[Editor’s Note: The Army Mad Scientist Initiative has an enduring tradition of hosting William & Mary undergraduate students as embedded interns. Our interns author Mad Scientist Laboratory blog posts, support production of The Convergence podcasts, help facilitate Mad Scientist conferences and document key findings in final reports, serve as judges in scoring Mad Scientist contest submissions, and enter open- source Operational Environment (OE) insights — just to name a few key mission requirements they support.
Today’s guest post submission is by Eliot Ploog, our current Mad Scientist William & Mary intern, who tackles the issue of increasing energy demand on the battlefield. He goes into how our adversaries, mainly China, are adapting to face this challenge, and how the Army could respond. This post deeply dives into the technical aspects of energy requirements and emerging technologies in this realm — Read on!]
U.S. Army 1st Special Forces Group is 72 hours into Large-Scale Combat Operations (LSCO) in the Pacific. Drone teams are advancing persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Counter-UAS (cUAS) nodes are cycling continuously, hunting for drones and feeding targeting data to the force. Then, one by one, the power nodes go dark. From artillery or a cyberattack? No, from an adversary that planned for this.
The Army Runs on Electricity
The modern Soldier carries more battery weight than any soldier in history. Electronic warfare suites, encrypted communications networks, UAS platforms, and forward-deployed sensor arrays all run on electricity. As the Army prepares for a drone saturated battlefield under the updated FM 3-0, it is fielding systems that depend on power nodes that remain vulnerable to disruption, alongside domestic critical infrastructure. A sensor network that loses power becomes a dead node. A command post that goes dark loses tempo. A drone launch team without recharge capability becomes irrelevant after its first sortie.
During the 2024 Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center rotation, the 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, ran a brigade-sized experiment in hybrid battlefield power. The results validated that battlefield energy is not a logistics function but a warfighting function. 
The Army has not yet treated it as one. Brigade Combat Teams still manage electrical power as a secondary line item buried inside Class III or Class VII sustainment. There is no class for kilowatts. The energy footprint of the force has grown with every generation of technology it fields. In World War II, the average soldier burned 1.67 gallons of fuel per day. In Iraq that figure was 27.3 gallons, driven largely by generators, aviation, and cooling systems. The Army of 2026 is more capable than any force in history and more power-dependent than any force in history.
The Army’s expeditionary power capacity falls far short of the demand. The 249th Engineer Battalion, the Army’s prime power unit, fields 26 MEP-810 generators providing roughly 34 megawatts electric (MWe) of total capacity. That is the Army’s entire deployable prime power across all theaters, and it already struggles to support a Brigade Combat Team in garrison.
The Race to Power the Future Force
Russia and China’s growing strategic alignment could give them an edge in fielding expeditionary power systems in austere environments because each brings a different strength to the problem. China contributes industrial-scale capabilities, advanced engineering, and a willingness to iterate quickly on compact reactor concepts. At the same time, Russia brings extensive experience operating in harsh northern environments, from Arctic logistics to remote basing and mobile power support. Together, those strengths could produce a more mature model for sustaining energy in extreme conditions than either state could develop alone. That would give Russian and Chinese planners a head start over the West, which must coordinate across more dispersed industrial, regulatory, and political systems before comparable capabilities can be fielded.
The United States is pursuing the same concept through Project Pele, a transportable microreactor being developed by the Department of War Strategic Capabilities Office. Pele is a 1.5-megawatt demonstration system, gas-cooled and designed to fit into four 20-foot shipping containers, capable of delivering power to a forward military base for up to three years without refueling. In November 2025, Idaho National Laboratory received the first delivery of tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel for the system. Executive Order 14299, signed in May 2025, directs the Department of War to have a reactor operating at a domestic military base no later than September 30, 2028. The Army’s follow-on Janus Program aims to scale that capability to between 10 and 50 megawatts across U.S. military installations; this comes in conjunction with the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program whose goal is to field commercially available, fixed nuclear microreactor power systems for DOW installations. Recently, a C-17 airlifted a five-megawatt microreactor system nearly 700 miles from California to Utah, demonstrating that forward deployment is operationally feasible.
China’s pursuit of truck mounted 10-megawatt transportable nuclear power reflects a return to a capability the United States Army once demonstrated and later retired. The Army Nuclear Power Program developed prefabricated land reactors and the MH-1A Sturgis, a 10-megawatt reactor mounted on a converted ship that provided power in the Panama Canal for eight years. The program ended because the cost and logistical burden outweighed the operational need of that era, but today smaller reactor designs, better materials, and more mature manufacturing have made the concept more affordable to revisit. China now appears to be revisiting that tradeoff as battlefield power demands rise and compact reactor technology improves. Recent reporting suggests that Beijing’s 2-megawatt thorium molten-salt reactor has moved from concept validation toward operational proof of concept, including thorium-to-uranium conversion and refueling without shutdown. China’s successful testing of a large superconducting magnet for its fusion program and Chaotan One, the world’s first commercial sCO2 power generator suggests it is also building the enabling industrial base for future high-density energy systems, not just near-term field power. 
Nuclear is not the only avenue. Tactical microgrids, modular battery storage, and solar hybrid systems are already being tested in the field. The 2/25ID JPMRC experiment demonstrated that insertion teams could sustain 56 to 96 hours of operations on battery and solar without a generator signature, reducing both the logistics burden and the thermal and acoustic signatures that invite targeting.
The force of the future cannot depend on a single fuel supply chain or a centralized power node. The Army that solves this at the doctrine level, not just at demonstration, gains a structural advantage that compounds across every other capability it fields.
What China Is Building Toward
China faces the same energy problem the U.S. Army does, and it has designed its force around solving it. The PLA’s modernization trajectory, captured in its concept of intelligentized warfare, is built on systems that are fundamentally power-dependent. China is fielding new combat systems built on a much denser support architecture of power generation, energy storage, data processing, and continuous connectivity.
At the 2024 Zhuhai Airshow, the AI-Enabled Synthetic Brigade was unveiled, a combined arms formation integrating advanced armored vehicles, drones, and loitering munitions. Alongside it was the Smart Digital-Enabled Command and Control System, designed to provide real-time situational awareness across the battlespace by fusing data from multiple domains simultaneously. It is clear that the PLA thinks about combat power as a formation built around persistent sensing and machine-fused command.
The PLA is also integrating large language models across its command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C5ISR) chain. Procurement documents from 2025 outline plans to embed AI decision-support tools, internally referred to as “command brains”, at the formation level to enable rapid autonomous decision cycles under complex conditions. That points to a military investing in AI tools and the infrastructure needed to keep them active at every echelon, because persistent, high-bandwidth computing power is the foundation that allows the model to function. Russia’s poor experience with losing Starlink access in Ukraine shows how quickly battlefield performance degrades when a force loses access to resilient broadband backhaul.
PLA doctrine also describes UAV swarm operations as a biological simulation of a bee colony, — decentralized, self-organizing, and self-repairing. A swarm of 100 autonomous drones, each drawing between 200 and 500 watts during flight, represents a continuous power draw of 20 to 50 kilowatts just to keep the platforms airborne, before accounting for the ground-based computing infrastructure that processes their sensor feeds in real time. These are components of a force that has accepted high electrical demand as a design parameter and is now engineering its power network to match it. China is building an energy-supported combat ecosystem that targets the specific vulnerability the Army has yet to resolve.
The Strategic Logic
PLA theorists define dissipative warfare as a form of intelligentized conflict that creates disorder within the adversary’s system while maintaining order within one’s own, combining material consumption, energy dissipation, and information diffusion. The objective is to degrade the enemy’s ability to sustain its own systems.
In LSCO in the Pacific, the logistics tail is long and exposed. Power nodes that depend on diesel resupply through contested sea lanes are not resilient. They are targets. Convoy interdiction, port denial, and anti-access/area-denial operations can extend logistics timelines well beyond what current generator-dependent formations can sustain. China has designed its force with that vulnerability in mind. The strategic logic is to degrade the adversary’s ability to sustain its systems while ensuring your own systems keep running.
What the Army Could Do
The counterargument to forward nuclear power is radiological risk. A reactor is a target and could be a contamination event. However, a destroyed land-mobile microreactor releases radiological material measured in kilograms, affecting an area far smaller than that of many common industrial accidents. The shielding that reactor operation requires also provides substantial kinetic protection against conventional attack. Furthermore, fuel infrastructure is easier to destroy, harder to defend, and more likely to trigger an immediate logistics collapse when hit. A fuel farm offers its contents almost no protection, requires more personnel to defend, and, when destroyed, may not cause a contamination event but certainly causes a logistics collapse. At Pearl Harbor, assessments stated that if the Japanese aimed for fuel over ships, the United States would have been forced to withdraw to the West Coast for at least a year. A forward fuel depot hit by a PLA strike in a contested Pacific environment carries the same logic.
Three operational imperatives follow from that assessment.
Formalize energy as a protection issue. Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) currently plan for power as a logistics variable rather than a warfighting one. That means power vulnerability assessments are not systematically integrated into the development of courses of action, wargaming, or sustainment planning at the formation level. Formalizing energy planning at the BCT. level, with dedicated capacity analogous to what currently exists for fires or intelligence, would give commanders a tool they are currently operating without. A useful place to start would be to embed energy as a recognized planning concern within doctrine and staff processes, rather than treating it as a technical adjunct.
Accelerate the bridge between now and 2028. Project Pele and the Janus Program establish the right long-term trajectory. But Pele does not reach an operational military base until September 2028 at the earliest, and Janus does not reach meaningful scale until 2030. The formations the Army is fielding today, including drone teams, AI-enabled command posts, and counter-UAS networks, are operating on generator-dependent power architectures in a threat environment that already includes adversary-directed energy and electronic warfare systems capable of targeting them. Tactical microgrids, modular battery storage, and hybrid solar-generator systems are not permanent solutions, but they reduce both the logistics burden and the thermal and acoustic signatures that invite targeting. The 2/25ID Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) experiment demonstrated 56 to 96 hours of sustained operations without a generator signature. That capability needs to scale beyond a single brigade experiment. 
Harden power nodes as force protection requirements. China’s OW5-A50 directed energy system operates at 50 kilowatts. Its high-power microwave systems can collapse an entire frequency band in a single engagement, taking down multiple nodes simultaneously. A U.S. Army command post, drone recharge station, or sensor network hub that presents a fixed thermal or electromagnetic signature in that threat environment is not a hardened asset. It is a target. Dispersal, redundancy, and low-signature generation are the architectural responses to that problem, not engineering preferences to be balanced against cost, but force protection requirements for the formations the Army is already building and deploying. The Army could also work to harden domestic critical power infrastructure, which is coming increasingly under adversarial threat. This is especially concerning, considering the current situation with the Russo-Ukraine war, where both sides are increasingly targeting each other’s power and communications installations.
Conclusion
The energy expenses of Iraq and Afghanistan were a warning about what dependency costs are when left unmanaged, measured in dollars and in lives, against an adversary that was not even trying to target power infrastructure. China’s investment in mobile power, intelligentized warfare, and supporting energy systems is the peer-level version of that problem, and it is deliberate.
Energy is no longer a support function. In LSCO against China, it may be the high ground. The Army has the research, the record of experimentation, and the doctrinal momentum to treat it that way, and the question is whether that recognition moves fast enough to matter.
If you enjoyed this post, check out the T2COM G-2’s Operational Environment Enterprise web page, brimming with authoritative information on the Operational Environment and how our adversaries fight.
About the Author: Eliot J. Ploog is currently an intern with Army T2COM G-2, bringing a wealth of operational experience from previous roles supporting the Army’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) at JBLM and Yakima, the Army National Guard 91st Cyber Brigade, and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) through Hacking for Defense (H4D). He is a Cyber Fortress 2025 Champion and is currently pursuing a Joint Degree Program (JDP) in International Relations and Terrorism Studies at the University of St Andrews and the College of William & Mary. In his free time, he enjoys taking to the skies as a pilot.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of the Army, or the Transformation and Training Command (T2COM).
Sources
The Strategic Importance of Supercritical CO2 and Next-Generation Power
Best Practices on Operationalizing Battlefield Energy, U.S. Army, August 2025
Army Adapts Doctrine Force-Wide, Integrating Drone Lessons, U.S. Army, March 2026
Project Pele Begins Core Manufacturing, BWXT Technologies, July 2025
Powering Future Conflicts: The Case for Going Nuclear, National Interest, May 2026
New Products Show China’s Quest to Automate Battle, Defense One, March 2025
DeepSeek: PLA’s Intelligentized Warfare, RealClearDefense, November 2025
PLA Concepts of UAV Swarms and Manned/Unmanned Teaming, Air University CASI, April 2025
Defense Primer: Directed-Energy Weapons, Congressional Research Service, January 2026
DoD Directed Energy Roadmap, Congressional Research Service, May 2024
Among the Costs of War: $20B in Air Conditioning, NPR, June 2011
Starlink Used by Russian Forces Deactivated on Battlefield, Ukraine Says, Reuters, February 2026
Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center Instrumentation System, U.S. Army, 2024
China’s 2 MW thorium molten-salt reactor article
China fires world’s biggest superconducting magnet for fusion project
Tension in the South China Sea – Dissipative Warfare to Undermine Allied Capabilities
Dissipative Warfare: The PLA’s Potential New Strategy in the AI Era
PLA military writer Wang Ronghui background / related discussion
Army adapts doctrine force-wide, integrating drone lessons to achieve drone dominance
Tactical Energy Delivery and Management in the Ukraine War
