We Have to Produce Strategic Materials in the United States Things sometimes are not as simple as they seem. This even goes for relations between countries. We keep hearing that Russia and China are our two biggest enemies and that may be true, but things go on between us and Europe which seem to me to be incredible. An example of this is our dependence on rare earth materials which we get shipped in from China. Eight percent of rare earth imports come from what is considered currently our biggest enemy. China is building its entire military in a way which seems to be based on destroying America. They even name their targets with American names according to some of the things I have heard. You may find this hard to believe but some rare earth ores are necessary for our military because they are used in jet engines, missile guidance systems, missile defense systems, satellites and lasers just to name a few things. How crazy is it for us to depend on a potential enemy to supply ores to our military? Russia supplies many things here, and nickel is one of them. This import is very important to our military. The armor on our tanks has a nickel based component. Our aircraft use nickel in their armor. It has a lot of other uses. The body armor our soldiers use has nickel in it. It also has uses in the aerospace industry. Nickel is found in over 300,000 products according to the Nickel Institute. Stainless steel is created with nickel. Sometimes we realize what is going on depending on the administration in this country. Last year in 2020 the administration realized we were relying on China for the chemical Butanetriol which is used in our Hellfire air to surface missiles. We built a factory to produce it here. Yet there are so many other items we absolutely need to protect ourselves that we rely on imports from hostile countries. In 2018 the Pentagon reviewed what we were importing and came to the conclusion we were over depending on imports for our military and these countries included hundreds of instances. China was found to be the country we relied on the most. Does anyone really think if we get into a battle with China, they will continue to supply these items? No of course not and it won’t only be strategic items which will be cut off. Much of our medicines come from China along with so many other things necessary to keep us going. There are two major problems one is the imports our military needs and the other is the imports our citizens need. We are now totally unprepared if a war starts. Our enemies won’t even have to nuke us only knock out our electrical grids and let us kill ourselves. Without electricity we don’t stand a chance. China has managed to become a critical supplier in many fields over the years. They are involved in everything from computer chips to cell phones. No one country should have that power. They wouldn’t have it if we didn’t let them. They found our Achilles heel which is profit. They made it so much cheaper to manufacture in China many companies fell into the trap. The government should have put tariffs on their products to make them competitive with the ones manufactured here, but they didn’t and they let things get out of hand. One would think from everything which they hear there would be no way we would have any trade with Iran. Guess what? That is not true. While trade is relatively small, it hasn’t stopped Iran with all their hate for us, they still trade with us. While most trade is restricted with Iran there still is a small amount going on. Most of us do not really know what is going on between countries aside from what we hear in the news and that is very undependable. Sometimes one cannot help but feel the media is stirring up emotions to get a bigger audience. Take what happened with a news service recently. One of their reporters was banned from a trial for following jurors home according to another news agency. We also import vital materials from more friendly countries, but we can’t rely on them in a war. Some of these countries receive their energy needs from Russia for example and the pipeline could be shut off at any time. 39% of Europe’s oil imports come from Russia. The countries in Europe with the highest dependence on Russian oil are said to be Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Greece, with other European countries less dependent which would still be in trouble with a shutoff of oil. Some people are unaware of the fact we get a large amount of our agricultural products from Europe. In 2019 we imported almost 24 billion dollars’ worth. The top imports from Europe come from Germany which is a recipient of Russian oil. If there is a war between China and Russia will the Europeans abstain because of their reliance on Russian oil? Maybe they would be on our side but is it worth the risk? Shouldn’t we manufacture any strategic materials we get from them right here in America instead of rolling the dice? We are, as hard as this is to believe, 100% dependent on other countries for gallium. Gallium is primarily in electronics. 95% of it is used to make gallium Arsenide known as GaAs. This is a compound used in circuits, semiconductors, LEDs and other electronics. Some computer chips use it, especially those in our cars for radar assist. It is also used in smart phones among other devices. Right now, we are no longer energy independent and are completely dependent on oil and gas imports. We can thank the current administration for this. Hopefully this will change back to the way it was in the future. This affects so much of our economy and also our military. If there was a war tomorrow, we couldn’t get back to energy independence fast enough any longer, so if our imports were shut off, we would have to use our oil reserve for the military leaving the people not only without enough gas, but also without enough heating energy. The United States has to take a hard look at what we import and decide which imports are the most important to the maintenance of our country and defense and decide to get them produced here. We can’t wait any longer, the world is getting more dangerous every day. One has only to look at what happened in Afghanistan.
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