The modern world is a series of tragic accidents masquerading as policy, and nothing illustrates our collective descent into the abyss quite like the recent 'spectacular success' of drone warfare in Ukraine. It is truly heartwarming to see the heights of human ingenuity focused entirely on the most cost-effective way to liquefy a teenager in a trench from three miles away. The word 'spectacular' is doing a staggering amount of heavy lifting here. Usually, we reserve that adjective for fireworks displays or particularly vivid sunsets. In the context of the current conflict, it refers to the terrifyingly efficient manner in which off-the-shelf electronics have rendered the last sixty years of military doctrine about as relevant as a flintlock pistol. The 'success' is that we’ve finally found a way to make mass death affordable. It’s the Walmart-ization of the infantry.

But, as with all things in our terminal era, the lesson the global intellectual class has chosen to learn is, predictably, the wrong one. Rather than reflecting on the terrifying fragility of modern infrastructure or the obsolescence of billion-dollar defense contracts, our glorious leaders have looked at the smoking wreckage of multi-million dollar tanks and concluded: 'We need more battery subsidies.' It’s a masterful piece of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. By slapping the 'National Security' label on a pile of corporate welfare, the state manages to silence the fiscal hawks and the green-grifters in one fell swoop. The argument, thin as the skin on a dying man’s hand, is that we must bribe corporations to build battery plants on our own soil to ensure we aren’t reliant on 'hostile actors' for our future tools of destruction.

Let’s deconstruct the absurdity. National security is the ultimate trump card for the mediocre politician. It is a conversational dead-end designed to shut down any rational analysis of cost or utility. If you tell a bureaucrat that a battery subsidy is a bad investment that distorts the market and funds technology that will be obsolete by the time the ribbon is cut, they’ll yawn and check their watch. But if you tell them that without this subsidy, a fleet of foreign-made plastic insects will buzz into their gated communities and ruin their brunch, they’ll hand you a blank check and a commemorative pen. We are told that 'strategic autonomy' requires us to out-spend our rivals in a race to build the most subsidized lithium-ion cells on the planet, ignoring the glaringly obvious fact that the raw materials for these batteries are still owned by the very people we are supposedly defending ourselves against.

Economists, those modern-day court astrologers who couldn’t predict a rainy day if they were standing in a monsoon, are now treating the Ukrainian battlefield as a giant A/B test for industrial policy. They argue that the drone's dominance proves we need a robust, state-managed supply chain. This ignores the reality that the drones succeeded precisely because they were not part of a robust, state-managed supply chain. They were the result of improvised chaos, desperation, and a complete disregard for the very procurement rules and 'industrial strategies' that these subsidies are designed to protect. The drones worked because they were cheap, disposable, and unofficial. The government’s response is to make them expensive, permanent, and bureaucratic.

The Right-wing morons see the words 'National Security' and start salivating at the thought of more factories, ignoring the fact that their supposed 'free market' principles are being tossed into a woodchipper. The Left-wing performative hypocrites see 'Batteries' and start imagining a carbon-neutral apocalypse where the killing machines are powered by sunshine and good intentions. Both sides are blissfully unaware that they are being played by the same group of industrial grifters who have been sucking the marrow out of the public treasury since the invention of the wheel. They are racing toward a future where we have very expensive batteries, zero actual security, and a national debt that is currently accelerating faster than a kamikaze drone.

In the end, the battery plant of today is the rust-belt ruin of tomorrow, but with more toxic soil and a slightly higher suicide rate among the middle management. We are subsidizing the past to protect ourselves from a future we’ve already lost. The 'economic lessons' of Ukraine aren't about supply chains or strategic autonomy; they are about the realization that the state is a parasite that will use any excuse—even the 'spectacular' efficiency of modern slaughter—to justify its own expansion. We are not building a shield for democracy; we are building a golden parachute for the battery industry, and we’re doing it with the enthusiastic approval of a public too distracted by the pretty lights of the explosions to realize their pockets are being picked.