Gallium: Why the US Cannot Produce Precision Missiles and Fully-Functional F-35s

jandrewrogers•about 1 hour ago

One of the unique properties of gallium is that it does not form meaningful concentrated ores. The concentration of gallium in your backyard is roughly the same concentration as gallium literally everywhere.

Consequently, every country has gallium. It is associated with aluminum production primarily because the waste stream coincidentally had some of the chemical extraction steps already applied, which saves money since you don’t have to apply them separately to the dirt in your backyard.

China has a lot of gallium because they refine a lot of aluminum (cheap energy), and gallium is a secondary product. The US has a long history of refining aluminum but produce relatively little now. Nonetheless, the ability to refine gallium is not conditional on that. Anyone everywhere can refine gallium if they need it; marginal differences in cost don’t matter if it is strategically important and the amount of gallium required is quite small.

OgsyedIE•about 1 hour ago

The marginal differences in labor and environmental costs are not small at all even when it is strategically important. During the Cold War when this was last an immediate issue the National Defense Stockpile had to act as a subsidy program to keep dozens of unprofitable smelting operations in the Gulf Coast, the Tennessee River Valley and the Columbia Valley afloat against competition from Scandinavia and East Asia because of these costs but this only created the new problem of what to do with the NDS, a controversial operation from the beginning.

JFK criticised it again and again and put forward investigations with the aim of scrapping it. Nixon and Carter tried to scrap it only to face concerns about which senatorial districts would be harmed by months of flooding commodities markets. Reagan passed an act to mandate its liquidation and died years later before any sales had begun. All of these were accompanied by weeks of Congressional fighting that dominated the papers.

Lazare•about 1 hour ago

Headline discusses missiles (which are topical); the article is mostly about radars in F-35s, and admits halfway through it's because a procurement schedule slipped.

This is just clickbait; there's no content here.

sixtyj•about 1 hour ago

There are 210 comments under the article - https://sonar21.com/the-galling-gallium-chokehold-why-the-us...

jmyeet•about 1 hour ago

This is one of hundreds of reasons why I laugh at the idea of the US going to war with China and being prepared for a war with China. That's never happening. Why? Because China can cut off so many critical supplies, not just for weapons but for the entire economy.

And this self-proclaimed strategic threat comes from the same country that has been decisively militarily and strategicially defeated by Iran.

tkel•about 1 hour ago

AI-written article

bouke•14 minutes ago

> That is a decade-plus undertaking, not a budget line.

Reads like your typical opus.

klooney•about 1 hour ago

> The reason is structural, not incidental

It's almost insulting

danhon•about 1 hour ago

Just once, it would be nice to read something where the publisher has put in some effort to at least hide the slop.

polotics•23 minutes ago

Well, be careful what you wish for. At least I was able to stop reading that thing pretty quickly: it's not unreadable, it's untrustable! ...and yes, adding non-LLMish malapropisms has become my Captcha...

throwaway63467•44 minutes ago

Terrible AI written article, utter garbage.

Gallium: Why the US Cannot Produce Precision Missiles and Fully-Functional F-35s

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