying injured on the ground.
The cases I’ve described above are obviously deeply disturbing in both their brutality and brazenness. What I find almost equally alarming is that there are indications that Russia and Israel have been able to commit these acts of cruelty using, at least to some degree, modified “off the shelf” quadcopters, not necessarily ones originally designed to be used as weapons. With battery companies now getting actively involved in combat drone engineering, what new horrors might be unleashed if the batteries of tomorrow are deliberately tailored for technologies more deadly and sophisticated than makeshift quadcopters? Will Gaza and Ukraine only be the beginning?
More batteries for weapons also means more batteries being diverted away from positive aims. As the battery industry becomes further embedded into the military-industrial complex, the goals the battery boom was supposed to achieve – reducing emissions, fighting the climate crisis, and promoting energy justice – risk being pushed to the periphery. This also means more mining of so-called “critical minerals” like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and many others to feed weapons production. The widespread extraction of these minerals as a result of the ongoing EV surge is already having a host of negative impacts on local communities and biodiversity, which you can read about in my previous article. These damaging mineral mines would also become the birthplace of technologies that could be used to further exacerbate human suffering and inequality. If the environmental toll of mining to support passenger EV production, widely framed as a “necessary” tradeoff for climate action, is itself raising serious ethical questions, how can we begin to justify it in the name of war?
I don’t have an easy answer for how we’re supposed to prevent batteries from being used to enable instruments of violence. Military influence is pervasive throughout the battery ecosystem, from university research labs to big-name companies. This means funding incentives for battery researchers and manufacturers can be heavily biased towards applications that militaries want, combat drones being just one. The profit-hungry structures within which we exist also encourage the production of technologies that will most quickly fill the pockets of shareholders, no matter if to the detriment of human and environmental wellbeing. That means if batteries don’t make enough money to satisfy investors as “climate tech”, they will seek out alternative ventures to pivot towards and protect their bottom line. With batteries showing demonstrable capabilities in weapons systems and offering energy security advantages, warfare is the gold rush of the moment that investors are seeking to capitalize on. Given the amount of money and power backing the decisions being made, we must persistently advocate at every level, from the individual to the system as a whole, if we hope to push the battery industry to change course.
Regulations and treaties can be powerful, although certainly imperfect, mechanisms for controlling how technologies are used. The nuclear non-profileration treaty and the banning of chemical weapons are two relevant examples of ongoing international efforts to rein in dangerous technologies. Perhaps something similar in spirit needs to be devised to restrict what batteries can be built for.
We also have considerable agency as workers to collectively speak up and pressure our employers to stop activities that conflict with our values. Take, for instance, the well-documented activism of Google employees. After successfully pressuring their company to cancel a contract with the US military a few years ago, Google employees also recently organized en masse to demand it stop helping ICE. Or, an even bolder example: the Mediterranean dockworkers who have courageously been refusing to load weapons onto ships, walking out of their jobs and demanding that ports be made “arms-free zones”.
Ultimately, we have a lot of work ahead of us and there probably won’t be a single, silver bullet antidote to the forces we’re up against. Regardless, I think questioning why we started in this industry in the first place, and defending the vision of the future that I’m sure many in the battery sector still share, one of a cleaner, healthier, and more just world, sounds like a good place to start.
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V interesting to read this take on the ‘battery boom’, definitely got me thinking more about some of the darker sides of technological advancements, especially when driven by profit and capital, as is the case with the military-industrial complex. I wonder if we will see any battery producers come out with ethical production/anti-weapons statements like we were seeing with AI companies (even if these were then revoked as was the case with Google).
It's more than a little strange for you to focus on the uses of drones by Russia in Ukraine and more or less totally ignore their use by Ukraine in defending themselves against Russian aggression. Drones have done more for Ukraine than to Ukraine and it's not particularly close.