Ever since Osama bin Laden’s demise, aviation sleuths have been trying to figure out what was themystery copter that delivered Seal Team Six. I’ve been pondering a much geekier question: what was inthe mystery copter?
Odds are, rare earth elements played important roles in producing the elusive aircraft. After all, these elements have been essential to everything from stealth technologies to targeting mechanisms to temperature-resistant magnets for aerospace components. Many missile designs have used samarium-cobalt permanent magnet motors. Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) have used neodymium-iron-boron magnets, which have a unique ability to withstand extreme temperatures without losing magnetism. Radar, phosphors for fluorescent lighting, and night vision goggles require rare earths too. Think your basic ground vehicles are safe? Rare earths are used in automotive catalytic converters and for refining petroleum products. These minerals are used to make smart phones, so you can bet we need them for Darpa’s universal translators.
So what are these rare earths that are so critical to defense tech? Rare earths are a class of minerals with similarly unique physical and chemical properties, including yttrium, lanthanum, neodymium, samarium, europium, and others. If you look at a periodic table, they comprise the separated two rows at the bottom (with a few others sometimes classified as rare earths).
The minerals aren’t actually rare in nature — they’re just not found in heavy concentration, as I describe in my report, Elements of Security: Mitigating the Risks of U.S. Dependence on Critical Minerals, which comes out Thursday. But the rare earths are increasingly part of Washington lexicon these days. Most of the fuss involves the fact that China, supplier of some 95% of global consumption, continues to limit exports and played its near-monopoly card in a 2010 dispute with Japan. The market has grown so tight that the price of neodymium last week jumped to $283 per kilogram from $42 a year ago, and samarium rose from $18.50 a year ago to $146 per kilogram.
At the Pentagon, the concern today is that rare earths supplies to the United States happen to exhibit a perfect storm of vulnerabilities: rising global demand; a dearth of producers; out-dated stockpiling policies; an inability to ability to substitute more readily-available minerals; skyrocketing prices.
Perhaps worse, there is a looming problem that the Defense Department doesn’t always understand its supply chains down to the raw material level now that the defense industrial base is thoroughly globalized and dual-use with civilian applications. Ask a Pentagon supplier which rare earths it needs to produce a drone or a reconnaissance satellite, for example, and the odds a good you’ll get a shoulder-shrug in return. Those kind of micro details are up to some sub-sub-sub-sub-contractor.
The Department of Defense has been trying to dig out the information it needs to address rare earths concerns. But it’s not enough for some members of Congress, who wrote a letter to Secretary Gates last January complaining that the military wasn’t giving the issue. Meanwhile, a common refrain from some defense analysts and active Pentagon officials over the past few years has been that the market will sort out any problems. Never mind the extreme market manipulation that already governs minerals production, from environmental regulations to allowing access to public lands, or that international trade disputes often lead private companies to call on the U.S. government to get involved when things get too heated.
This year’s rare earths tussling between the Hill and the Pentagon is not too shocking; the causes and solutions to America’s mineral troubles are hard to get straight. U.S. companies and federal agencies can’t simply buy their way out of a shortage if the only sellers aren’t selling. It takes years to get rare earths production up and running. The timeline extends up to and beyond a decade for mines that have never produced rare earths given the massive technological investments needed to process individual minerals. (Each element is found in trace amounts in any given chunk of mined rare earths, and each must be physically or chemically separated and processed in often-elaborate, multi-stage processes.) Even then, many rare earth mines are raising capital by selling their future products, preventing others from accessing the added production capacity.
To boot, many myths circulate weekly in the mainstream media. Is Afghanistan going to bring in trillionsfrom minerals? Not any time soon. Is China unreasonable in restricting rare earth exports? Not if you consider its domestic high-tech manufacturing needs and concerns over the environmental impacts of its rare earth mining methods.
Still, it doesn’t have to be this way. In contrast to the Pentagon’s reactive stance, the Department of Energy is identifying now what minerals are must-haves for tomorrow’s energy innovation — and what minerals are most likely to cause rare earth-style problems down the road. In other words, it is proactively managing the problem.
The Defense Department can do the same. Additionally, it can provide incentives or require suppliers to share raw material information.The Pentagon is in the process of updating its stockpiling policies (though we have yet to see whether this update will go far enough). The Department of Defense can also invest more heavily in developing substitutes for some of the functions rare earths play. Even thinking creatively to better understand how minerals can combine with emerging geopolitical trends – say, incorporating enduring supply disruptions into Asia- or Latin America-focused war games – could go a long way toward preventing future problems. There’s a good chance that preventing minerals problems from grabbing major headlines would be more cost-effective than reacting to problems after they surface.
This story – and the ability to reduce future risks to U.S. interests – doesn’t end with rare earths. The new stealth Joint Strike Fighters can’t be made without rhenium, a particularly heat-resistant mineral used in alloying metals that today we import almost entirely from just two countries, Chile and Kazakhstan. Gallium, tantalum, niobium and other minerals exhibit the same risks of supply disruptions, suppliers leveraging exports for political gain, and cost overruns that make rare earths so problematic today.
Unless America gets ahead of this problem, the United States will be unnecessarily ceding strategic advantage to commodity suppliers — all over pretty modest quantities of rocks and metals. Minerals should not command foreign policy or derail defense procurement. Even when they go into things as cool as stealth copters.
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