As the United States looks to strengthen its defense industrial base for an era of great power competition, a new brief from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) points to a critical vulnerability that rarely headlines national security debates: energy.
The report argues that while the United States has the industrial capacity to scale defense production in a crisis, it may not have the energy infrastructure in the right places to sustain that surge. In a major conflict, that gap could become a decisive constraint.
At a national level, the numbers appear reassuring. CSIS estimates that a full-scale wartime mobilization would require about 17.4 petajoules of energy annually, a small share of total U.S. consumption. But the topline figure masks a deeper problem. Energy demand would not be evenly distributed. It would spike in specific regions where defense-critical industries are already clustered and where power systems are under growing strain.
Facilities producing steel, aluminum, titanium, and semiconductors form the backbone of modern weapons manufacturing. Many of these sites sit in areas facing tightening electricity reserve margins and surging demand from energy-intensive sectors like data centers. At the same time, natural gas constraints complicate the picture, since gas remains both a primary industrial fuel and a dominant source of electricity generation in these regions.
The result is a paradox. The United States may have sufficient energy overall, yet still struggle to deliver it where and when it is needed most for defense production.
The concern is not hypothetical. History offers a clear warning. During World War I, energy shortages forced factories, particularly in steel and chemical production, to operate below capacity. By World War II, policymakers had absorbed the lesson. The federal government actively managed power plant siting, built interconnected electric grids, and coordinated closely with industry. Those efforts ensured that even as electricity demand surged by nearly 70 percent, energy did not become a bottleneck to wartime output.
Today, the CSIS brief suggests, the United States risks drifting back toward a more fragmented approach.
To better understand the challenge, the study models three production scenarios: a modest baseline increase, a more ambitious defense buildup, and a full war mobilization tied to a prolonged Indo-Pacific conflict. The most demanding scenario reveals how energy pressures would accumulate. Roughly 60 percent of demand would come from munitions and unmanned systems, with naval vessels and combat aircraft accounting for the remainder.
What drives that demand is not just assembly lines, but the materials behind them. Using an “embodied energy” framework, the researchers calculate the total energy required to produce the metals, composites, and electronics embedded in modern weapons systems. Aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, and advanced circuit boards all carry significant energy costs, meaning that production surges ripple upstream through supply chains and into regional power grids.
This is where the risk sharpens. Energy infrastructure has not been systematically aligned with defense priorities. Many industrial nodes critical to national security are not designated as priority energy assets, leaving them vulnerable to grid congestion, fuel supply disruptions, or permitting delays for new capacity.
The CSIS brief argues that this disconnect reflects a broader policy gap. While recent strategies emphasize both defense industrial expansion and U.S. “energy dominance,” they rarely integrate the two in a meaningful way. The implication is that planning for one without the other leaves a critical seam in national preparedness.
To close that gap, the report calls for a more deliberate alignment of energy and defense policy. Among its recommendations are extending critical infrastructure designations to key industrial facilities, streamlining permitting and financing for energy projects tied to defense production, and incorporating energy resilience into supply chain risk assessments.
None of these steps would require a dramatic expansion of total U.S. energy supply. Instead, they focus on targeting reliability and capacity where it matters most.
The broader message is simple but consequential. In a future conflict, the limiting factor may not be industrial capacity or workforce, but the ability to power them. The United States has faced this challenge before and solved it through coordinated national effort. Whether it can do so again, before a crisis forces the issue, remains an open question.
