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Notes -
China just chose the nuclear option:
TLDR:
China’s Ministry of Commerce just created an extra-territorial export-control net around rare earths and anything made with Chinese rare-earth technology. The bar is set extremely low, so this will ripple through EVs, wind, electronics, and defense supply chains worldwide.
(Assuming that this isn't a ploy designed to be a bargaining chip in order to get Trump to overturn export restrictions on advanced chips).
Now, while rare earths are very much not rare (though they do come from the earth, mostly), 90% of the actual processing happens in China, even if many deposits are elsewhere. Why is that the case? Well, rare-earth mining is not the most eco-friendly of industrial processes, and everyone else prefers it happen outside their backyards.
Just about every consumer and commercial electronic item is wrapped up in this. China dominates processing and magnet making, so the 0.1% trigger will catch a very large share of motors, drives, sensors, HDDs, speakers, drones, missiles, EVs, and wind-turbine components that contain NdFeB or SmCo magnets.
Assuming that a pleasant agreement isn't reached by Trump and Xi, this is going to do numbers on the trout population, and the economy. I don't even have to specify which economy, it's that global. It'll take years to onshore or friend-shore processing, even if deposits could ramp up to meet the demand. Really, I can't stress the chaos this will cause if the Chinese truly exercise their discretion, so we're going to have to strap in and see. Maybe nothing ever happens, maybe it does.
From your link:
Interestingly enough, I think that chip production does not require tons of rare earth elements. Even if the REE prices increased by a factor of 100, I am not sure if the chips themselves would be much more expensive. Of course, for ceramic capacitors the story is different, and a lot of other tech in data centers uses REE as well.
I think that the US (and it's loose allies, like Taiwan or the Netherlands) leading in chip feature size is them being ahead in a race which is relevant (at least if you believe that AI will not simply fizzle out, and care about who builds the paperclip maximizer).
By contrast, I am not sure that having cheaper REE extraction tech (which China likely has) is much of a game-changer. The price of Neodymium is a few hundred dollars per kilogram. As you need about 1kg for an EV, changing the price to 1000$/kg would increase the price of EVs slightly. For headphones, the relative price hike is probably even smaller.
That being said, investing in US REE refining is probably not a solid business decision. Sure, while China blocks exports your product is competitive, but as soon as they put their stockpiles on the market, you will no longer sell anything.
I think that the best thing you can do as a nation if a competitor controls a market of strategic importance is to (a) have a strategic reserve and (b) pay companies to produce the product at prices far above what the market would pay in moderate quantities, so that once an embargo happens you have some tech which you can scale up. (Arguably, (b) is also the strategy most countries use for military hardware. In three decades, Europe produced 609 Eurofighters. By contrast, in the six years of WW2, 800 thousand airplanes were produced by all combatants. The point of paying astronomical sums for a few Eurofighters is not that they will be very useful, but that if one ever finds oneself in the situation of wanting to spend a decent fraction of the GDP on fighter planes, one can ramp up the production in a few years rather than spending decades developing new planes.)
As a negotiation strategy with Trump, I think China's approach is decent, and as an European I wish them wholeheartedly success in standing up to Trump's protectionism.
A quibble: the importance of ramping up is overstated. Operating costs are much higher in the modern age than they were in WW2, and there are real diminishing returns from additional planes in the air. One modern strike fighter—with the proper logistical tail—can provide more value than a wing of heavy bombers. At less human cost, too, which is much more important than it used to be.
These constraints relax in a high-intensity, high-intel conflict, but they don’t go away. You’ve still got to fuel and arm and dispatch your planes. You still need confidence that they won’t die to cheaper SAMs or get blown up on the ground. In that scenario, 6000 Eurofighters aren’t worth 10x as much as 600.
Neither the U.S. nor Europe has faced a serious threat to air superiority since the mid-century. I hope we never do.
I think the main point where having more planes helps is if the airspace is contested. Fighters carry a limited number of air-to-air missiles, and once they are out their ability to interdict airspace even to inferior enemies seems questionable. Any nation fighting an existential war and having problems with air superiority would likely be willing to pour a sizable chunk of the GDP into planes (or drones).
I agree that nobody is keen to re-enact the battle for Britain, and as long as you have air superiority, how many planes you can have in the air at once is much less of a concern. And if a large-scale war were to break out, the primary concern would be how fast you can ramp up the production of iodine tablets, at which point I tend to lose interest in the timeline.
Modern air combat is looking more and more attrition heavy. Ukraine and Russia basically can’t use close air support because it’s too dangerous. Even operating far from the front lines, both still regularly lose aircraft. And with drones and hypersonic missiles, both sides are still suffering aircraft losses even when the planes aren’t in combat.
Meanwhile India and Pakistan just recently had the only major air-to-air engagement of the 21st century and even though it was barely a skirmish it caused the loss of six to eight planes on both sides. Imagine what would have happened if they had been seriously trying to get air superiority.
And then you have Israel, who is fighting an enemy with no Air Force and no air defenses, and they are still running into problems with wear and tear because they are having to run too many missions with too few aircraft.
All in all this would seem to imply more planes are better, because you need to be able to afford losing quite a few.
My understanding is that close air support was always understood to be extremely attrition heavy in a peer war - supposedly, the USAF expected to lose 60 A-10s against the Soviets daily.
Other sorties are much lower risk - while the Russian Su-34 and Su-25 fleets have been hit hard, the MiG-31s and strategic bombers have been quite safe in the air.
(Frankly if anything the Su-25 losses are lower than what we might expect from Cold War projections, the Russians have been using them for close air support - and I think continue to do so, Wikipedia lists one as lost in February to a MANPADS, which suggests a CAS role, and they've lost around 40, it looks like, over the course of years, not weeks. However without knowing the total number of sorties I can't compare to the supposed USAF projections for the A-10.)
My understanding is that contrary to stereotype the Russian Air Force has been extremely risk averse in how they employ their aircraft because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.
The VKS basically did nothing other than relatively ineffective close air support with frog foots and helicopters (which, on a side note, proved quite effective at using anti-tank missiles at the extreme of their range against Ukrainian armor during the '23 counteroffensive) or lob missiles from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses for the first year and a half or so of the war (notably expending a large number of them to little effect during Surovikin's campaign against the Ukrainian energy grid).
The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses) and their development of the Geran series of suicide drones. The latter has provided a cost-effective way of attacking into the teeth of Ukrainian air defenses and saturating them such they more frequently achieve hits with their ballistic missiles.).
I'm not really sure how much it matters how well your aircraft is "built" when it's hit by a missile, but I am given to understand that Russian aircraft are actually designed pretty well - the Flanker, for instance, is pretty commonly acknowledged to be a peer to the F-15 (and of course the Russians equipped their aircraft with equipment such as high off-boresight dogfighting missiles and electronically-scanned arrays before the States during the Cold War and today continue to develop capabilities not fielded by the West, such as the Felon's cheek radar arrays and of course the favorite weapon of comic book villains everywhere, nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles).
Yes. From what I can tell, the (embarrassing) lack of glide bombs was more important to the lackluster support provided by the Russian air arm than any sort of aircraft quality issues.
However, I'd suggest a third thing where the VKS has stood out - perhaps not a "major game changer" in the course of what is primarily a ground war, but their employment of the MiG-31 and Flankers carrying long range air-to-air missiles seems to have been relatively effective, with the Russians scoring at least one kill with the R-37 in excess of 100 miles. Being able to threaten Ukrainian aircraft even when they are able to mask themselves from the Russian surface air defenses seems to have created real problems for the Ukrainians, and of course despite receiving F-16s more than a year ago the Ukrainians don't seem to have been able to seize air superiority, which I would guess is due partially to the effective Russian SAM network but also partially to the fact that the F-16/AMRAAM combo is just outsticked by the MiG-31/Su-35 and R-37 combo.
I could be wrong as I haven't looked into the Mainstay's situation very much, but from what I can tell the Russian airborne early warning fleet is too small for them to consistently keep them on station providing situational awareness, which is also embarrassing but if anything makes what their fighters seem to be able to achieve more impressive.
The kill chain for antiair starts at detection and current air ops favor terrain hugging with popup approach for strikes. As such kills are almost predetermined by baiting bandits to an ambush location, not one to one fights in the air. Operation Sindoors furball is textbook what NOT to do, and the Ukrainians lacking cueing radars to allow extreme range missiles without using ones own radar. Plus, the F16s Ukraine received are all ancient block A MLU so they have no AESA radar at all. Maybe link16 but that's still useless without a cueing platform.
In any case industrial capacity doesn't matter as much as legacy stocks because you can't just whip up a thousand eurofighters on demand. This isn't WW2 where tractor factories could make T34s and piano makers could make planes Spitfires. A modern combat platform is far more advanced and just the factory to make one is a dedicated multiyear investment to get operational let alone the rate of production. Inventories are nice to have but those take up space and are either tempting targets for sabotage or logistical nightmares to get to the front.
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