Modern Warfare Is Burning Through the Metals Needed for a High-Tech Future

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 that 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,…