China just turned off us supplies of minerals critical for defense and cleantech (opens in new tab)

(cleantechnica.com)

65 pointssemanticist11mo ago27 comments

27 comments

This is actually a good thing (not that anyone responsible had the faintest idea what would happen). When they invade Taiwan we’ll have this sort of thing going on so we’ll need to know where our military supply chain bonks.

scheeseman48611mo ago

Cool well I hope the US doesn't piss off all their other trading partners so they can find affordable alternatives ah oops

0dayz11mo ago

Just trust the "art of the deal".

The money will flow in any second now.

Teever11mo ago

We already know where the bottlenecks are[0] -- it's in production of anti-ship missiles and then ships.

The lead-time in producing missiles is measured in months and years and war games predict that the supply of most of them will be depleted in an initial engagement with China over Taiwan that sees Japan/Taiwan/US win but lose many ships.

After it's anybody's guess but China has 260x the naval production capacity of America so they'll be able to come back faster than the US can.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...

weard_beard11mo ago

Does it account for commandeering spacex and corresponding space armament? Naval projection vs orbital projection seems like a good thing to measure.

1 more reply

8note11mo ago

no guarantees that china would limit those when at war, same as russia and ukraine kept trading oil.

theres no guarantees that the US would get involved with china invading taiwan, either. again, look at ukraine. sales and donations of old materiel only

csense11mo ago

How do they know some entrepreneur won't buy a boatload of them, export them from China to France or Indonesia or wherever, then re-export them to the US?

Especially if said entrepreneur is working with (or an outright front for) US intelligence, so they're sophisticated enough at this game to run an Airtag detector over the cargo when they transfer it from the ship the Chinese know about to the one they don't.

namaria11mo ago

That is how Russia sells lots of its oil, how the US got titanium supplies for the SR-71 from Soviet Union and will most definitely happen. But it is also very inefficient and will drive up costs.

kennykartman11mo ago

I wonder i this will push US to be bolder/aggressive wrt Greenland.

ilaksh11mo ago

How old is too old to learn a completely new and very different language?

amai11mo ago

The US president is 78 and learned to speak russian propaganda fluently.

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