Bullets:
The TPY-2 radars are part of the THAAD missile defense system, and identify and direct allied air defenses against inbound ballistic missiles.In the early days of the war, Iranian forces targets the radars, knocking out at least four, across four countries.Raytheon (RTX) is the Pentagon contractor for the TPY-2 radars, which cost $500 million each, and feature a Gallium-Nitride populated array. China has a monopoly on the production of gallium, with 98% of the world’s total. China also has export bans on its gallium to weapons makers, including Raytheon.
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Report:
Good morning.
In the earliest days of the war, Iranian forces launched drone and missile attacks against strategic radars across the Persian Gulf region. These radar installations are crucial in air and missile defense, and serve as a theater-wide warning system. The THAAD system is Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, and identifies and engages incoming ballistic missiles.
Obviously this system is reliant on radars to make that all work, and Iran is knocking out those radars. At an Air Force Base in Jordan, a TPY-2 radar was hit, and those come with a $500 million price tag. That’s just for the radar, plus the cost of the missiles, which are useless without that radar. Another attack took out a radar in Saudi Arabia. And two others in the UAE and Qatar.
A replacement radar is being hurried over to Jordan to replace the one blown up there, and further down the Wall Street Journal points out that another race is on to finish the war in Iran before stockpiles of interceptor missiles run out.
From the start of this channel we have pointed out that the supply chains for the Pentagon all run through China. Literally not a single weapons platform or strategic asset gets built without rare earth metals, and China has monopolies on almost all of them. What’s more, China has dual-use export bans, that expressly forbid their sale to companies that are building weapons. All the Pentagon contractors, in other words, cannot source raw materials from Chinese companies.
The TPY-2 radars are built by Raytheon, and are scarce. This is a press release from Raytheon from last May, 2025, after the company delivered just the 13th TPY-2 radar, and which was the first such delivery to the US Missile Defense Agency.
So in the first few days of the war, Iran took down at least four of them. The system is a Gallium Nitride populated array system. Gallium Nitride allows for longer range and surveillance capability.
China has a monopoly on the production of gallium. 98% of the global production of gallium comes from here, while the United States is 100% dependent on imports. So these radar systems that are being blown up by Iranian drones and rockets, cannot be replaced until China relaxes those export bans to weapons makers.
A caveat here, because this is a common point of confusion: China previously had hard bans on all exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony. But as part of the trade deal with the Trump Administration, that restriction was removed, last November. But exports from China to weapons makers, and to companies on the dual-use export control list—those stay.
This is to say that some Western civilian manufacturers can import these metals, including gallium. But weapons makers cannot: Raytheon is one of the companies on that list. China’s “Unreliable Entities List” includes top Pentagon contractors, like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon, and those companies are banned from importing from China. So all these radars that got blown up in the first two weeks – $2 billion so far and counting just for the THAAD system radars – they’re gone forever.
Be Good.
**Resources and links:**China’s rare-earth mineral squeeze will hit the Pentagon hardhttps://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/04/chinas-rare-earth-mineral-squeeze-will-hit-pentagon-hard/404776/RTX’s Raytheon delivers 13th AN/TPY-2 radar for the U.S. Missile Defense agencyhttps://www.rtx.com/news/news-center/2025/05/19/rtxs-raytheon-delivers-13th-an-tpy-2-radar-for-the-u-s-missile-defense-agencyTerminal High Altitude Area Defense Radar Successful in Integrated Flight testhttps://raytheon.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=667The US military needs Chinese semiconductors to build advanced weapons. Not the other way around.
Presidential Document: Addressing the Threat to the Domestic Supply Chain From Reliance on Critical Minerals From Foreign Adversaries and Supporting the Domestic Mining and Processing industrieshttps://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/10/05/2020-22064/addressing-the-threat-to-the-domestic-supply-chain-from-reliance-on-critical-minerals-from-foreignChina suspends ban on exports of certain metals used in chip and electronics manufacturing to the u.s.https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/09/china-suspends-ban-on-exports-of-gallium-germanium-antimony-to-us.htmlCritical Minerals and Defence technologieshttps://www.sfa-oxford.com/knowledge-and-insights/critical-minerals-in-low-carbon-and-future-technologies/critical-minerals-in-defence-and-national-security/Radar Bases Linked to US THAAD Systems Hit in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and uaehttps://politicstoday.org/radar-bases-linked-to-us-thaad-systems-hit-in-jordan-saudi-arabia-and-uae/U.S. Rushing to Replace ThAAD Radar in jordanhttps://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-news-updates-2026/card/u-s-rushing-to-replace-thaad-radar-in-jordan-P764k4GQIjTocK36lHLr
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Who could have foreseen the consequence of hollowiy out your manufacturing base
And starting trade wars with every other nation while you’re at it
Art of the deal
I assume these companies can just setup shell companies to buy the gallium or find other ways around the export controls. As long as China is putting rare earths on boats to the US the US can and will find ways to get them to weapons manufacturers. Sure China could then just ban exports again but at that point it’s already here. And so far they have been entirely milquetoast with any real response to anything so once the US starts running out again China can just relax the controls again just enough to let the metals flow to the US again.
This just all feels like posturing and not any real issue. Maybe I don’t understand something but if the metals are here I don’t see anything stopping the US from making sure they get to weapons rather than to civilian use products.
Yeah, the article admittedly is probably a bit too hopeful about the actual impact of the current export controls.
Much hay has been made about how the rare-earth export controls are going to end US munitions manufacturing, but I suspect it will only be an annoying bump in the road. We’ve seen US sanction-busting efforts be fairly effective using a lot of middlemen to obfuscate the source and destination of trade goods. It stands to reason that the USA will use the same techniques to get around China’s ban on exports of raw materials to weapon manufacturers.
It will cost them a lot more to pull that off which is still extra pressure, but also China has demonstrated an ability to have more control over the supply chain by the nature of the state owning a super majority of the relevant Chinese companies involved with extraction and refinement.
The trying to get all the capitalist nations to uphold Russian sanctions is hard because there is no real material incentive to do so and no great unity of capitalist nations to follow through on purely ideological reasons and they can’t really be punished for not following through.
If China finds out anyone is not following their sanctions, they have the power to cut them out and make things much harder and more expensive for them and both a material and ideological incentive to do so.
Yes, the US efforts to sanction russian oil demonstrate how challenging it is to truly prevent commodity products from flowing. Galliun and other critical minerals aren’t a perfect analogue, but considering that the US has infinite money for this kind of thing, I bet the spice will find a way to flow regardless.
The worst person you know?
This is him now:
Feel old yet?
Anyway, whether he’s right about China’s exports not being able to eventually get to Raytheon etc, which I’m not fully convinced the US won’t find another way to get around that. I’m at least happy to see more evidence that it will cause serious problems and be very hard to replace in the immediate future.
Can’t they just recover the gallium from the destroyed radars?
Gallium has a very low melting point. It’s sometimes used in PCB rework by folks in the know because it will mix with the normal solder and keep things fluid for longer, helping remove components.
I would imagine that upon being missiled, the gallium would instantly melt and be scattered around in a 400ft radius.
It’d be like mining for platinum by sweeping the dust on your local freeway to scavenge the catalytic converter particulate.
I distinctly remember Codylab doing that ages ago and it works
It works but it’s also very inefficient and low yield. They could theoretically recover some gallium, but are they going to find anywhere near enough in purities required to make their targets?
Do they have domestic recovery capabilities? I think they were working on it, but I think “just recover” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Where does the other 2% of the world’s supply come from and how much is that? Do military radars consume a lot or do they only use tiny amounts?
This article seems like it’s over-stating the impact on the US. The loss of the radars is still a big deal, given the 2 years it takes to build one iirc and will have an impact on the US and Israel in the medium-term but I’m not convinced the radars cannot be manufactured at all. Specifically these radars are made in small number so I doubt they’d be affected but it might pose a problem for other US-made weapons if the limited supply they can get right now is redirected to these radar units instead of other products.
Where does the other 2% of the world’s supply come from and how much is that?
The USA is the other “major” producer, and it was not so long ago (the 90s) that they did the majority of processing. And then there has always been widely dispersed mining and processing worldwide.
China ramped up production in a decades-long effort. They both expanded overall worldwide production, and also took other producer’s slices of the pie, until we ended up in this current lopsided situation where the industry is almost entirely concentrated in China. Other producers wound down production, but not entirely. There’s always going to be little niche operations where a local factory is in need of some particular rare earth metal, and there just so happens to be a processing facility nearby, and so it pays to just keep production going. Those kinds of facilities are now the nucleus of efforts to restart non-Chinese processing.
