Replacing the thousands of precision weapons the U.S. and Israel expended against Iran requires significant quantities of specific minerals - and China controls the supply of nearly all of them, a Payne Institute analysis has found.
As reported by "Hvylya", researchers at the Colorado School of Mines have converted the munition expenditure from the opening 36 hours of the war into what they call a "mineral replacement burden" - the raw materials needed to rebuild the arsenal.
The numbers reveal a stark dependency. Replenishing expended weapons requires 11,406 kilograms of tungsten, a metal China supplies at roughly 80 percent of the global market. It requires 937 kilograms of cobalt, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo controlling about 70 percent of supply. And it demands 124,040 kilograms of ammonium perchlorate - a solid rocket oxidizer produced at a single U.S. facility in Cedar City, Utah.
The most alarming bottleneck may be gallium. China controls 98 percent of global primary production of this material, which is essential for the GaAs chips used in RF and GPS guidance systems. Replacing just two destroyed U.S. radars - the AN/FPS-132 in Qatar and the AN/TPS-59 in Bahrain - will require 77.3 kilograms of gallium alone. Beijing has already imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, another critical mineral for infrared seeker optics.
The researchers argued that the West's "theory of military readiness is incomplete." War, they wrote, "is being costed in the wrong units." The relevant metric is not how many launchers exist at the start of a conflict but "how many precision weapons and interceptors can be fired on days two, 20, and 200, and how quickly industry can replace them." This turns a battlefield question into an industrial one - and an industrial one into a minerals-and-processing question that China is uniquely positioned to exploit.