ECONOMIC WARFARE: China’s chipmaking export curbs ‘just a start’, Beijing adviser warns before Yellen visit. “Germanium is used in high-speed computer chips, plastics and in military applications such as night-vision devices, as well as satellite imagery sensors. Gallium is used in radar and radio communication devices, satellites and LEDs. China’s abrupt announcement of controls from Aug. 1 on exports of some gallium and germanium products, also used in electric vehicles (EVs) and fibre optic cables, has sent companies scrambling to secure supplies and bumped up prices.”
Related: EU industry chief: We need to switch to ‘war economy mode.’
Also: Pentagon has strategic germanium stockpile but no gallium reserves. “The (Defense) Department is proactively taking steps using Defense Production Act Title III authorities to increase domestic mining and processing of critical materials for the microelectronics and space supply chain, including gallium and germanium.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed huge shortfalls in Western defense-industry capacity and organization. The U.S. and its allies aren’t prepared to fight a protracted war in the Pacific, and would struggle with a long European conflict.
As Adm. Rob Bauer, a top military officer at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, puts it: “Every war, after about five or six days, becomes about logistics.”
If the U.S. clashed head-on with Russia or China, stocks of precision weaponry could be used up in hours or days. Other vital supplies would run out soon after.
Do tell.