Guest Post: America’s Drone Future Depends on Battery Independence

In this guest post, Micantis co-founder and CEO Howard Alt argues that batteries, not aircraft, may be the defining factor in the future of the U.S. drone industry. As demand for drones grows across commercial, public safety, and defense applications, he contends that battery manufacturing and supply chain resilience have become strategic issues for both industry and policymakers. Alt examines how evolving U.S. policy, global battery production, and domestic manufacturing capacity could shape America’s ability to build and sustain its next generation of drone technology. DRONELIFE does not accept or make payment for guest posts.

Drones Are America’s Second-Biggest Tech Story. The Battery Is the Plot Hole.

Drones are delivering the visible, job-creating technology progress that AI keeps promising. One dependency could ground all of it.

By Howard Alt, Micantis Co-Founder and CEO

This past weekend, for the country’s 250th birthday, hundreds of American towns celebrated with aircraft instead of explosives. Arlington Heights, Illinois flew 400 synchronized drones over Recreation Park. Flagstaff went all-drone because of wildfire risk. Tucson announced that this year’s fireworks over ‘A’ Mountain were its last; next year, drones. A typical show costs $15,000 to $100,000 and takes about 70 hours to choreograph, and a ten-year-old in a lawn chair gets to watch a few hundred robots fly precision formation overhead. That is robotics at consumer scale, visible to everyone, and nobody had to write a think piece explaining why it matters.

The Same Machines, a Different Sky

Half a world away, the same machines were doing something else. Ukraine built more than four million drones last year and is on pace for five to six million this year. Drones now account for about 75 to 85 percent of frontline casualties in that war. Roads that were passable in 2022 are unusable today because a $500 aircraft with a warhead can find anything that moves.

Then came the war with Iran this spring. Tehran threw waves of Shahed one-way attack drones at Israel, the Gulf states, and American bases. And the United States, for the first time in combat, flew its own low-cost one-way attack drones: the LUCAS, roughly $35,000 apiece, reverse-engineered from Iran’s Shahed design, doing work that would otherwise burn $2.5 million Tomahawks.

Read that again. We cloned their cheap drone because it was the right answer, and we leaned on Ukrainian counter-drone technology to protect our own installations.

That is how fast this technology is moving, and how far the center of gravity has drifted from where we assume it lives.

The Megaphone Problem

Drones are the biggest technology story this country has, second only to AI.

The AI industry has the megaphone, because the megaphone is bolted to the money. The five largest AI infrastructure companies will spend around $700 billion on data centers and chips this year alone. That buys a lot of oxygen.

It also buys a permanent seminar: why the disruption is worth it, why it isn’t taking your job (no really, it isn’t; now, about that gigawatt and your county’s water table…) AI progress arrives as an abstraction plus an invoice, delivered by billionaires who need you to be patient.

Drone progress arrives as a thing you can watch. Ukraine budgeted about $2.6 billion for its entire 2025 FPV drone program, the weapon class that rewrote land warfare. The AI buildout burns through that in about a day and a half. And the drone economy has room for everyone in it: for venture-backed manufacturers scaling NDAA-compliant production lines, and for the pilot with a Part 107 certificate and a pickup truck.

The AI economy has room for about five balance sheets. One pilot network alone counts more than 20,000 FAA-certified operators and adds about a hundred a week, flying inspection, mapping, agriculture, and public safety missions in all fifty states. The industry supports on the order of a hundred thousand American jobs and is adding more, in manufacturing towns and rural counties, not just coastal metros. Nobody has ever had to explain to a bridge inspector why the drone is good for him. Drones add jobs. Drones are good for this country.

Which brings us to the plot hole.

Every Drone Is a Flying Battery

Almost every one of these aircraft, the ones over Recreation Park and the ones over the Black Sea, is a flying battery. Endurance, payload, cost, cold-weather performance, safety: the cell decides all of it.

And here is the part of the story we don’t like telling on the Fourth of July. Lithium-ion chemistry was born in American and British labs, commercialized in Japan in 1991, and industrialized in China while we congratulated ourselves on inventing it.

Today China holds roughly 75 to 85 percent of the world’s cell manufacturing capacity; the United States holds about 5 percent. China produces 99 percent of the spherical graphite that goes into anodes, the large majority of cathode and anode active materials, and prices finished packs some 40 percent below ours.

Thirty years of complacency let one country hollow us out of a resource that now sits at the center of everything from the phone in your pocket to every drone that flew this weekend. We are only now understanding the consequences, because the consequences finally showed up wearing a uniform.

Banning Is the Easy Part

Washington has noticed. The FY2024 defense bill bars the Pentagon from buying cells made by six named Chinese manufacturers starting October 1, 2027. The FY2026 bill goes further, reaching down into the components themselves: cathode, anode, separator, electrolyte salts, phasing in from 2028 through 2031.

And here is the detail most people miss: a Korean or Japanese cell is not automatically a clean answer, because the law reaches upstream into who owns and processes the components, not merely where final assembly happens.

Congress can write a ban in a paragraph. Qualifying a replacement cell is a year or more of testing, data, and documentation per design, and Congress knows it: the same law stood up a working group specifically to accelerate qualification of compliant materials, which is about as close as statute gets to admitting where the real bottleneck sits.

Picture the company this actually lands on: a drone OEM accustomed to building 250 aircraft a year on Chinese cells, running quality out of spreadsheets.  That same company may have just won a program requiring 4,000 units a year, all of them NDAA-eligible, with provenance proven for every delivered aircraft.

The airframe is now the easy part. The battery, and the evidence about the battery, is the hard part.

A Second Chance

The good news is that we are being handed a second chance industries almost never get: a real demand signal (the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance push has ordered more than 22,000 systems, though fewer than 3,000 have shipped, which tells you exactly where the constraint sits), a statute with dates on it, and domestic and allied cell makers ready to grow into the gap.

What we do with it comes down to unglamorous work. Build the cell capacity. Treat qualification as an engineering discipline instead of a paperwork tax. Know what is inside every battery we field, down to the lot it came from.

Drones entertain our kids, inspect our bridges, employ our neighbors, and are rewriting the wars we hope never to fight. So the question for the next few years is not whether drones are good for this country; that case flies itself, every summer weekend, over the town square.

The question is whether we will own what powers the drone century, or rent it from the country we are trying to deter. We spent thirty years learning the price of the second option. This time, let’s build the first.

Howard Alt is the co-ounder and CEO of Micantis, a battery data and qualification platform for defense, aviation, and industrial battery programs whose software is used to qualify production cell lots totaling hundreds of millions of cells a year.

 

Read more:

• U.S. Navy Awards Packet Digital $9.8 Million to Scale Drone Battery Production in North Dakota
• The Next Drone Supply Chain Challenge: Rare Earth Magnets
• Skydio Responds to Chinese Sanctions with Temporary Battery Rationing for Drone Customers