# EDITORIAL: Indium, gallium, germanium — Beijing cuts the West off from its war metals

> In June 2026, China once again tightened export controls on three strategic metals — indium, gallium, and germanium. This decision, technical in

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Editorial
- Published: 2026-06-26
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/editorial-indium-gallium-germanium-pekin-coupe-l-occident-de-ses-metaux-de-guerr

## Key takeaways

- China controls more than 80% of global production of these three metals, a position the author attributes to a deliberate 30-year industrial strategy.
- Gallium is essential for GaN transistors used in radars such as those on F-35 fighters and Patriot systems; new non-Chinese capacity is not expected until 2028-2030.
- Germanium is used in infrared night vision and high-performance military fiber optics, and indium (57% extracted in China) is used mainly in ITO for displays and cockpit panels.
- Alternatives such as graphene films, doped zinc oxides and aluminum nitride transistors exist or are in development but are not yet mature for military use.
- The author calls for replenished strategic stockpiles, transatlantic coordination, and a NATO agreement on critical metals at the Ankara summit, and argues that strategic autonomy is necessary.

## Introduction: Beijing's silent counterattack

### June 2026: the export controls that change everything

In **June 2026**, **China** once again tightened export controls on three strategic metals — **indium**, **gallium**, and **germanium**. This decision, technical in appearance, is in reality a **precision economic weapon** deployed in direct response to Pentagon sanctions and blacklisting of Chinese companies. Beijing did not fire a missile. It simply closed a tap. And that tap controls a critical share of the **Western** military and technology industry.

The **Western** response to these controls too often resembles paralysis. These metals have been known as **critical for years**. Reports on vulnerabilities in **strategic** raw material supply chains have multiplied since the pandemic. And yet the dependency remains structural, deep, and slow to reduce. **China built this dependency patiently. It is now monetizing it, at the moment of its choosing.**

### 80% of global production: a monopoly position

**China** **controls more than 80%** of global production of indium, gallium, and germanium. This is not the result of geological fortune — these metals are found on every continent. It is the result of a **deliberate 30-year industrial strategy**: invest massively in extraction and refining capabilities, maintain low production costs through economies of scale and relaxed environmental regulation, and let Western competitors offshore their production for cost reasons. The result: a **de facto monopoly** over materials indispensable to the global military and technology industry.

This monopoly is all the more dangerous because it covers **metals with no direct short-term substitutes** for many critical applications. Switching **oil** suppliers can be done relatively quickly. Rebuilding the gallium refining capacity needed to produce GaN amplifiers for military radar systems cannot be done in a few months.

*When I think about Beijing's strategy on critical metals, I am struck by its patience. Thirty years to build this monopoly. Thirty years during which we slept, seduced by low prices and the promise of happy globalization. And now the awakening is painful. Very painful.*

## Gallium: the invisible metal of modern weapons systems

### Gallium in every military radar

**Gallium** is probably the metal least known to the general public and one of the most critical for **Western** defense. It is the indispensable ingredient of **gallium nitride (GaN) transistors** — the basic technology of power amplifiers in modern radar systems. The AESA radars of F-35 fighters, Patriot systems, maritime surveillance radars — **all use GaN components that require gallium.**

Beyond radars, gallium is present in **precision-guided missiles** (guidance electronics), **C4ISR systems** (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), and secure satellite communication systems. Cutting off access to gallium is potentially cutting off the supply of critical electronic components for the entire **Western** military command chain.

### Structural dependency and its correction timelines

Rebuilding gallium production capacity outside **China** takes **years**, not months. The byproducts of aluminum smelting, in which gallium is naturally present, must be processed in specialized facilities whose construction and regulatory compliance stretch across long investment cycles. **Europe** and the United States have **projects underway**, notably in Germany and Canada, but these projects will not be operational until 2028-2030.

Between June 2026 and 2028, the **Western** defense industry must manage with existing stocks and long-term contracts. **ArentFox** (June 25, 2026) documents that Chinese export controls are already creating procurement delays and cost overruns that are beginning to weigh on military production programs. This is not yet a crisis — but it is a red alert that is flashing.

*Two years' delay to rebuild gallium production capacity — two years during which China can maintain this pressure. Two years during which our defense industrialists will manage shortages and cost overruns. This is not a power outage. It is a slow, calculated, relentless stranglehold.*

## Germanium: the army's night vision under threat

### The metal of night vision and **military fiber optics**

**Germanium** is, alongside gallium, one of the most vulnerable metals in the Western defense supply chain. It is essential for two critical military applications: **infrared night vision systems** and **high-performance military fiber optics**. These two applications are not peripheral — they are at the heart of the tactical advantages that Western armies have cultivated since the Gulf War.

**Night superiority** — the ability to see and fight effectively at night when the adversary cannot — is one of the most valuable asymmetric advantages of American and NATO forces. It relies on night vision goggles, thermal cameras, and infrared guidance systems that all use germanium. **Limiting access to germanium is directly attacking this night superiority.**

### Fiber optics: the backbone of secure communications

**High-performance military fiber optics** use germanium in their core to optimize high-speed data transmission and reduce signal attenuation over long distances. These fibers constitute the backbone of **secure military communication networks** — the links that allow commanders to transmit encrypted orders, sensors to transmit their data, and C2 systems to function in a networked fashion.

Cutting off the germanium supply does not instantly neutralize these networks — the fibers already in place continue to function. But it prevents their **extension, replacement, and maintenance**. On the scale of a prolonged war or a prolonged period of tension, this constraint gradually becomes critical.

*Imagine a modern army without night vision. Without secure fiber optic communications. This is not science fiction — it is what China can progressively make difficult by closing the germanium taps. Not all at once. Progressively. Methodically. Until the pain is sufficient to change American or European policies.*

## Indium: the screens guiding soldiers

### Indium in military displays

**Indium** — with **57% of global production extracted in China** — is primarily used in the form of **ITO (Indium Tin Oxide)**, a transparent and conductive material applied to touchscreens, OLED displays, and military cockpit panels. High-performance **military LEDs** and infrared optical detectors also use significant quantities.

In contemporary defense, screens are ubiquitous: fighter aircraft dashboards, missile command interfaces, battlefield management systems, drones — every modern weapons system has graphic interfaces that use indium. The dependency is diffuse, spread across thousands of components, which makes it all the more difficult to address quickly through specific substitutions.

### Long-term alternatives: prohibitive timelines and costs

Alternative technologies to ITO exist or are in development — notably graphene films or doped zinc oxides — but they are not yet mature for large-scale industrial use in military components. The military component electronics qualification processes take years and costly certifications, further slowing the transition to indium alternatives.

**The European Union and the United States have substitution programs underway**, notably within their respective **Critical Raw Materials Acts**. But these programs operate on five-to-ten-year horizons — timelines that are **incompatible with the strategic urgency** created by China's June 2026 export restrictions.

*57% of indium extracted in China — that is a statistic that should be taught in every European military academy. Not as a technical anecdote. As a strategic warning. Dependency on critical raw materials is the new geography of vulnerability. And it is a geography we let Beijing draw over thirty years.*

## The context: the Pentagon blacklist and Beijing's response

### A proportionate and calculated response

The tightening of Chinese export controls on critical metals in June 2026 is a **direct response** to the listing of new Chinese companies on the Pentagon's Entity List and American sanctions targeting Chinese military and technological capabilities. This response is not impulsive — it is **calculated to maximize American and European economic pain** while staying below a threshold that would trigger a symmetrical military response or global sanctions.

**CNBC** reports on June 23, 2026 that tariff policies and American procurement policies have already created supply chain disruptions on both sides. China transforms these mutual disruptions into a unilateral weapon by targeting metals over which it has a near-monopoly — materials that the United States cannot immediately obtain elsewhere in sufficient quantities.

### The logic of commercial escalation and its dangers

This **step-by-step escalation** — American sanctions, Chinese counter-restrictions on metals, potential counter-sanctions on other domains — follows a logic of **controlled trade war**. Each party seeks to maintain pressure without crossing the red lines that would transform economic competition into direct confrontation. But **the margins of error shrink** as tensions accumulate.

**KPMG Navigator** (June 23, 2026) notes that multinationals operating in the technology and defense sectors must now integrate **supply chain geopolitical risk** as a primary variable in their investment decisions — at the same level as interest rates or currency risks. This is a profound transformation of the global economic environment that China's restrictions on critical metals illustrate with particular acuity.

*The Sino-American commercial escalation reminds me of boxing rounds: each blow is calculated to hurt without knock out, to maintain pressure without triggering total breakdown. But by repeating this game, one of the two parties ends up hitting too hard by error or miscalculation. And a trade war becomes something far more serious.*

## The European response: between assumed dependency and proclaimed urgency

### Europe and its own vulnerabilities

Europe is in an even more vulnerable position than the United States on critical metals. **EU Insider** (June 23, 2026) signals that the **ReArm Europe program** now explicitly integrates the reduction of dependencies on Chinese raw materials as a priority. The **European Defence Fund** has made ITAR-free a funding criterion — but the critical metals question goes beyond the ITAR framework: it touches the raw materials themselves, not just American technologies from which Europe wants to free itself.

Mining and refining projects are under development in Europe — the **European Critical Raw Materials Act** of 2024 created a legal framework for these investments. But the delay between initial investment and viable commercial production is five to ten years, in the best cases. **Europe launched its critical materials awakening too late to be shielded from China's 2026 pressures.**

### Alternative partnerships: Canada, Australia, Africa

The long-term strategic response requires **diversification of supply sources**. Canada has significant germanium deposits. Australia, with its exceptional mineral wealth and its commitment to the AUKUS partnership, is a natural partner for securing critical metals supply chains. Several African nations possess important resources — but their extraction requires massive infrastructure investments that neither the EU nor the United States has yet mobilized at the necessary scale.

The American **Minerals Security Partnership** program, launched in 2022, moves in the right direction — but its concrete results remain limited. Building alternative supply chains takes time and money, in a context where governments are simultaneously called upon to finance defense, the energy transition, and social needs. **Democracies' priorities are many. Their resources, less so.**

*The solution to critical metals is known: diversify, invest in alternative extraction, build **strategic stockpiles**. Everyone knows this. Nobody did it fast enough. Now that Beijing has closed the tap, people are scrambling. But scrambling is not the same as replacement capacity. There will be years of pain while alternatives are built.*

## Toward a doctrine of economic resistance

### Strategic stockpiles: the buffer solution

While alternative production capabilities are brought online, **building strategic stockpiles** of critical metals is the most immediate emergency measure. The United States maintains a **Strategic National Stockpile** whose metallic components have been depleted or reduced in recent years under budget pressure. Replenishing it for critical metals — gallium, germanium, indium, but also rare earths, cobalt, lithium — is a national defense priority.

Europe lacks a coordinated European-level equivalent. Discussions are underway to create a European strategic stockpile mechanism for critical metals, but they have not yet resulted in a concrete funding decision. **As long as Europe does not have its own strategic reserves, it will be vulnerable to every surge of Chinese commercial policy.**

### Transatlantic coordination: an absolute necessity

Faced with this shared vulnerability, **the United States and Europe must coordinate their responses** with an urgency they have not yet demonstrated. A transatlantic agreement on the sharing of critical metals strategic stockpiles, on coordination of alternative mining investment programs, and on commercial policies toward Chinese restrictions would allow a collectively more effective response than fragmented national policies.

The **NATO Ankara summit** (July 7-8, 2026) should be an opportunity to place this coordination of critical metals supply chains on the collective defense agenda. The security of raw materials is national security. NATO, whose raison d'être is collective defense, should formally integrate it into its planning processes. **The wars of the 21st century are also won in mines and refining laboratories.**

*A NATO agreement on critical metals — that is the kind of practical, unspectacular, fundamentally strategic decision that Ankara summits should produce in addition to defense spending announcements. Patriot missiles and Leopard tanks capture attention. Gallium supply chains save lives when the radar detects the enemy in time. Both deserve equal attention.*

## The strategic lesson: never create a dependency of which the adversary is the sole supplier

### The principle of strategic non-dependency

The current situation on critical metals illustrates a fundamental strategic principle that should have guided Western economic policies for thirty years: **never become structurally dependent on a potential adversary for inputs critical to your national security.** This principle, obvious in theory, has been systematically sacrificed on the altar of short-term economic efficiency and free-trade globalization.

It is not only the metals. The same finding applies to semiconductors (Taiwan), generic medicines (India/China), solar panels (China), lithium batteries (China). The **list of critical dependencies** is long and continues to grow despite repeated warnings since 2020. The pandemic was a warning signal. China's restrictions on metals in 2026 are another. **How many warnings will it take before systemic action?**

### **Strategic autonomy**: more than a slogan

**Strategic autonomy** — a concept championed by France for years and progressively adopted by the entire EU — is not a protectionist slogan. It is a rational response to the structural vulnerability created by three decades of globalization without safeguards. It does not mean autarky — modern economies are too interconnected for that — but the ability to function, defend oneself, and exert diplomatic pressure **without being at the mercy of a single supplier** for critical inputs.

China's restrictions on gallium, germanium, and indium are one more argument — if one were needed — for investing massively and rapidly in this autonomy. **Every million invested now in alternative production capabilities is insurance against far costlier crises tomorrow.** The short-term accounting logic has proven dramatically insufficient. It is time to adopt long-term strategic logic.

*Strategic autonomy — I believe in it. Not out of economic nationalism or instinctive distrust of globalization, but out of geopolitical realism. A world where China can close the critical metals tap while Russia cuts gas pipelines is not a world where democracies can function on the basis of mutual trust and pure free trade. The context has changed. Our economic policies must change too.*

### Concrete consequences for the defense industry in 2026

### Delays and cost overruns hitting programs

The concrete impacts of Chinese restrictions on critical metals are already manifesting in Western defense programs. **ArentFox** (June 25, 2026) documents disruptions in customs controls and import processes that create procurement delays. Defense industrialists report production timeline extensions, costly component substitutions, and urgent negotiations with alternative suppliers that are sometimes less capable.

In the short term, **Bloomberg** (June 25, 2026) notes that these disruptions push industrialists to build larger precautionary stockpiles — a bullwhip effect that may temporarily amplify apparent shortages before supply stabilizes on new sources. This well-known supply chain management phenomenon takes on unprecedented national security dimensions when it affects critical military components.

### Accelerating research into substitution materials

The constraint also creates its own positive dynamic: Chinese restrictions are accelerating **research into substitute materials**. American and European laboratories are intensifying work on aluminum nitride-based transistors to replace GaN, on alternative conductive films to ITO, on germanium-free infrared detectors. This work would have advanced more slowly without the pressure of supply constraint.

The history of technological innovation shows that supply constraints are sometimes the best **accelerators of breakthrough research**. The oil crises of the 1970s accelerated the development of fuel-efficient vehicles and civilian nuclear energy. China's restrictions on critical metals could, in time, accelerate the development of an electronics industry less dependent on these materials. **The short-term challenge can become a long-term opportunity if the response is equal to it.**

*Crises are often accelerators in disguise. The gallium restriction could be the catalyst that finally triggers the massive investment in alternatives we have been postponing for years. I do not want to be naively optimistic — the short-term costs are real and heavy. But history suggests that constraint is sometimes the mother of innovation. Provided we do not simply wait for the crisis to pass.*

## Conclusion: the era of comfortable dependency is over

### A rupture demanding a systemic response

China's restrictions on **indium, gallium, and germanium** in June 2026 are not an ordinary commercial incident. They are the manifestation of a **deliberate strategy** by Beijing to transform its dominance in critical raw materials into a geopolitical lever. This strategy is rational, effective, and deeply dangerous for Western national security.

The response must be equal: **strategic stockpiles immediately replenished**, massive investments in alternative extraction and refining capabilities, urgent transatlantic coordination, acceleration of research into substitute materials. This program is not optional — it is a condition of the industrial and military sovereignty of democracies in the medium term.

### The editorial of strategic lucidity

I state it without equivocation in this editorial: **the West committed a major strategic error in allowing China to build this monopoly on critical metals**. Correcting this error will take time, money, and political will. But every additional day of paralysis is another day of vulnerability. Beijing played the long game. It is time that democracies did the same — with the urgency the situation demands and the discipline the stakes deserve.

This is not anti-Chinese sentiment. It is realpolitik. China uses its economic advantages as strategic instruments — every great power does. **Refusing to see this reality out of naivety or intellectual laziness is the true luxury we can no longer afford.**

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [CNBC — Trump tariffs, manufacturing, and supply chains — June 23, 2026](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/23/trump-tariffs-manufacturing-warren-kelly.html)

- [ArentFox — The customs and trade world in June 2026: export controls — June 25, 2026](https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/customs-import-compliance-blog/the-customs-and-trade-world-turns-june-2026)

### Secondary sources

- [KPMG Navigator — June 2026: global economic navigation, geopolitical risks — June 23, 2026](https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2026/june-2026-global-navigator.html)

- [Straits Times — New Trump tariffs: trade war and legal challenges — June 21, 2026](https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/another-rumble-in-the-trade-jungle-will-trumps-new-tariffs-survive-a-court-challenge)

- [Bloomberg — Chinese economy: 6 charts of the slowdown — June 25, 2026](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/china-economy-6-charts-explain-why-how-economic-growth-is-slowing-down)

- [EU Insider — European defense ITAR-free: ReArm Europe — June 23, 2026](https://euinsider.eu/news/eu-defense-itar-free-europe-rearm)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/editorial-indium-gallium-germanium-pekin-coupe-l-occident-de-ses-metaux-de-guerr