The Next War Will Be Decided by Watts, Not Just Warheads

A sweeping essay in War on the Rocks' “Cogs of War” series argues that the technologies now reshaping combat — drones, autonomy, offensive cyber, jamming — all converge on a single bottleneck: electricity. Future battlefields will be saturated with unmanned systems that need ever-better batteries and electric motors, plus onboard AI models to keep functioning in jammed, GPS-denied environments, which in turn demands even more power. The authors call this convergence “electrotech”: the stack of hardware and software that turns electricity from a passive physical flow into something that can be generated, stored and directed with software precision. Ukraine is their proof of concept — unmanned surface vessels have mauled Russia's Black Sea fleet, first-person-view drones have captured infantry positions, and autonomous strike systems increasingly operate on battery power and onboard compute rather than direct human control. Offensive cyber operations, likely to open the next major war, will themselves be gated by how much electricity a state can pour into compute. The piece's warning is that Western militaries still budget and train as if munitions and manpower were the constraint, when the real constraint is fast becoming grid capacity, battery supply chains and the industrial base to build both at wartime scale. That is a much harder problem to solve in eighteen months than stockpiling artillery shells.