by maxglute | 2025-10-13 11:14:02+00:00
>all militaries engage in out of deemed necessity.

No, the opposite. Most militaries import equipment / are takers. Most militaries not engaged in very expensive R&D and capex to maintain overmatch. Most militaries buy off the shelf from vendors and make do because defense budget not priority unlike US.

US military budget while enormous is not unlimited, already experiencing extreme capitilization issues across the force, active naval hulls, airframes age etc are all in very bad state. 100's of billions buys a lot of hardware, but more importantly non trivial DELAYs a lot of hardware if there needs to be reengineeering.

>up to Chinese standards >it's not capable of doing so

A bunch of the HREE US _NEVER_ had industrial process knowledge for commercial mining. PRC accumulated 20+ years of R&D, build out workforce, infra, supply chains. Do I think US replicate part of that / hit PRC quality AND quantity in short time, i.e. before have to start substituting components if PRC locks down REE hard. Serious doubts, i.e. dysprosium, terbim for heat resistent magnets were lab tech and ONLY PRC has ever extracted at scale, and it's application is ONLY because PRC can extract them at scale. It's like saying PRC has lab EUV technology too, but doesn't mean they can do commercial scale, or even strategic scale unlike ASML who has decades of R&D and tacit knowledge. There's is zero reason to believe US is remotely capable of spinning up scale of HREE operation required in critical timeframe.

Now keep in mind PRC HREE is ONLY viable because they have specific geologic deposits that are economic to extract at scale. US does not have those deposits, US to break hard rocks (vs PRC leech from soft clay), it's magnitudes less output, if US needs to spend 100X more effort for same unit of HREE, it may not even be strategically sustainable, see how PRC has more shale than US but can't extract it economically, because it's very deep so doesn't even try and ended up pivoting to entirely different tech stack - renewables - despite US wanking about blockading PRC oil SLOCs for decades.

This is like when people say but US was industrial powerhouse in WW2, US can mobilize again. But the reality is US industrial capacity was 5/5 in WW2, but PRC has changed the denominator to 50. There is a lot of things US can't do now. Not that it can't do _eventually_ but can't do on timelines required. MIC overmatch is about doing things in strategic relelvant timeframe, i.e. we're talking about HREE that goes into sensors, aelectronic warfare actuators for highend aviation/missiles performance, the bread and butter of next gen platforms.

At some point, the time constraint may compel US it's strategically better off basically retooling to different componets with different material science - that's decades + trillions pivot. Presumably short term stopgaps would be less performant since US MIC R&D does make effort to use leading edge for overmatch, whatever alternative they switch to will be second best. But again the real killer is every part of this is time friction, measured in decades that disrupt the entire procurement cycle, split force design, it's not problem you can throw money at - which again even US DoD/W seemingly doesn't have... or else US wouldn't be going through capitalization squeeze in navy/airforce. This translates to US overmatch declining, regional force balance / deterence changing, expose US posture to decades of vunerability. It's ripple of technical turn strategic issues US doesn't have the TIME to figure out in short/medium term, and arguably money, at least without taking from elsewhere, which in DoD/W case is going to be procurement, because most other costs fixed.