I just kind of handwave the battery issue. As alternative vehicle fuels were found, post '97 the home-grown battery business found equal purchase. Hollow out a battery, put new chemicals/metals back in (scavenged from elsewhere), et voila.

Maybe that's not how it works in real life...but, hell, by canon a limited nuclear exchange somehow involved countervalue strikes and didn't escalate to the "5000 warheads over the 'Pole" nightmare it should've!

Also: re laptops...when I came on board at my company's IT department in 2000, we had piles and piles and piles of '486 and Pentium I laptops from '94-'96 and were starting to phase out low-end (233-266mhz) Pentium IIs for 333-400mhz Pentium IIs.

Thing is, part of the IT boom (consumer and professional) from '90 onward was predicated on a lot of technologies being freed up from wartime restrictions (and we were on a war footing from '45 onward, trust me). Without the fall of the USSR, I wonder if that pace of development wouldn't have been much, much slower. I mean, sure, more computers in more homes still, but perhaps as much as an order of magnitude fewer - maybe 10-20 million in the US, with 9-10 million utterly destroyed by EMP etc., and the rest either forgotten/waiting to be recovered "someday" or squarely in the hands of MilGov, CivGov or New America.

Phew, sorry for rambling.

Anyway! Batteries! Yes, batteries IMC are manufactured much like ammo and so forth - it can be done locally without too much effort.

i know that for US Radios there have been rechargeable batteries since around the first gulf war. and are among the more highly used batteries in the military as they reduce training costs as well as the number of logpacs needed during combat. most combat units have chargers for radio batteries pushed down to platoon level (mounted in vehicles) and non combat units tend to keep them at company level.

in addition there are adapters to use commercial batteries for SINCGARS, PRC77 and even PRC25 radios. http://www.prc68.com/P/Prod.html
has several of these adapters.

Something just occurred to me...do aircraft have batteries? Helos or fixed wing...there'd be a source of spares right there. I mean, for vehicles, anyway.

Plus as the number of operable vehicles dwindles, units will scavenge what they can from the hangar queens and thousands (millions!) of abandoned civilian vehicles...

I don't know about jets, but I'd bet that most of don't -- most jets require power from an external APU on a cart or small vehicle to start their engines. A lot of helicopters do have batteries -- and they're huge (a Black Hawk's batteries weigh about 70 pounds apiece, and I believe that the Black Hawk uses two of them).

Fixed-wing propeller-driven aircraft sometimes have batteries and sometimes not. Have you ever seen footage of ground crews for World War 2 bombers turning the propellers by hand? They're sort of "winding up" the engines -- developing a charge in a part of the engines (I think it's a capacitor, but don't quote me on that). Smaller prop-driven aircraft are more likely to have their own batteries, and I'll bet they're pretty hefty too. A turboprop is most likely like a jet -- it would probably require external power to start.

Saw a link to this today in an article on the Sandy cleanup.

http://www.biolitestove.com/

It's a wood-fired camp stove that also (re)charges electronics. A cool idea for the MacGyver on your team. Instead of finding newer sources of batteries, I expect more effort will go into finding new and creative ways to charge the ones you've got.

Actually I won't. Those engines getting props rotated were on radial engines. When the engine was idle (not running) lube oil settled in the lower cylinders. The purpose of rotating the props was to (1) get rid of some of the built up oil in the lower cylinder, and (2) lube the upper cylinders. IIRC they had electric starters, so I would imagine they had some sort of battery, thought it might have been provided by a ground unit (apu).

During this period they did not have the 'sophisticated' batteries of today. I don't know that they were sealed at all, so aerobatics would be a problem with an acid filled battery. The Optima gel cell that was menitoned elsewhere only came into being in the late 90's IIRC, at least on the open market.

also the batteries in most military vehicles can be renewed chemically. the reason this doesn't usually happen in garrison is because most motor pools don't normally keep those chemicals on hand. i'd imagine with war breaking out on several fronts the chemicals would get pushed down to the battalion motor pools though.

I'd imagine both sides would try to stick with standard batteries as much as possible - always better to use the enemies supplies before your own.
On the other hand, more complex, militarily sensitive equipment may use unique power sources in an effort to reduce the ability of the enemy to use them (of course anyone with a bit more than basic electronics/electrical skill can get around this fairly easily).