For more than fifteen years, I have been writing about a broad category of metals now commonly labeled "strategic" because of their importance to high-tech applications. These include solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, flat screens, semiconductors, batteries, optics, and aerospace, as well as a wide array of military uses: night vision, radar systems, communications satellites, radiation shielding, vehicle armor, submarine hulls, and precision weaponry, among others.

It is the military applications that concern me here, because the strategic minerals contained in most civilian devices can largely be recycled when those devices are discarded. In warfare, however, the whole point in many cases is to blow things up. Once something containing strategic minerals important for military applications is destroyed, there is no chance of recovering those metals for reuse.

That is why this headline caught my eye: "Ukraine's Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies." I cannot verify whether the claim is true, but some nonzero amount of germanium is being consumed by drone warfare—not only in the Ukraine-Russia war, but also in the Iran war involving the United States and Israel. It is important to note that germanium has many civilian applications, including semiconductors, solar energy, autonomous vehicles, scientific instruments, battery technology, and a variety of health care uses. The "chokes supplies" part of the headline refers to the fact that China is the world's dominant producer of refined germanium; in 2023 it imposed export licensing requirements on germanium and gallium, and in late 2024 it announced a formal ban on exports of those metals to the United States. China's export controls on germanium and related metals followed U.S. restrictions on advanced semiconductor sales to China, underscoring how trade policy and mineral supply have become intertwined with military competition.

As the world's militaries rush to embrace drone and missile warfare and other high-tech weapons, we can expect considerably larger amounts of germanium to be locked up and ultimately scattered to the winds when the weapons containing it are detonated. The same holds true for all the other metals associated with modern, high-tech warfare.

This brings to mind Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the first major economic theorist to point out that the law of entropy (commonly known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics) ensures that all nonrenewable resources, including metals, will degrade to the point that they become unrecoverable. When explosive military applications are involved, this degradation is instantaneous and total for each weapon detonated. Yet even the most careful recycling of civilian and non-exploding military devices will never recover 100 percent of the original nonrenewable material. Eventually, all metal ores worth mining will be exhausted, all existing metal-containing objects will degrade, and the loss of access to metals will move from theoretical to actual. Our modern technical society, however, will almost certainly collapse before that point, for many reasons that will include the increasing difficulty of maintaining access to metals over time.

Given this reality—one firmly anchored in physics—one might expect modern society to be carefully husbanding the remaining minable and recyclable metals and devising ways to recycle them with ever greater completeness. Instead, while interest in metal recycling fluctuates with price, the mining industry is being called upon to dramatically increase its output. Governments have codified this push: the United States has designated critical minerals including germanium in its official critical minerals lists, and both the U.S. and the European Union have adopted strategies and funding programs aimed at diversifying supply chains away from dominant producers—efforts that generally emphasize new mining and processing rather than recovery from end-of-life products.

I questioned whether such a dramatic increase in output is sustainable in a July 2022 piece entitled "Acceleration forever? The increasing momentum of mineral extraction." To understand our current trajectory, it helps to know the following: half of all the copper ever extracted from the Earth as of 2018 was mined between 2000 and 2018.

Copper is central to the emerging, electronically oriented technology future. Could we double copper production again over the next 19 years? And could we do it once more in the following 19 years? As I have argued repeatedly, it is the rate of extraction that matters more than the stock of any resource. Increasing the rate of extraction requires more and more energy and other resources as ever lower-grade deposits are tapped. Increases will therefore demand ever greater effort, possibly slowing the rate of increase—and perhaps stopping it altogether, or even reversing it.

From 1970 through 2022, the rate of lithium extraction increased 2,539 percent. Could that rate of increase continue for the next 52 years—that is, could the extraction rate grow by a factor of 25 yet again?

This is what I think about when I read about the importance of so-called strategic metals: the scramble to secure supplies, the emphasis on their use in warfare, the apparent indifference to the fact that they are nonrenewable, and the failure to take the need for recycling seriously. All of this suggests that the quest by the United States and other countries to secure access to supplies not controlled by adversaries will almost certainly fall dramatically short of stated goals. Strategic metals wasted on warfare will mean less available to build the high-tech world that technology leaders keep promising—a world that, as it turns out, requires huge physical resources. While there are many reasons to believe this high-tech world will not emerge as promised (which may actually be a relief), there can be no dispute that a lack of physical resources would prevent it from being built out at scale.

By Kurt Cobb via Resource Insights