I've been writing for more than a decade and a half about a broad category of metals often nowadays dubbed "strategic" because they are crucial to high-tech applications such as solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, flat screens, semiconductors, batteries, optics, aerospace and a wide array of military applications including night vision, radar systems, communications satellites, radiation shielding, vehicle armor, submarine hulls, precision weaponry, and on and on.
It is the military applications which interest me here because much of the volume of strategic minerals in most civilian devices can be recycled when devices containing them are junked. But, of course, in warfare the whole point in many cases is to just blow stuff up. And, once you do that to something containing any of the strategic minerals important for military applications, there is no chance to recover the metals and use them again.
That's why this headline caught my eye: "Ukraine's Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies." I can't verify whether this claim is true, but some nonzero amount of germanium is being consumed by drone warfare, not just in the Ukraine-Russia war, but also in the Iran war with the United States and Israel. It's important to note that germanium has many civilian applications such as semiconductors, solar energy, autonomous vehicles, scientific instruments, battery technology and a variety of health care applications.
