The Electric Tech Stack: Its Importance and How the U.S. can Keep Pace with China

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This OpEd was originally published in S.C. Media.

January 12, 2026

Author: Valerie Moon, Executive Director, ICIT

Economist Noah Smith recently popularized a useful term to frame the core industrial capabilities that will decide both manufacturing leadership and battlefield advantage in the near future: the "Electric Tech Stack."

In Smith's telling, the Electric Tech Stack is the trio of batteries, electric motors, and power electronics that forms the hardware backbone of drones, robots, electric vehicles, and much of the coming "electrify everything" economy.

That framing is powerful because it sidesteps the classic industrial-policy critique that governments can't pick winners. In some past eras, the "winners" have been obvious because national security and the broader economy have converged on the same foundational technologies. Railroads, steel, autos, and semiconductors all had that quality.

Today, the argument is that the Electric Tech Stack is that new foundational technology. Drones and autonomous systems are increasingly central to modern warfare, and the same components that make drones cheap and plentiful also enable mass production of consumer and industrial goods.

Why the Electric Tech Stack is critical infrastructure

At a systems level, the Electric Tech Stack is a chain that converts raw materials into controlled motion:

• Batteries (energy storage): Drones, robots, portable sensors, and distributed energy systems all rely on compact, high-performance storage. As grids add unpredictable renewable energy sources, batteries also become a strategic buffer technology for national power resilience.

• Motors (energy to motion): Brushless permanent-magnet motors, common in drones and many EV drivetrains, turn stored electricity into thrust or torque. In high-volume manufacturing, the permanent-magnet-motor supply chain becomes a bottleneck as soon as demand scales up.

• Power electronics (control and conversion): Inverters, motor controllers, and power semiconductors regulate the flow of electricity with precision. They determine efficiency, heat output, range, payload, and reliability. Power electronics are to electrified machines what hydraulic systems and transmissions were to the combustion era — except that they scale more like traditional electronics.

• Compute (increasingly inseparable from the stack): Smith's original stack emphasizes the above three factors, but in practice, modern platforms fuse them with chips, sensors, and software. Andreessen Horowitz's Ryan McEntush describes this broader "electro-industrial stack" as the bridge that lets machines behave more like software — iterated, simulated, and continuously improved.

The national-security angle is not abstract. The Ukraine war has made clear that mass drone warfare is changing force structure and attrition dynamics. The major French think tank IFRI estimates that drones accounted for 60–70% of losses across all categories in Ukraine in 2025, far exceeding prior drone-intensive conflicts.

If drones are the "new artillery," then battery cells, motors, and power electronics are the new shell casings and propellant — and they're hard to replenish quickly in wartime.

Why China is better positioned than the U.S. today

China's advantage is less about any single breakthrough and more about scale and the country's ability to integrate across the supply chain, especially "midstream" processing and manufacturing know-how.

China is ahead in three areas that feed the Electric Tech Stack:

• Critical minerals and processing concentration: The International Energy Agency notes that refining concentration has increased, with China dominating supply growth for cobalt, graphite, and rare earths. The U.S. Energy Information Administration similarly highlights China's central role in the trade flows that move battery minerals from raw inputs to processed materials and components.

• Manufacturing depth and learning curves: China has built dense supplier ecosystems where process improvements — in yield, throughput, tooling, workforce routines, and quality control — compound each other. That "factory learning" is hard to replicate quickly with greenfield plants.

• Defense-adjacent commercial scale: The same factories that produce consumer drones, EV components, and power modules can be repurposed or prioritized during crises. That dual-use flexibility — think of how U.S. auto plants rapidly built tanks, trucks and aircraft during World War II — is exactly what made prior industrial bases strategically decisive.

None of this means China is destined to win. It means China starts with structural advantages in the segments of the Electric Tech Stack that are hardest to stand up quickly: materials processing, high-throughput manufacturing, and supplier density.

What the United States should do next

The U.S. needs an electric-motor-manufacturing ecosystem that can scale reliably under stress, anchored by procurement, permitting speed, and allied supply chains.

• Treat the Electric Tech Stack as a defense-industrial priority

  Create a clear demand signal by committing DoD and DHS procurement to long-term contracts for drones, batteries, motors, and power electronics, especially for small, attritable systems that you can afford to lose on the battlefield. IFRI's analysis underscores that volume matters; boutique production won't keep up with the modern rate of attrition.

• Build the missing midstream: refining, chemical processing, and magnet supply.

  The IEA's warning about concentration in refining is the core vulnerability. The U.S. should pair permitting reform with finance tools (loan guarantees, offtake agreements, price floors) to make midstream projects bankable, especially for graphite processing, rare-earth separation, and magnet manufacturing.

• Scale batteries domestically with stable policy and bankable incentives.

  The Inflation Reduction Act's 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit is explicitly designed to subsidize domestic production of battery components and critical minerals. The next step is execution: Reduce uncertainty through clear guidance and durable timelines, and tie incentives to measurable ramp milestones such as yield, throughput, and domestic sourcing.

• Pair CHIPS-style ecosystem building with the rest of the stack.

  The CHIPS and Science Act provides a template for how the U.S. can mobilize around a foundational input (in that case, semiconductors). The same approach — clusters, workforce pipelines, supplier development, and sustained R&D — needs to extend to batteries, motors, and power electronics so that  electrified hardware doesn't become the weak link in an AI- and autonomy-driven era.

• Friend-shore aggressively, but with real capacity outside China.

  Alliances only help if they produce physical output at scale. The recent U.S.–Australia critical minerals push is directionally right, but it illustrates how large the gap remains. Build joint financing and guaranteed offtakes with allies (Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, the EU, Mexico) focused on specific bottlenecks like battery-grade chemicals, magnet materials, and processing equipment.

The bottom line

Mastering the Electric Tech Stack isn't a slogan. It's a strategy for ensuring that the U.S. can build and sustain the machines that will soon define both economic power and military power: drones, robots, EV platforms, grid storage, and the electrified infrastructure that underpins AI at scale.

Smith's point is that these are "winner" industries because they are foundational — and China's point, as revealed in its supply chains, is that the stack is easiest to dominate when you industrialize it end-to-end.

If the U.S. wants to avoid strategic dependence on hostile nations, it needs to acknowledge and prioritize electrified manufacturing as the industrial base of the 21st century.

Val Moon

Val Moon is Executive Director of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), advancing people-centered, secure, and resilient infrastructure. Previously, she served as Chief Strategy Officer at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and spent 22 years at the FBI in senior cyber and technology leadership roles, including service on the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

About ICIT

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)3think tank with the mission of modernizing, securing, and making resilient critical infrastructure that provides for people’s foundational needs. ICIT takes no institutional positions on policy matters. Rather than advocate, ICIT is dedicated to being a resource for the organizations and communities that share our mission. By applying a people-centric lens to critical infrastructure research and decision making, our work ensures that modernization and security investments have a lasting, positive impact on society. Learn more at www.icitech.org.