there was a time when this was forbidden
Posted on 10/07/2018 1:56:39 PM PDT by ameribbean expat
The Pentagon intends to invest in domestic manufacturing to reduce its over-reliance on Chinese and other foreign-made parts in American weapons, top defense officials said Thursday.
The U.S. reliance on China is one of many areas discussed in a 146-page report about the health of the defense industrial base that President Trump is scheduled to release on Friday during an event at the White House. Other areas include “accelerating workforce development efforts to grow domestic science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and critical trade skills.”
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The report says China is the only producer of various chemicals needed in missiles and bombs, Japan and European nations are the only suppliers of certain carbon fibers used in missiles, satellites, and space rockets; Germany is the prime supplier of special vacuum tubes for night vision goggles, it says.
(Excerpt) Read more at defenseone.com ...
Gives a whole new ring to "enemies foreign and domestic" doesn't it?
If a country can’t produce something then it’s natural to rely on others. This issue is something other countries take to heart on every product, including agriculture. Free trade was a globalist scam that left us empty
We need to identify our critical industries and protect them. For everything else we can be free traders but NOT chumps. To avoid being chumps we will use punitive/retaliatory tariffs as needed and without hesitation. When our trading partners play fair we’ll be free traders. But when they get selfish we’ll put the hammer down. This seems to be Trump’s vision and it makes perfect sense.
There are tungsten mines in the eastern Sierras, closed of course but the tungsten is still there. Rare earth minerals may also be available here. Don’t know.
This a is a very good idea.
The major use of rare earths is for magnets used in small speakers and batteries for hand held tools like cordless drills and saws.
In years past, the closing of the rare earth mine in Mountain Pass California has been a popular subject at Free Republic but I have seen a thread on that subject in years, maybe a decade.
Russia has the mother lode of tungsten. All of ours now come from them. We used to have the largest deposits of rare earths in the world - I believe on Montana or somewhere up there, but B. Clinton turned the land into a national park or some such at the behest of his Chinese ‘donors’.
Mining requires people to harvest the ore - but they also lost the War on Natural Resource Harvesters along with farmers, loggers, ranchers, and commercial fishermen.
Eat Plastic, Buy Chinese and Russian! MAaSHA
Yes I know what they are talking about. The point is we are dependent on the Russians and the Chinese for vital national defense, military, and scientific needs.
there was a time when this was forbidden
About time.
That why someone coined the phrase "Free Traitors".
I remember stories in the 1980s of American companies sourcing cheap and fraudulent bolts, for instance, from overseas.
Remember Clinton allowing the contract winner for the GPS guided bomb kits to have the fin solenoids made in China?
I get what you’re saying, but we should buy the raw materials and manufacture what we need here. We have the economic might to dictate these terms. If they don’t sell to us, then sanctions, and we dedicate our industrial and intellectual might to finding alternatives. We can be 90% self sufficient, relying only on trusted alies for the other 10%.
Get the Chinese out of manufacturing our pharmaceuticals ASAP. How do you know what’s in your medications being manufactured in China or other countries?? Valsartan anyone?
“We used to have the largest deposits of rare earths in the world - I believe on Montana or somewhere up there”
I believe the area you are referring to is near Lolo Pass on the border between Idaho and Montana. If its there, let’s go get it!
Don’t know about tungston—but the USA has plenty of rare earths. They’re just a bit more expensive than Chinese rare earths. For example, A big research effort is underway to extract rare earths from coal mine wastes.
I just redid my deck railings from conventional wood rails to horizontal cable wiring for a nautical look. I ran short on the hardware I got from Amazon and bought extra from Home Depot even though it was more expensive. The Amazon stuff has already started rusting only two years later. The Home Depot stuff is fine. Not endorsing Home Depot, it could well have been Lowes. Point being, it was just a deck railing, but if we’re buying this crap to put in our military and industrial and domestic grid systems, we are screwed. I can understand with simple domestic goods, but why would we rely on parts from potential enemies for critical military grade hardware. It’s like the Romans asking Attila The Hun for body armor just before a battle.
All the deposits worth mining were locked up in the 90s. They are too expensive to mine for what competitors can get more cheaply from China. Research ... don’t depend on it to solve the problem in any reasonable time or for any process to work commercially and efficiently for decades. US major deposits of rare earths need to be unlocked and large scale mining restarted.
Tungsten - US has almost zero. Russia exports all the metal for the rounds used by US mil’s small arms. Another wacko environmental issue - no lead and maybe shortly no depleted uranium rounds.
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