As the coalition burns through advanced munitions in Iran, the bottleneck to rebuilding those stocks runs through Beijing. A new RUSI analysis highlights that China controls most of the world's supply of gallium and germanium - essential inputs for guidance electronics and advanced weapons systems - and has imposed multiple rounds of export controls since 2023 to prevent the U.S. and its allies from acquiring them.
The analysis, published by researchers Macdonald Amoah, Morgan Bazilian, and Lieutenant Colonel Jahara Matisek and reported by "Hvylya", identifies what it calls a "coupling trap" in Western defense supply chains. The cheapest munitions and the most expensive ones share upstream materials. Replacing the roughly 509,500 rounds of gun ammunition fired in 16 days will require approximately 4,000 kilograms of tungsten - a metal China controls at over 80 percent of global production and has subjected to export controls since 2025.
The most available substitute for tungsten in defense applications is depleted uranium, but most U.S. allies refuse to use it due to its radioactive properties and political toxicity. This leaves the coalition with few practical alternatives for a material that feeds both ground ammunition and naval point-defense systems simultaneously.
The trap extends beyond metals. The cheap-defeat layer of coalition air defense - gun systems like C-RAM - consumed nearly 29,000 kilograms of propellant and over 10,000 kilograms of explosives in the first 16 days. These energetics flow through the same constrained American facilities, Holston and Radford, that supply every missile program in the inventory. C-RAM ammunition competes upstream with Tomahawk, JASSM, and Patriot for the same energetic base.
The authors warn that the mass of a weapon is not the measure of its criticality. A few kilograms of a constrained input like gallium or battery chemicals can stall production of advanced weapons, while a warehouse full of steel is useless if a system is bottlenecked at the sub-tier level. The acquisition system separates missiles from ammunition in its budgeting, they note, but the supply chain does not.
Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on Washington's $12 billion effort to build a mineral stockpile and narrow the gap with Beijing.