Highlights
- Modern warfare increasingly depends on resilient supply chains, with global dependencies exposing critical vulnerabilities in defense logistics and resource acquisition.
- China’s dominance over rare earth elements and strategic minerals presents significant threats to defense readiness and national security infrastructure.
- The study calls for urgent transformation from just-in-time efficiency models to robust risk-mitigation strategies focusing on redundancy, domestic production, and cybersecurity.
At the heart of modern warfare lies not just military strategy but the invisible arteries of global supply chains, ensuring the uninterrupted flow of critical components. The recent study by Goksel Korkmaz, PhD (opens in a new tab), Ministry of Defense, Turkey, via the Journal of Defense Resources Management (JoDRM), delves into the precarious vulnerabilities within defense supply chains, painting a stark picture of how geopolitical entanglements, foreign dependencies, and emerging threats expose national security to economic coercion and technological sabotage. The study hypothesizes that the defense sector’s reliance on complex, globalized supply chains makes it disproportionately susceptible to high-severity, low-probability risks, requiring a shift from just-in-time efficiency models to robust risk-mitigation frameworks centered on redundancy and resilience.
Duality of Trouble
The author, affiliated with Ankara University, dissects the dual forces shaping defense supply chains: vulnerability and criticality. Vulnerabilities emerge at both the macro and micro levels, ranging from a nation’s overreliance on foreign suppliers to the fragility of individual enterprises in defense logistics.
On the other hand, criticality underscores the difficulty of replacing essential components in times of crisis. The study emphasizes that spare parts for an F-35 fighter jet are far more indispensable to national security than a soldier’s boots—yet both remain hostage to fractured supply networks.
The COVID-19 pandemic, once considered a low-probability, high-impact event, shattered the illusion of supply chain stability, exposing the Achilles’ heel of Western defense industries that had blindly pursued outsourcing in the name of efficiency.
The Cold Hard Reality
The study aligns with cold, hard realities. China’s dominance over rare earth elements (REEs) and strategic minerals, coupled with Russia’s stronghold over palladium, nickel, and titanium, presents a tangible threat to defense readiness. The fact that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has stockpiled over $1.15 billion worth of rare elements since 1989 is a tacit admission of the long-standing risks associated with supply chain disruptions.
Likewise, the rise of cyber threats and digital espionage—where defense contractors and subcontractors are prime hacking targets—validates the study’s assertion that securing supply chains is not just about materials but about safeguarding data integrity across an increasingly digital battlefield.
Yet, for all its strengths, the study bears glaring blind spots.
What About Solutions?
It offers an extensive diagnosis but falters when prescribing tangible solutions. While it rightly emphasizes redundancy as a safeguard, it underplays the fundamental tension between economic feasibility and national security. The notion of stockpiling indefinitely is economically untenable, and the study’s limited discussion on how private-sector partnerships, near-shoring, and rapid permitting reforms could expedite domestic production leaves critical questions unanswered.
Similarly, it skirts around the political realities of supply chain alliances, failing to address the fractious nature of Western coordination. EU-U.S. tensions over sustainability and resource nationalism, for instance, pose a significant hurdle to a united front against adversarial control of strategic resources.
Another glaring omission is the study underestimating China’s long-term strategic depth. While it acknowledges China’s grip over minerals, it barely touches on Beijing’s ability to manipulate global pricing, use state-backed enterprises to undercut Western refiners, or quietly acquire stakes in mining operations across Africa and Latin America—moves that make diversifying supply chains more difficult than the study implies.
China is not just a supplier but a gatekeeper, setting the rules of engagement in ways Washington and Brussels have yet to counter effectively. In fact, Rare Earth Exchanges has found that certain hubris in both Washington and Brussels doesn’t allow for even a recognition of the severity of the problem.
Hard Hitting Nonetheless
Despite its limitations, the study delivers an urgent warning: the defense supply chain is an economic battlefield, and the failure to fortify it will have catastrophic consequences. The authors are correct in asserting that the United States and its allies must abandon just-in-time supply chain efficiency models and embrace a posture of resilience.
But resilience, absent decisive industrial policy, remains a hollow strategy—a concept Rare Earth Exchanges frequently mentions.
What is needed is not just risk assessment but strategic intervention—the aggressive expansion of friend-shoring, massive investment in domestic refining capabilities, and a comprehensive cybersecurity overhaul to protect digital supply chains as fiercely as physical ones.
As geopolitical fractures deepen, the next major conflict may not be dictated by battlefield superiority but by access to the right materials at the right time. The United States cannot afford to be caught unprepared in this war of attrition. The study serves as both a warning and a call to action: without an immediate shift in defense logistics, national security will not be lost on the frontlines but in the mines, factories, and data servers that Washington or Brussels failed to understand and embrace fast enough.
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