Posted on 04/15/2010 1:28:27 PM PDT by Stayfree
• According to government, industry, and academic officials, the use of rare earth materials is widespread in defense systems. These include, among others, • precision-guided munitions, • lasers, • communication systems, • radar systems, • avionics, • night vision equipment, and • satellites. • Officials emphasized the significance of the widespread use of commercial-off-the-shelf products in defense systems that include rare earth materials, such as computer hard drives. Objective 2: Rare Earth Materials Are Widely Used and Lack Substitutes Page 27
(Excerpt) Read more at gao.gov ...
We have plenty here, enviro just won’t let us mine it.
bookmark
Actually we don’t have a lot, but we can’t even get to what we do have due to some of the mines being in California.
... whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower...
-Obama
extreme /s
There are also huge deposits in MT and Idaho...same problem enviros won’t let you at them.
Actually, we have a lot, but we don’t mine it and really don’t have the capability to process the small amount we mine.
There are deposits of the 17 rare earths in Canada and the U.S.
For a related item, look up Magnequench. They were bought out by the ChiComs and moved to the PRC back in the 2003-4 timeframe. Turns out they are the sole source of rare earth magnets suitable for our cruise missile guidance systems. If China says “No”, we will have a helluva time making cruise missiles that fly straight. I did not think that “Free Trade (TM)” was a suicide pact. If the right palms are greased, anything is possible, I suppose.
That wasn’t a “free trade” issue, but nice try.
Magnequench: CFIUS and China's Thirst for U.S. Defense Technology
[Heritage Foundation via FreeRepublic].
The bad news just keeps on coming.
Sure it was free trade — arbitrage the cost difference between US living wages and Chinese slave wages, and bring that to the bottom line as pure profit, damm the consequences. Mr Hu would be glad to hang you with your own rope.
Just read at the link I supplied in my comment #13, and go complain about NAFTA somewhere else.
Check this out: the more things change, the more they stay the same. We have another paleo arguing that, if only wage scales were equalized between China and the United States (by implication: with tariffs), we could restore rare earth production and processing in the U.S.
Good summary — didn’t realize that the Magnaquench debacle goes back to the mid 90s.
Sorry to come down so hard on you, but I had the same argument on that thread from 2008.
Just keeping it old-school sonny. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.
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