U.S. lags developing a key military materiel.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Technology Tomorrow

* James J. Greenberger traveled from Chicago to Virginia Beach in May to address a National Defense Industrial Association conference about the "exciting field of electrochemical energy storage technologies."

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In other words--batteries.

Don't stop reading here. It's true the words "exciting" and "batteries" are not often spoken in the same sentence. But it is a critical technology that all four services rely upon to power devices large and small needed to maintain their edge against adversaries.

Somewhere in the world there is probably a small unit, perhaps a SEAL team, that would be unable to use their sniper rifles, communicate, see at night, or do much of anything without batteries to power their devices.

"The country whose drones can fly farther, whose railguns shoot farther

and faster, whose ground troops can move more rapidly and are less dependent on supply, are going to have a considerable advantage on the battlefield," said Greenberger, who is the executive director of NAATBatt, a nonprofit devoted to advocating for the U.S. battery industry.

Greenberger was preaching to the choir. The conference was NDIA's Joint Services Power Expo, which drew hundreds of engineers and company executives involved in the battlefield energy sector.

One of the problems as Greenberger sees it, is that those defense-centric companies don't coordinate their efforts with the 90 or so NAATBatt corporate members who are mostly in the commercial world. They are working in "silos," he said.

"You can't think about these two things separately anymore," he said. "You have got to be paying very close attention to what's happening in the civilian area. And the civilian area can benefit from what is happening in the military as well. And keeping them apart, I think, hobbles both."

For the good of the nation, NDIA and his organization should work more closely together, he said.

NAATBatt is a relatively new association. Its origins date back only to the Obama administration. In 2007, it appeared as if the government was going to organize an industrial consortium to go full bore on battery development, much as it did in the 1980s when Japan threatened to dominate the semiconductor business.

The Reagan administration gathered 14 semi-conductor manufacturers together to form the Semi-Conductor Manufacturing Technology initiative, better remembered as Sematech, to ensure the United States did not fall behind its international rivals. Today...