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I hear this a lot, and I can appreciate that it's probably true to an extent, but "milspec electronics" and "next gen process nodes" don't really overlap as much as you'd expect, as best as I can tell. I can imagine some things it matters for (radars and such), but I don't think process node differences within the last decade are really driving, say, artillery battles or even drones in Ukraine. Maybe in a few years we'll be talking about mostly-autonomous targeting systems with ML, but half of the impact of drones seems to have come from how they became commercially ubiquitous in ways that drove the price down into the "expendable" regime.
Generally I don't see this claim with listed categories of weapons systems, but maybe there is something I haven't thought of. What can you do at 3nm that you can't at, say, 65nm?
Yeah, state of the art FAB is really only necessary for advanced autonomous functionality.
And it's not even any of the more recent AI shit, classic computer vision algorithms, millimeter wave phased array 4D radar or synthetic aperture radar just need to solve a shitload of Fourier transforms, in real time.
But it's worth noting that you can do a lot - and a lot more than we've seen in Ukraine so far - even with just 65nm.
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Even granting that, don't you need rare earths to produce lower-grade chips for ubiquitous drones and all sorts of other things too?
In a commodity drone, the rare earths are in the motors, not the chips.
The main (but not the only) industrial use of rare earths is for strong permanent magnets, and the main industrial use of permanent magnets is electric motors and generators.
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