Modern Warfare Is Burning Through the Metals Needed for a High-Tech Future
Russia Vows to Keep Selling Oil to India Despite U.S.
Tariff Threat Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment.
His work has also appeared in The Christian Science… I've been writing for more than a decade and a half about a broad category of metals often nowadays dubbed "strategic" because they are crucial to high-tech applications such as solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, flat screens, semiconductors, batteries, optics, aerospace anda wide array of military applicationsincluding night vision, radar systems, communications satellites, radiation shielding, vehicle armor, submarine hulls, precision weaponry, and on and on.
It is the military applications that interest me here because much of the volume of strategic minerals in most civilian devices can be recycled when devices containing them are junked.
But, of course, in warfare the whole point in many cases is to just blow stuff up.
And, once you do that to something containing any of thestrategic minerals important for military applications, there is no chance to recover the metals and use them again.
That's why this headline caught my eye:"Ukraine's Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies."I can't verify whether this claim is true, but some nonzero amount of germanium is being consumed by drone warfare, not just in the Ukraine-Russia war, but also in the Iran war with the United States and Israel.
It's important to note that germanium has manycivilian applicationssuch as semiconductors, solar energy, autonomous vehicles, scientific instruments, battery technology, and a variety of health care applications.
Now, with therush of the world's militaries to embrace drone and missile warfare and other high-tech weapons, we can expect much larger amounts of germanium to be tied up and ultimately to be scattered to the winds if that germanium is in weapons to be exploded.
And the same is true for all the other metals associated with modern, high-tech warfare.
This has me thinking about Romanian economistNicholas Georgescu-Roegen,who was the first major economic theorist to point out that the law of entropy (commonly referred to as theSecond Law of Thermodynamics) ensures that all nonrenewable resources such as metals will be degraded to the point that they become unrecoverable.
Of course, when explosive military applications are involved, this degradation is instantaneous and total for each weapon detonated.
| Product | Price | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Brent Crude | $102.14/bbl | +0.34% |
| WTI Crude | $96.90/bbl | +0.21% |
| EN590 Diesel | $846/MT | +0.18% |
| Jet Fuel A-1 | $1090/MT | +0.55% |
| Mazut M100 | $450/MT | -0.15% |
| Bitumen 60/70 | $470/MT | +0.08% |
| Sulphur Gran 99.5% | $470/MT | -0.44% |
| Urea 46% Gran | $650/MT | +1.12% |
| NPK 16-16-16 | $460/MT | -0.28% |
| Nat Gas TTF | $15.42/MMBtu | +0.92% |
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