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China's New Rare Earth and Magnet Restrictions Threaten US Defense Supply Chains
- buyucu 1y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes. Honestly, what did the Americans expect?
- Buttons840 1y agoIf we're getting military supplies from a rival, isn't it already threatened?
- johng 1y agoExactly. What a sad situation we find ourselves in.
- GenerWork 1y agoI'd say it's more of an incredibly large vulnerability, but in this case it may be the same thing. No matter if it's called a threat or a vulnerability, hopefully this'll spur more action towards moving away from China for raw earths and magnets.
- LPisGood 1y agoI’ve never understood the attempt to draw a difference between threat and a vulnerability. I’ve done offensive security work and worked on defensive security systems professionally. It seems to me like there’s a certain less technical side of computer security that cares a little too much about making definitions and checkboxes - when I get asked in an interview if I think threats or vulnerabilities are a bigger issue I know that job is not a good fit.
- tw04 1y agoA vulnerability is a known potential weakness in a system. A threat is someone telling you they’re going to exploit the known weakness.
- GauntletWizard 1y agoAnd China has always been a threat.
- KPGv2 1y agoNot always. Just recently.
- petersellers 1y agoThey are different things, so it makes sense to have two different terms to describe two different (but related) ideas. Your example interview question doesn't make much sense to me, though.
- bigfatkitten 1y agoThreat = intent + opportunity + capability. The vulnerability is the opportunity.
- cutemonster 1y agoAt the same time, wouldn't a bright adversary hide their intent and capabilities?
- bigfatkitten 1y agoYes. Capability protection is everything for intelligence services.
- Buttons840 1y agoI didn't know there was a difference, I was just sticking with the term used in the title.
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- juusto 1y agoWho isn't a "rival" for this administration?
- lovich 1y agoNo one. That is why they are trying to set up an autarky
- ajross 1y agoWe all were screaming that Trump was going to start a trade war and how that was going to be bad for everyone. Even the most cynical of us didn't think he'd lose.
- TinkersW 1y agoWhat? He is a moron, and is advised by morons, I mean we are talking about a person that started a trade war with Canada.
- narrator 1y agoGood thing we found out what our dependencies are on China were before we got in a shooting war with them.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoWe knew about these dependencies since around 2014, definitely it was known during Trump 1, that America still hasn’t bothered getting its own rare earth refining up (the elements themselves aren’t that rare) is just bizarre, but private enterprise has continuously scoffed at doing it given the cheap prices the Chinese offered us.
- Animats 1y agoYes. There was a rare earth glut in 2015, when the China price went way down. Mountain Pass CA mine shut down. Molycorp went bankrupt. MP Minerals now owns that mine, and claims to have ore to magnet capability, although not at full capacity. They've been sending ore to China for refining. Now that has to stop. There are four steps: - Mining. - Beneficiation - raw dirt goes in, most of the uninteresting dirt is removed, low grade ore comes out. Mostly a mechanical process. Done at the mining site. Biggest problem is getting rid of the waste. Mountain Pass pipes it to Nevada. Really. - Separation - low-grade ore goes in, and the various elements are separated out. Usually separate from the mine site. Currently China has over 80% of the capacity for this step. US capability in this area is weak. MP Minerals has a pilot plant. So does a startup, Ucore.[1] They claim to be scaling up. Total investment in Ucore seems to be about $55 million, which is small for the importance of this business. - Smelting and magnet making - MP Minerals has a modest plant in an industrial park in Texas. The US military demand for rare earths probably isn't that high compared to consumer demand. Nobody wants to overspend, because the last two times rare earth producers overspent, the price crashed and many players went bust. The problem with this industry is price volatility vs large fixed capital expenditures. Now pricing, subsidies, and export controls are so political that volatility is worse. [1] https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2024/09/18/mining-tech/the-tech-behind-rare-earths-separation/1928.html https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2024/09/18/mining-tech/t...
- mensetmanusman 1y agoHumanities majors running America couldn’t grok the risk they were taking by incentivizing the outsourcing of these mining and refining processes. This behavior to ban sales of materials needed for every advanced engine, actuator, sensor, etc. is why the Taiwan situation is fraught.
- stevula 1y agoHey, leave us humanities majors out of it. Most of us have studied critical thinking skills and ethics, which could have easily been used to avoid the various geopolitical messes we’re in right now.
- jfengel 1y agoSounds more like business majors. Who spend their spare time shoving humanities majors into lockers.
- cosmicgadget 1y agoLockers in college?
- bigbadfeline 1y ago> Humanities majors running America couldn’t grok the risk they were taking by incentivizing the outsourcing of these mining and refining processes. Outsourcing of everything wasn't incentivized, it was forced on the US industry by Wall Street and their Republican friends. Around 2005-2006 there were 2 Congress bills about balancing the US current trade account, both were written and sponsored by Democrats but neither could get enough sponsors for a vote. At that time, the GOP was full speed "outsource baby, outsource" and Wall Street analysts would bury any company refusing to follow the party line.
- fzeroracer 1y agoThis hits the nail correctly. It's really funny to see people act like it was different heads running the economy back then, you've got the same big businesses and same big names now directly running the US government. The ones that outsourced everything and stripped away America's ability to be self-reliant are the same ones now stripping away America's ability to trade with even its closest allies. People mistake their actions now as protectionism when it's about looting and pillaging what little is left so that they can keep their death grip on capital.
- dangsecondalt 1y ago[dead]
- itake 1y agohow? crypto trading is illegal in china. where would the RE money go? My understanding is they typically buy RE to get money out of China.
- Gigachad 1y agoIt’s already happened. Someone was making insider trades on crypto which perfectly align to the minute with trumps posts.
- jayd16 1y agoYou mean John Q Public can afford a house AND doesn't have to listen to uncle Ted's business plan for another Thanksgiving?
- siliconc0w 1y agoThe reality is that it's probably good they're forcing our hand now rather than keep dumping and stringing us along.
- echelon 1y agoSame as what we've done to them with the GPU supply. It's time for us to grow anti-fragility and independence. And we should expect China to do the same. Sucks for US soybean farmers, but it would have undoubtedly happened in the future regardless. We need to distribute critical manufacturing far and wide amongst our allies, and onshore some of the most important pieces. (Though I'm not sure the current admin considers our allies as friends, which is not a great idea during this great reshuffling.)
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- piskov 1y ago> It's time for us to grow anti-fragility and independence. And we should expect China to do the same. Now imagine if people stopped strong-arming each other.
- DougN7 1y agoI’m not sure our “allies” consider us allies any more.
- ElectroBuffoon 1y agoIt's deeper than that, it's about loyalties among you. Trump wants US military to get paid even with the federal government shutdown. [1] Like your executive fearing mercenaries changing their mind, instead of household troops staying in place when the pay chest takes a bit to show up. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce808gvp56mo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce808gvp56mo PS: Sorry guys, you fucked up. Hard. And by extension fucked everyone else, so expect no sympathies. We will be busy with the new boss, while trying to keep our democracies not going to crap too. New boss, worse boss than old boss.
- jmyeet 1y agoI believe the tariff fiasco has crossed a line that marks the beginning of the end of American Empire and there's really no going back. America is a one-party state. That party is neoliberalism. On economics and foreign policy there's almost no daylight between the major parties in the US and really foreign policy is economics. Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Political discourse is dominated by culture war issues not economics. Race, gender, sexual oreintation, immigration status, etc are intentional distractions designed to divide the working class while the government steals from you to give it to the wealthy. As LBJ put it: > “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” Southern states were so deeply concerned that poor white people would unit with freed slaves they went out of their way to sow these kinds of racial divisions. Why tariffs have crossed a line is because the Republicans seem to have forgotten that protecting the economic order is the point of culture war issues. You're not meant to actually start messing twith the economic order. Trade is so intertwined on the global stage that no country stands self-sufficient. China can wield an extremely large stick here. Rare earths are just the tip of the iceberg. The US produces very little now and that's mostly weapons (and some commercial airplanes). You might say tech products but they're almost all produced in China. We have a dysfunctional economy that teeters on the brink of collapse where basics like food, water and shelter are getting out of reach for many people. Take out data centers being built and our economy is in decline and that's another theft from the public too as we're all paying for the electricity. Now that might be fine if those AI data centers actually produced something but... they don't. The capitalist dream here seems to be to produce AI to displace workers but where does it end? Who buys your stuff if nobody has a job and those who do have no disposable income? AI data centers, weapons and private equity firms. That's the modern US economy. Compare that to China where the government is building infrastructure at an incredible rate and is investing in public services. I feel like the epitaph for the United States of America will be something like "For a brief time we created a lot of shareholder value."
- loandbehold 1y agoThe US is second by manufacturing output after China. It's just not true that "US produces very little".
- YZF 1y ago"Rare earths are crucial for various defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs. The United States is already struggling to keep pace in the production of these systems." This feels like it can't be true. What % of "rare earths" are going into those military products? I mean those are super low volume manufacturing compared to EVs or anything consumer oriented. I'm sure there are strong magnets somewhere in a submarine but how many? I thought "rare earths" were not rare at all. A lot of stuff is made in China because it's economical but can be made somewhere else for a bit more money. Do billion dollar fighter jets care if the magnet used in some electric motor costs $0.35 or $0.43 ? Isn't the manufacturing issue in the US unrelated to any of this? Not enough factories, not enough skilled people, not having ramped up because munitions weren't needed?
- grebc 1y agoI think it’s a bit like TMSC and bringing back chip manufacturing. Sounds easy in theory till you go to do it. My cursory understanding of why we don’t process this stuff anymore is environmental degradation more so than money. Happy to ship the externalities elsewhere while it cheap and we’re on good/friendly terms.
- usef- 1y agoYes, though money is still a big part of it. An Australian company (Lynas) developed the capability but was struggling to get investment largely because they couldn't produce them as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could. When Japan was temporarily cut off from rare earths they became an investor (willing to pay more to reduce single-vendor risks), but apparently it was hard to get the US at the time to care enough. At least that's the story that was floating around.
- hilbert42 1y ago"…as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could." Not an issue if China blockades sales. There are strategic and security issues so governments should also mandate production.
- roenxi 1y agoJust to ask the obvious question - if China has the ability to threaten the US War [0] supply chain, would it make sense for the US to adopt a more peaceful strategy? The Chinese seem to be slowly building up a dominant position without their army really leaving the Chinese borders. And their trade policy seems to mostly leverage producing high quality goods cheaply. Maybe the US could emulate that. [0] That rename was the best gift Trump has given the international community so far.
- CyanLite2 1y agoWithout US military intervention and support, Taiwan and Ukraine would fall. Then dozens of other islands in the Pacific as well as Eastern Europe. The U.S. economy and technological growth would be devastated if Taiwan (and TSMC) falls to the Chinese. This is a WW3 scenario.
- roenxi 1y agoMy understanding based on the reports out of the military-industrial complex is that the decision over whether Taiwan falls sits pretty much entirely with the decision makers in Beijing. There isn't much the US can do about it. If they can't coerce Russia in Ukraine then they definitely can't coerce Chinese decision making about the security situation off the coast of China. It is a bit late to use Taiwan and Ukraine as justifications for the US using a military solution. It isn't winning these fights.
- remarkEon 1y agoThe decision to invade sits with the leaders in Beijing. "The enemy gets a say", as the saying goes, and whether they would be successful is not obvious. It would be arguably the most complex amphibious invasion in history, definitely rivaling Normandy. The US has a lot of tools, both software and hardware, to bring to the fight in this scenario. Perhaps the question is on acceptable cost. There's also really only two times in the year when the weather in the Straight is calm enough to support that kind of invasion, and the sheer volume of hardware and systems they would have to move makes this kind of operation almost impossible to hide, though there are limited and imperfect ways to mask the preparation. >It isn't winning these fights. It absolutely is, right now, in Ukraine. The US has been able to use the Ukraine war as a massive real-time R&D laboratory for our weapons systems. The result is that Russia can no longer project naval power, their strategic air force is completely neutered, and they have tipped their hand for much of their signals and EW systems. The war is stalemated ... without the direct involvement of NATO (the wisdom of direct involvement is not relevant here). This is to say that I disagree, there is a military solution to this problem.
- tehjoker 1y agoGood, if the US is weak enough maybe we wont try to start a war
- cosmicgadget 1y agoA strong US keeps China out of Taiwan and Russia out of Europe, so at least there's that.
- conorcleary 1y agoA weak one invites them.
- tehjoker 1y agoNeither of these are problems that concern us, and to a great extent are manufactured by us.
- KPGv2 1y agoMy friend, China invading Taiwan would be catastrophically ruinous to the American economy and would almost assuredly trigger a hot war because of it. Biden was trying to fix this problem by on-shoring more chip manufacturing, but Trump put a stop to that.
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- cosmicgadget 1y agoI am sort of curious to hear your isolationist alternate history of WWII and the decades after.
- rchaud 1y agoIf the Taliban were too much for the US to handle, I don't see how a direct confrontation with a nuclear power is on the table.
- nine_zeros 1y agoIsn't it widely accepted that every country is playing the art of the deal with America after having been bullied by this administration so much? I wouldn't be surprised if China ekes out a better negotiation than EU or other countries because of this play - because this is the only language this administration understands.
- Paradigma11 1y agoOn a related note, I am not sure the 20% EU deal is that bad for the EU. Any practical ramifications are a few years in the future (building local production) and whenever Trump threatens to rise tariffs by n% because of x they can always counter with n+20% and erase the board.
- chillycharlie 1y agoHopefully this motivates alternatives to rare earths, China dominates because they can get away with polluting huge areas. For 1 kg of rare earth, you get roughly 200–300 kg of rock tailings, 2–3 kg of chemical/toxic waste.
- cdmckay 1y agoAny sources on this? From everything I’ve read this is not the case and they instead made it a national priority to have a secure supply.
- ksec 1y agoWondering if anyone with knowledge can explain a little more. We know Rare Earth are not rare. But do high concentration of Rare Earth exist? i.e larger total number of Kg per tonne extracted. Or is the number so small it is negligible? How big of a site would be needed if US were to be self sufficient? What is the highest cost of extraction? Electricity? Are extraction automated? Could it be automated? They say environmental issues, what exactly are those issues? Metallic or chemical contamination? How much more expensive would it be in the US if the initial Capex were not needed for ROI? I mean I could ask those questions for every other industry that has China as supply Chain chock point but most post or articles seems to ignore it.
- aeternum 1y agoA better name might be trace metals. They're not actually rare just extremely dilute so you need to create huge chemical leaching ponds (sulfuric or hydrochloric acid) either above or below ground to sufficiently concentrate and collect them. Of course the ponds create lots of waste gas and water, including radioactive elements and metals since you end up dissolving and concentrating those also. (So both metallic and chemical contamination) The ratio is something like 1 ton of rare earths = 2000 tons of toxic waste. Seems to me like the issue is not so much the capex cost, but the regulatory and environmental cost. Doing it at scale in a way that doesn't harm the environment (and proving that) is likely prohibitably expensive in the US.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoAn issue that might not be obvious is that most of the metals in question are mined exclusively as secondary and tertiary ores. It is rarely profitable to mine them as primary ores and in some cases, like gallium, they don’t exist as primary ores. Consequently, there is a long list of metals that are mined almost entirely from the waste streams of primary metal ores with chemical processes that coincidentally have these other metals or which coincidentally partially refine other metals in the waste stream. This allows you to get a lot of work for free as a side-effect of processing the primary ore. A canonical example of this is gallium, which famously doesn’t concentrate or form ores. However, the process of refining aluminum coincidentally partially refines gallium as a byproduct. So almost all gallium is produced by continued processing of the aluminum refinery waste stream even though aluminum ore contains no more gallium than a random rock. China produces almost all of their REE from secondary and tertiary ores. The prerequisite to having these secondary and tertiary ore process is having a primary ore. If you are not processing primary ores, none of the secondary and tertiary ores will be available to you as an option. If you want to have a supply chain for diverse metals, you need to be processing diverse primary ores with an eye toward reprocessing the waste stream when it is chemically efficient. The US has outsourced much of the primary ore processing that can produce a lot of metals that can only be economically produced as secondary ore products.
- throwaway-0001 1y ago[flagged]
- shigawire 1y agoWhat's the purpose of posting AI slop here? If anyone is interested we can all generate this sort of useless output ourselves
- throwaway-0001 1y agoTo back up my answer. Some people have other opinions, and this is what I think, given the research below. Feel free to disclaim it as wrong, but specify what’s wrong. —- And is it slop if it’s accurate? Or just because it’s from AI?
- CuriouslyC 1y agoThe point is that anyone here can ask the same question to the bot. You're not adding value. If you want to use a bot answer as source material, distill it down to its valuable essence in respect of our time.
- crvdgc 1y agoSome Chinese language source claims that it's a reaction to the Pakistan-US rare earth deal. My pet theory is that this is intended as an attack to the concept of long-arm jurisdiction itself, due to 1. This is the first ever long-arm jurisdiction policy from China. 2. Diplomatically, China usually advocates for the total sovereignty of each country within its border. 3. The recent chip entity list has been a huge headache. 4. Notice how the language mirrors the US justification for the chip restriction: dual use, national security.
- noisy_boy 1y ago> Some Chinese language source claims that it's a reaction to the Pakistan-US rare earth deal. Maybe they approached India for a deal that was too lopsided in favour of US for the former to accept so US did the show-and-tell cozying up to Pakistan to get a better while publicly shitting on India? Just follow the money?
- burnt-resistor 1y agoXi is getting China ready to attack Taiwan in 2026 or 2027, and the now mutual unwinding of economic relations between the US and China is underway. Still frenemies at this point, but Trump is aiming for more enemy status sooner because it causes media drama and draws attention to him. The US will be screwed because domestic production takes years to happen and it has lost most of its machine tool suppliers, knowledge, and workers. Manufacturing productivity is essential for any sort of war, as evidenced by the history of the American Civil War and WW II. If the US doesn't impeach and remove Trump and Vance, and get a real, war-time leader who isn't a celebrity reality star ASAP, it will be doomed as China will rapidly seize Taiwan, disrupt Western chip production and plunge the West into an economic armageddon, and likely widen to a war with Japan who would definitely intervene militarily to defend economic technological resources in Taiwan. No more incompetent, self-destructive, corrupt, ideologue chaos can be tolerated.
- Khaine 1y agoChina has also suspended purchasing of BHP iron ore as a negotiating tactic to lower prices. They banned Australian barley, wine and coal when the previous government upset them. Honestly, everyone should put tarrifs on china. Bringing them into the WTO was the biggest mistake made. People thought it would drive them to democracy. Instead the opposite has happened. The sooner, Chinese companies are forced to compete fairly the better. When western countries can sell cars in China as easy as BYD can ship shit boxes to the west, the better. Until then, fuck them. Raise tariffs, restrict trade, disincentivise investment in China. Build out manufacturing capabilities in western countries
- someNameIG 1y agoOne of the speculations I've seen going around about the iron ore thing is that China wants to buy it off us (Australia) in RMB, not USD.
- rchaud 1y ago> People thought it would drive them to democracy That's the White House's cover story, not the actual reason. China is in the WTO because the Fortune 500 needed a stable tariff regime to streamline production offshoring to a country with weak labor and environmental protections, but without the political instability of actual democracies.
- jambutters 1y agoNot unique to China. Japan also withheld critical semiconductor materials from Korea due to Korea not backing down on historical disputes in 2019 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/japan-south-korea-dispute-impact-on-semiconductor-supply-chain-prices.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/23/japan-south-korea-dispute-im...
- tock 1y agoThis is bad. This whole debacle has only proven two things: you can't trust China. And you can't trust the USA. Globalisation is slowly going to reverse :(
- blackoil 1y agoMore like monopolies are bad, be at company, country or currency level.
- AngryData 1y agoI mean you should definitely be careful with China, but I don't see how this example is evidence that we shouldn't trust China as it is mainly a response to heavy US tariffs and pulling back from established trade deals. The US seems like the far better "You can't trust them" candidate in this situation.
- snorbleck 1y agomaybe we just need a big rock half the size of Earth made entirely of rare earths from the cosmos to strike the planet. this would solve all of our rare earths problems. we would never need rare earths again.
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- notorandit 1y agoIs it time for carbon-based technologies to be made available?
- tsoukase 1y agoThe vague, general and ill specified argument of "national security" can mean anything, from "we are totally screwed" up to "our fighter's LCD screen has 10% less contrast than it should". Only an insider can provide some context in what RE means currently.
- maxglute 1y agoHigh temperature magnets for motors (controlling flight surfaces), radar, sonar, lasers. TLDR miniturization, increase power draw. Might have to reduce range due to heaver components, or keep range by deliver smaller payloads, all while sensing less because you can't power emitters as hard, i.e. now you're using more ordnance to attack/defend. But main issue is if you can't smuggle, designing around is expensive / long process and all of a sudden your inventory has 2 supply chains for new / legacy fleet.
- cholantesh 1y agoThis is the intent of every last CSIS publication: to promote the expansion of the military industrial complex with pearl-clutching language.
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- mikewarot 1y agoI remember talking with someone well over a decade ago who predicted this over Thanksgiving Dinner. The politicians decided to let Magnequench, an Indiana company that made the small, very high torque rare-earth magnet servomotors you need if you want to steer missile fins, etc. get sold to China. He used to work incorporating those motors into other gear, and predicted this would come back to bite us. My understanding is the main thing keeping us from ramping up the US domestic rare earth supply chain is the cost of environmental compliance. A long term thinking DOD would have kept this in mind for National Security reasons, and funded things just to keep our supplies viable. As it is, we have vast national security stockpiles of various raw materials, but you know how well central planning worked out for the Soviets.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoOur government really fought a trade war with China (the last mini trade war were Trump got concessions) and then started another trade war expecting to fight the exact same war again and not evolving/preparing knowing you can never fight the same war twice? We have the worst political class ever.