Article URL: https://sonar21.com/the-galling-gallium-chokehold-why-the-us-cannot-produce-precision-missiles-and-fully-functional-f-35s/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

Kudos, again, to Kevin Wamsley of Inside China Business. Based on his latest podcast (see below) I did some additional digging. The substance of his video briefing is shocking and alarming, at least for US policymakers and weapons manufacturers. There is a single thread running from the empty nose cones of America’s newest stealth fighters to the laboratories where China is building the internet of the 2030s. That thread is gallium — a soft, silvery byproduct of aluminum refining that almost no one outside a materials-science department thinks about, and that the United States does not produce at all. The top line from the US Geological Survey is stark: the United States has had no primary domestic gallium production for decades, and its net import reliance sits at 100 percent. China, by contrast, controls the overwhelming majority of global output — figures commonly cited run from 94 to 98 percent of raw production. The reason is structural, not incidental. Gallium is extracted as a byproduct of bauxite and zinc processing, industries China dominates. A country cannot simply decide to make gallium; it must first build the aluminum and zinc industries that yield it, then the extraction, refining, wafer, and packaging lines on top. That is a decade-plus undertaking, not a budget line. This dependency became a weapon in December 2024, when Beijing banned exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States, explicitly prohibiting sales to US military end-users. It was retaliation for American semiconductor export controls, and it landed on a Pentagon that, by the USGS’s own accounting, had no gallium in the National Defense Stockpile to fall back on. One crucial update the alarmist version of this story often omits: in November 2025, as part of a broader trade truce between Presidents Trump and Xi, China suspended the civilian portion of that ban until late November 2026, moving those exports to a licensing regime. But the suspension came with a catch that matters enormously — the prohibition on exports to military end-users stayed in force. So the civilian supply reopened on Beijing’s sufferance, revocable at will, while the weapons-makers remained cut off. The chokehold didn’t release; it was repositioned. The most vivid symptom of this dependency is also the most easily misunderstood. It is true — confirmed through photographic evidence and industry reporting, though initially denied by the Department of War — that F-35s built from Lot 17 onward are being delivered with counterweights, literal ballast, in their nose cones where radars belong. Reporting has put the number affected in the hundreds. But the cause is more tangled than “China cut off the gallium.” The immediate culprit is the delayed development and certification of the AN/APG-85, the next-generation radar meant to replace the older AN/APG-81. The APG-85 is built on gallium-nitride (GaN) technology, which delivers far higher power and better thermal efficiency — and demands roughly 82 kilowatts, forcing structural, cooling, and power redesigns to the aircraft’s forward fuselage. Jets from Lot 17 were redesigned to accept the APG-85 and can no longer take the old APG-81. When the new radar slipped, those aircraft had nowhere to turn but counterweights. Gallium supply is the aggravating factor layered beneath that engineering delay: GaN radars use far more gallium than their predecessors, the DLA has struggled to source it as Japan and Germany lack the capacity to fill the gap, and prices have surged. The honest framing is that America faces a radar-development problem and a materials problem, and China’s monopoly sits underneath both. Meanwhile, China has moved its own J-20 fighter to a next-generation radar reportedly built on the same GaN technology — the qualitative gap the APG-85 was meant to open is instead narrowing. The vulnerability extends well past one airframe. Gallium nitride underpins the high-power jammers on the EA-18G Growler, the F-35’s own electronic-warfare suite, and the large ground-based radar arrays of the kind destroyed during the fighting in the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon’s supply chains reportedly touch Chinese suppliers across a vast share of weapons components — the dependency is systemic, not a single point of failure.