An analysis published by the Institute for Modern Warfare at West Point said the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is creating “crippling real-time problems” for any expected manufacturing surge in the U.S. defense industrial base and even the repair of defense equipment damaged by the Iranian attack.
In particular, sulfur, an important upstream raw material for the mining of key minerals such as copper and cobalt, has been “almost completely” disrupted by seaborne trade across the strait, which accounts for half of the world’s total transport volume, the report said. Sulfur prices have soared by nearly 25% since the start of the war, with a year-on-year increase of 165%.
The minerals, used in everything from microprocessors to jet engines to drone batteries, “determine how quickly things are built and scaled under the stress of ongoing war,” according to the analysis, while the impact of sudden supply shocks on U.S. defense preparedness has never been modeled.
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One of the authors of the analysis, US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jahala “Frankie” Maticek, a non-resident fellow at the US Naval War College, told the Guardian in a phone conversation that this was “a knock-on problem”, raising the possibility that “the knock-on effect of this war is that the cost of replacing all these weapons could more than double or triple because all mineral requirements are going to go up significantly”.
Maticek warned of another possibility: “The market will not be able to provide the quantities of minerals needed to replace all the radars that have been destroyed and all the munitions that have to be replaced. The situation is really unstable right now.”
Sulfur used as an input in industry and agriculture is produced primarily as a by-product of refining crude oil. Production in the Middle East accounts for about 24% of global supply, and about half of the world’s seaborne trade in the substance passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Sulfur is an input in the manufacture of artificial fertilizers, and international organizations, industry bodies and media reports have drawn attention to the possible downstream impacts of sulfur on agriculture and food supplies, particularly in low-income countries where farmers need to purchase sulfur in the same markets as those in richer countries.
But sulfur is also burned to make sulfuric acid – the world’s most produced industrial chemical – used to extract copper and cobalt from low-grade ores.
The Modern Warfare Institute warns that these metals are critical to replenishing and repairing U.S. military equipment used or damaged in current wars in the Middle East, noting that “copper is a designated strategic material embedded in the transformers, motors and communications hardware that enable bases to operate and defense factories to function.”
The authors provide specific estimates of material damaged in the early stages of the war, writing that “more than thirty thousand kilograms of copper would be needed to replace just two major U.S. radars destroyed in Bahrain and Qatar” and that “thousands more kilograms of copper would be needed to repair or replace other damaged U.S. communications equipment, sensors, and radars in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.”
They added: “The current sulfur shock is becoming a copper issue, and the copper issue has the potential to soon become a preparedness and resilience issue.”
They called it a “pre-logistical crisis” that previous “military planning treated as background noise.”
Only 6% of U.S. defense contractors have fully transparent supply chains, according to a separate February analysis co-authored by Matisek. In the latest report, he and his co-authors write that this has resulted in military efforts being constrained by “upstream conditions beyond its control and the U.S. joint force finding its combat capabilities limited by the invisible industrial base required to replenish them.”
Maticek told the Guardian this was partly due to a reliance on large defense contractors and the opacity of their supply chains to military planners.
“All the big defense industrial base companies, this is proprietary information. They don’t want anyone to know how many minerals they buy to make missiles,” he said.
“From a strategic perspective or a great power competition perspective, we can’t actually allow them to do that anymore because we actually need to know that,” Matticek added.
“We don’t know who their suppliers are,” he said, adding that beyond a few steps in the long chain of subcontractors, “no one really knows who is supplying these metals, these minerals and components. It’s just a maze.”
He added that in addition to copper, sulfur is a key ingredient in explosives used in U.S. military activities.
“Only two companies produce energy materials and high explosives. If they don’t receive any orders or requests to increase production, that’s very problematic, especially as we face the sulfur crunch.”
He added: “But [there is] Kind of like a crunch of all these minerals, you need to actually spin them up to make all this stuff. “
The Guardian contacted the US Department of Defense for comment.
