Military power ultimately rests on industrial capacity. China is now translating its dominance in electric vehicles, batteries, and power-management systems into military capability.
A publicly released Army intelligence report highlights how China is leveraging its lead in “clean tech” to build battlefield capability. China’s new hybrid-electric armored vehicles not only reduce fuel consumption and associated logistics burdens, but are designed to be more mobile, quieter, and harder to detect, while also generating substantially more onboard electrical power.
This latter point is particularly important because demand for electricity across the battlefield is increasing, and electricity is becoming a central enabler of combat power, whether at small forward operating bases, in space, or across air, sea, and land platforms. Modern militaries increasingly need this power not just for propulsion, but also to meet the growing demands of AI-enabled systems, drones, advanced sensors, electronic warfare, communications, directed-energy weapons, and additive manufacturing.
Interestingly, the article refers to China’s ability to conduct “maneuver” with “formations” equipped with hybrid-electric vehicles, suggesting that vehicle-level advantages will be translated at scale across wide swaths of the battlefield.
I have worked on the topic of “operational energy” for over sixteen years, providing initial funding for US Department of Energy experts to assess energy use and electricity production in Afghanistan and Iraq as far back as 2010. These assessments led to many positive developments, including the deployment of hybrid solar, battery, and generator systems that reduced tactical fuel resupply by up to 60 percent, and the development of the now-accepted tactical microgrid system being purchased by both the Army and the Marines.
For over a decade, other senior defense leaders and I have argued that a rapid transition to hybrid-electric vehicles would improve combat effectiveness by enhancing survivability and lowering logistics demands. We argued that hybrid-electric military vehicles were not about politics, symbolism, or “green” branding. They were about combat effectiveness.
That argument was often misunderstood in Washington. In some quarters, it was dismissed as “woke,” which was an unserious response to a serious military issue. It was never a choice between all-combustion or all-electric. The choice was about optimizing power production, storage, and consumption to achieve valuable outcomes. What was a pressing issue a decade ago is now an acute crisis, as the operating environment becomes increasingly lethal and electricity demands rise.
There are now some positive signs of movement in the US military, including the gradual retrofitting of some wheeled tactical vehicles with hybrid-electric drives, interest in hybrid-electric drivetrains for new vehicles such as the M1A3, and the development of unmanned hybrid or all-electric vehicles from manufacturers such as Oshkosh. Acquisition reforms and new procurement methods should also be recognized for their value.
And while these developments should be welcomed, they are years late and raise serious concerns about US industrial depth. While the United States was probably the first nation to recognize the value of hybrid-electric vehicles, it has been too slow to act, and with more than $20 billion in domestic EV and battery manufacturing projects canceled in the last 12 months, catching up will be even harder, if not impossible.
Climate change is real, and the energy transition is accelerating globally, if not always domestically. The technologies driving this transition — solar, wind, nuclear power, battery storage, electric vehicles, and power-management systems — offer both commercial and, when adopted correctly, military advantage. China recognized this and put in place a series of national plans that have created an electro-state ecosystem enabling it to control over 70% of the world’s production capacity for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles.
The issue is not about any one particular hybrid vehicle. It is about whether the country maintains the deep industrial infrastructure and associated culture of innovation needed to compete in a more electrified battlespace. Once a competitor builds momentum across manufacturing, engineering talent, supply chains, software integration, and system design, catching up becomes harder, slower, and more expensive. If the United States does not maintain a strong domestic production base for batteries, power electronics, and electric-drive systems, future combat platforms will be more expensive, less scalable, less connected, and less capable than they otherwise should be.
History shows that countries that can transition to and leverage new power generation sources and technologies gain a strategic advantage over time. China is leveraging its leadership in electrification to achieve just such an advantage. And if the United States doesn’t get serious about clean tech soon, it risks falling permanently behind.