Tervell [he/him]

President Donald Trump in late March directed DHS to use emergency funds to pay Transportation Security Administration workers who had gone without paychecks ​for about six weeks, causing disruptions at U.S. airports. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne ​Mullin told “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday that the money would run out ⁠by early May. “That money is dried up if I continue down this path the first ​week of May, because my payroll at DHS is just over $1.6 billion every two weeks,” ​Mullin said. He said after the next paycheck, “There is no more emergency fund, so the president can’t do another executive order for us to use money, because there’s no more money there.”

TSA workers also went ​unpaid for six weeks last autumn during an earlier partial government shutdown. Airlines for America ​CEO Chris Sununu told Reuters on Tuesday Congress has to move fast to get DHS funded. “You cannot ask ‌these (TSA ⁠officers) to go through this a third time,” said Sununu, who heads the group representing American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab, Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab, United Airlines (UAL.O), opens new tab and others. In March, the weeks-long standoff in Congress caused security lines at some airports to exceed four hours, the longest in the TSA’s ​nearly 25-year history. More ​than 500 TSA officers ⁠have quit since mid-February. Senate Republicans will move forward this week on a budget blueprint that would boost funding for DHS agencies for ​the next three years, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said as ​Congress aims to ⁠end a partial shutdown of DHS. Democrats have pushed for a series of new constraints on ICE and Border Patrol, which operate under the direction of DHS, before authorizing additional funds. They ⁠have argued ​that ICE and Border Patrol should be subject to ​the same operational rules as police forces across the United States, including a requirement that agents obtain judicial ​warrants before they enter private homes.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that the U.S. military will no longer require all American troops to get the flu vaccine, citing “medical autonomy” and religious freedom. “The notion that a flu vaccine must be mandatory for every service member, everywhere, in every circumstance at all times is just overly broad and not rational,” Hegseth said in a video posted on social media. He said American service members are free to get the flu vaccine but will not be forced to “because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable.”

uh, I’m sure this means the administration is going to be very tolerant of abortions and trans people

Hegseth’s directive does allow for the military services to request to keep the vaccine requirement in place, according to a memo enacting the policy posted online. It says the services have 15 days to make those requests. Vaccination programs in the U.S. military date back to the American Revolution. But they became a contentious political issue during the coronavirus pandemic, when more than 8,400 troops were forced out of the military for refusing to obey the 2021 mandate for the COVID-19 vaccine. Thousands of others sought religious and medical exemptions. Congress agreed to rescind the mandate, which the Pentagon dropped in January 2023, after roughly 99% of active duty troops in the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps had gotten the vaccine, and 98% of those in the Army. The Guard and Reserve rates are lower but generally are more than 90%. The Trump administration then spent months crafting a policy to allow service members who refused to take the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine to reenter service with back pay. While only a tiny fraction have taken the Pentagon up on the new policy, Hegseth’s team has spent the past several months personally highlighting them.

totally normal stuff for the head of the DoD to be spending time on!

The Pentagon stated in March that 153 service members who were separated under the COVID-19 mandate had been reinstated or “re-accessed.” The dropping of the flu vaccine mandate follows what health officials said was a particularly severe flu season when U.S. infections surged. Public health experts recommend that everyone 6 months and older get an annual influenza vaccine. The Trump administration has been working to dial back vaccine recommendations. It stated earlier this year that it will no longer recommend flu shots and some other types of vaccines for all children, saying it’s a decision parents and patients should make in consultation with their doctors. A federal judge has temporarily blocked that effort as a lawsuit plays out. The Congressional Research Service listed eight mandatory vaccines for service members in a 2021 report. They included vaccines for the flu, polio and tetanus as well as the measles and hepatitis A and B. Service members could request to opt out of a vaccine requirement for religious reasons, the report stated. But the unit commander was required to seek input from medical and religious representatives, while also counseling the service member on the potential impact on their ability to deploy. A military physician also had to counsel the service member on the benefits and risks of forgoing a required vaccination. The Congressional Research Service noted that the military instituted its first vaccination program in 1777 when Gen. George Washington directed the inoculation of the Continental Army to protect personnel from smallpox.

A Different Orchestra

Uncrewed systems offer a potential way out of both problems. Against the physical problem, drones can operate from more austere sites — short runways, highways, even expeditionary landing zones — with far less infrastructure than the F-35 demands. By design, they will not require the same concentration of maintenance and supply. They should be designed not to require tanker support to reach the fight, and can be forward-positioned at risk levels that would be unacceptable for manned aircraft and their pilots. When a missile hits a drone operating location, the loss is material, not catastrophic, and far easier to reconstitute. The operational effect is a force that is harder to find, harder to cripple, and harder to keep out of the fight — precisely the attributes that make the Iranian Shaheds a problem, and that the Pacific demands. Against the sustainment problem, unmanned systems would offer lower unit costs, simpler supply chains, higher production rates that can more plausibly match wartime consumption, and no pilot lost with each airframe. Naturally, those advantages come with real constraints. Current designs, such as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the XQ-58A Valkyrie, are built around small airframes with limited payload capacity. Increasing payload would mean decreasing fuel and range. Carrying weapons externally defeats the purpose of a stealthy platform. And the small motors that keep these aircraft cheap and simple cannot generate the electrical power or cooling required to operate the sensors and electronic warfare suites that make the F-35 so lethal. Scaling unmanned aircraft up to close those gaps pushes their cost and complexity toward the very problems they are meant to solve.

The case for a mixed force does not depend on unmanned systems becoming cheap F-35s. It depends on accepting what they are: limited but producible, expendable, and logistically light. They can be paired with a smaller fleet of F-35s reserved for the missions that genuinely require penetrating stealth, advanced sensor fusion, and full-spectrum electronic attack. Reductions in planned F-35 procurement would free up tens of billions of dollars over the next decade — resources that translate quickly into transformative quantities of cheaper, replaceable systems. Reduced sustainment costs from maintaining fewer jets compound those savings further. A marginal shift in investment buys enormous capacity in attritable and autonomous systems that restore the mass a peer conflict demands. The relevant comparison is not unmanned platforms against the F-35. It is a force that pairs both, against a force built predominantly around one. This is not a risk-free bet. Autonomous and attritable systems are still maturing, and nowhere near perfect. Networking drones in contested electromagnetic environments remains an unsolved problem, and no country has yet employed these systems at the scale or against the defenses a Pacific war would demand. And many point out that legacy drones like the MQ-9 Reaper require a large footprint. But Ukraine and Russia have demonstrated that unmanned systems can reshape the battlefield faster than skeptics predicted. More to the point, the alternative to taking this bet is not safety. It is continuing to invest in a force that the preceding analysis suggests cannot survive, be sustained, or be replaced in the war the United States most needs to win.

None of this should suggest that the F-35 is a bad aircraft. Rather, the argument is that a force designed predominantly around the F-35 is a brittle force. The joint force should cover a wide spectrum of contingencies, from permissive raids against isolated adversaries to sustained, high-attrition campaigns against nuclear-armed peers fielding dense defenses across vast distances. No single platform covers all of that, and budgets are finite. The problem is not unique to the F-35. The Pentagon’s requirements process is built to maximize desired performance, not to discipline design by what the industrial base can actually produce at scale. The acquisition system then attempts to execute against those unconstrained demands, turning production realities into a downstream problem rather than a governing input at the outset. The same issue plagues or threatens to doom other tactical aviation programs, shipbuilding, and much more. Just as it took the brutal reality of naval warfare in the Pacific to shift the Navy’s love from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, it may take the catastrophic failure for limitations of exquisite tactical aircraft to overwhelm the forces keeping them drinking up most of the trough. The corrective is not to abandon the F-35 but to redefine its role. A smaller fleet should be reserved for the missions that truly require its unique capabilities — penetrating advanced air defenses, gathering intelligence in contested environments, and orchestrating distributed networks of unmanned systems. The marginal procurement dollar should shift toward platforms that are cheaper to build, easier to replace, less dependent on vulnerable forward infrastructure, and expendable in ways that manned fighters are not. The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for. The lesson for force designers is that the next war may not be that fight. The future of airpower belongs to a larger orchestra, many of its instruments unmanned, inexpensive, and replaceable. Prudence demands that the United States start building it now.

The F-35 program’s total lifetime cost is projected to exceed two trillion dollars, the most expensive Major Defense Acquisition Program in history. The United States plans to purchase thousands of them. Meanwhile, modern conflict, from Ukraine’s drone war to naval engagements in the Red Sea to Iran’s own mass missile and drone salvos, increasingly favors systems that can be produced at scale and replaced when lost. The F-35 is a masterpiece. But a force designed around a masterpiece is not designed for long, protracted wars, and U.S. adversaries know this. The problems fall into two categories. The first is the physical problem of operating in the Pacific. The second is the sustainability problem of fighting there for more than a few nights. Both problems point to the same solution: a balanced force that has the unique capabilities of the F-35, while hedging against its limitations by shifting more procurement dollars to unmanned systems. That would result in a force with fewer F-35s than projected, but positioned for what the decades to come will demand. The F-35 Lightning II has performed brilliantly in the Iran war. Stealth aircraft penetrated defended airspace, suppressed and destroyed air defenses, struck missile infrastructure, and enabled follow-on operations by legacy platforms such as heavy bombers. The jet’s sensor fusion gave commanders an integrated picture of the battlefield that proved as decisive as the weapons themselves. The F-35 demonstrated exactly what it was built to do: penetrate contested airspace, use its sensors to find and track targets inside an integrated air defense system, share that information across the force, and deliver precision strikes against high-value targets. None of that is in dispute.

But operational success in Iran does not validate a force built predominantly around a single platform, especially a platform with a low production ceiling and a high cost floor. This campaign has thus far been short, planned on American and Israeli timelines, and executed from secure bases against fixed targets whose defenses had been systematically degraded before the main strikes ever launched. It is a poor proxy for a high-end fight against a peer competitor. The question was never whether the F-35 could perform. It was whether a force built overwhelmingly around it will help win a protracted conflict against China. Iran does not answer that question.

The Physical Problem

Wargame after wargame exploring a Taiwan scenario has reached the same conclusion: Most aircraft losses happen not in the air but on the ground. Airbases across the Western Pacific sit within range of PLA missiles. Active air and missile defenses at forward bases cannot reliably defeat salvos at the scales China can generate, and passive defenses — hardened shelters, dispersed parking, rapid runway repair, and decoys — remain inadequate across most of the theater. High-value aircraft parked on exposed ramps at predictable locations are among the easiest targets an adversary can service. And the vulnerability is not limited to aircraft on the ground. On March 19th, an Air Force F-35A made an emergency landing after a combat mission over Iran, with the pilot reported in stable condition. Unconfirmed footage suggested the jet may have been engaged by a passive, road-mobile air defense system. Iran’s fixed air defense systems had already been heavily degraded by that point. If mobile systems in a diminished network can still put an F-35 on the ground, the threat from China’s intact, layered, and far denser air defenses is of a different order entirely.

This problem compounds because of the F-35’s heavy ground footprint. The jet depends on maintenance facilities, diagnostic systems, spare parts inventories, fuel and munitions stores, and the skilled maintainers who keep the fleet flyable. A runway crater can be filled. A destroyed parts depot or logistics server cannot be easily replaced in theater. Destroy any piece of that support infrastructure, and you degrade sortie generation as effectively as destroying the aircraft themselves. The concentration of high-value equipment and personnel at each operating location makes the F-35’s basing problem qualitatively different from that of simpler aircraft. The loss is not just one jet but the capacity to generate sorties from that site. The natural response to base vulnerability is dispersal — spreading aircraft across more locations to complicate targeting. But dispersal pushes fighters in exactly the wrong direction. It stretches supply lines that are already thin, fragments maintenance capacity across more sites, and moves aircraft farther from their targets. Distance should then be compensated for, either with standoff weapons or with tankers, and both are brittle. Standoff munitions like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile are expensive, produced in limited quantities, and have not been procured at scales intended to sustain a weeks-long campaign against a peer adversary. Every mile of additional standoff the operational geometry demands draws down a stockpile that cannot be replenished in wartime. Tankers are the alternative, but they are large, slow, non-stealthy aircraft that, against China, would orbit within the engagement envelopes of fighters and sensors designed specifically to kill high-value airborne targets. China’s dense, layered, and mobile integrated air defense network pushes those tanker orbits ever farther from the fight. Against Iran, tanker tracks could be established in relatively permissive airspace with minimal risk. Against China, those tankers would be priority targets. Losing them does not just reduce range, but it also collapses the operational architecture, because the fighters cannot reach the fight without them. Every step backward to survive trades away the ability to fight, and every workaround for distance depends on something fragile.

The Sustainability Problem

The Iran strikes featuring F-35s were a planned strike package comprising a few nights of operations at times chosen by Washington and Jerusalem, against fixed targets, with the luxury of an operational pause between sorties. American forces chose the time, the targets, and the tempo. A conflict with China would offer none of those advantages. It would demand continuous, reactive operations at adversary-imposed tempo across thousands of miles, against a vast and mobile target set — transporter-erector-launchers, surface action groups, relocatable command nodes — with simultaneous amphibious movements, missile salvos, and air operations demanding sensor-to-shooter timelines measured in minutes, not days. The key variable is not what the force can do on a single surge night, but what it can sustain over weeks and months of unrelenting combat. The cost-exchange math works against the F-35 in exactly this kind of war. Consider missile defense: Patriot and THAAD interceptors are among the most capable systems in the world, but each costs millions of dollars, and production rates remain limited. When adversaries launch large numbers of missiles or cheap drones, the defender burns through interceptors faster than they can be replaced. This dynamic is already visible across multiple theaters. The F-35 sits on the same side of this imbalance. At over eighty million dollars per airframe, with Lockheed Martin delivering fewer than two hundred aircraft per year across all variants and all customers worldwide, there is no surge capacity waiting to be activated and no precedent for accelerating a program of this complexity on wartime timelines. When one side can produce weapons by the hundreds and thousands — missiles, loitering munitions, and one-way attack drones — while the other relies on small numbers of exquisite platforms, the advantage shifts toward the side with scale. If losses outrun plans in a protracted peer war, the industrial base cannot replace F-35s quickly. What follows is not adaptation but improvisation under duress. And even if the jets survive, they cannot generate enough sorties to matter. The F-35A’s fleet-wide mission capable rate has hovered in the mid-fifty percent range, reflecting not a temporary shortfall but a structural maintenance burden inherent to the platform. Each sortie generates substantial maintenance demand across airframe, engine, and the low-observable coatings that make stealth possible. In a sustained campaign, maintenance throughput becomes a hard ceiling on sortie generation. The backlog accumulates without operational pause, spare parts inventories draw down faster than they can be resupplied through contested logistics lines, and the fleet’s output degrades when operational need is greatest. A force sized to the Iran template — a short, sharp raid from secure bases — is not a force sized for the Pacific.

Compounding this vulnerability, the U.S. National Defense Stockpile had no gallium reserves when China imposed its December 2024 ban. The Trump administration’s February 2026 launch of Project Vault — a $12 billion public-private initiative to stockpile critical minerals — is a step in the right direction, but even under optimistic projections, domestic production will only reach 10 to 15 percent of national consumption by 2030. China-based Innoscience, the largest 8-inch gallium nitride foundry in the world, leads in manufacturing capability. It also holds nearly 30 percent of the global gallium nitride power device market. This manufacturing capability is what matters in wartime. Silicon and gallium nitride are distinct materials, but analyzing the policy and decision-making surrounding the two reveals striking parallels. The United States pioneered the silicon transistor, then watched domestic companies offshore and cede manufacturing to foreign competitors through failed intelligence oversight and ill-advised technology transfers. This gave rise to the foundry model and paved the way for Taiwan to dominate silicon manufacturing. The gallium nitride story is following the same arc. The United States government pioneered gallium nitride through decades of government-funded research and maintains the majority of revenue in gallium nitride radio frequency devices, with U.S. companies dominating the defense and telecom segments. But the United States has never built the high-volume manufacturing infrastructure to match its design leadership. China has done so, through state-backed initiatives that mirror the government-driven industrial policies Japan and Taiwan used to dominate silicon. The gallium failure poses one critical distinction from the silicon blindside: In the latter case, silicon dominance was merely ceded to countries within the U.S. sphere of influence. A loss of gallium nitride excellence, however, hands victory to a direct strategic adversary.

Building a Heterogeneous Integration Supply Chain

The U.S. government must invest directly in national security-related technology companies and startups, with the taxpayer as the investor. The fabless mindset has led to an overfocus on designing chips and offshoring manufacturing. The United States needs an industrial revolution in heterogeneous integration: a standalone Department of Defense program authorized under Defense Production Act Title III, with four mandates. The Department of Defense’s newly established Economic Defense Unit — created to align defense strategy with economic competition and secure access to critical capabilities — could be the right vehicle to execute them.

the unit they’re staffing entirely with private equity guys and bankers? that unit?

it’s really funny to keep reading article after article pointing out obvious failings of US industrial policy and seeing how not a single one suggests nationalization

First, establish a framework of standalone, dual-use advanced packaging production facilities. Each facility must be government-funded, industry-operated,

ah, of course, gotta be industry-operated!

and located near defense customers and cleared workforces. They should not be co-located with university research fabs. Academic fabs have few security boundaries, with foreign nationals roaming freely through them. Moreover, the competing demands of basic research distract from production. Sites near the Boston Route 128 corridor, Huntsville, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Diego place production capabilities at the edge, adjacent to radar and electronic warfare customers who need it, supplementing facilities like MIT Lincoln Laboratory, rather than replacing them. These facilities must be dual-use: The defense mandate builds them, while revenue from wireless, power electronics, and data center market sustains them. The Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology consortium of the 1980s excluded smaller companies and stagnated when government funding ended. The National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program piloting facility sits today with no funding or operator. These facilities must carry milestone-based production targets, not research outputs. Second, establish a grant and equity program spanning the full heterogeneous integration supply chain, from gallium nitride wafer growth through advanced packaging. Startups will be the primary source of innovation in this space,

STARTUPS ARE GONNA FIX IT

as is the case now in many defense technologies. The government must inject startups at every stage of the supply chain through direct grants and tax credits.

okay so this is straight-up just a grifting plan, it’s probably fucking commissioned by some of the aforementioned private equity ghouls or something

For production-scale facilities, the government should take equity stakes in critical companies, extending the precedent of the Trump administration’s $8.9 billion equity stake in Intel to companies for whom gallium is core. Qorvo and Wolfspeed are ideal candidates. The United States should view domestic champions not just as tickers on the stock market, but as key strategic proxies in a global competition for national security. Third, for the fabrication of gallium nitride wafers, a secure source of domestic gallium is critical. Project Vault is a foundation to build upon. Building on the Department of Energy’s TRACE-Ga initiative and the Defense Production Act Title III award to ElementUS Minerals, the government must expand funding for novel gallium extraction techniques developed by startups. Strategic partnerships must establish a “Trusted Gallium Road” initiative, a network of allied nations ensuring a constant gallium supply outside the Chinese sphere of influence. Fourth, the United States must think outside of the traditional semiconductor hubs. Advanced packaging does not require Silicon Valley types. It requires discipline, precision, and a workforce culture with deep industrial roots. The coal mining communities of Appalachia and the steelworkers of the Rust Belt, the manufacturing communities that built American industrial power but then watched it leave, are the same communities that can revitalize America again — this time in the cleanroom. A workforce development program modeled on the National Defense Education Act of 1958 would effectively create a talent pipeline in these communities. Government-backed advanced packaging facilities in communities uprooted due to workforce losses can supply the warfighter and ignite domestic stimulus.

Conclusion

The United States is at a strategic crossroads. The imperative is clear: Act now, or accept a slow and steady decline leading to semiconductor mediocrity. A loss of gallium nitride excellence means a win for China. The nation cannot afford to repeat the error it made by turning its back on the production of silicon chips. The moment has come for the United States to lead a revolution in chip manufacturing, starting with heterogeneous integration.

the author?

Pradyot Yadav is a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellow at MIT’s Microsystem Technology Laboratories, with a minor in public policy and security studies of emerging technologies, working on 3D chips for next-generation radar. He has worked at Raytheon, Qorvo,

oh, Qorvo, the company he suggested above for government investment?

and IBM, where he built the hardware this piece is about and other technologies core to national security. He has published several peer-reviewed publications with the IEEE. More about his work can be found at his website and LinkedIn.

The United States has been here before. The United States pioneered and scaled modern silicon semiconductor infrastructure. A significant reliance on international manufacturing and the loss of domestic silicon dominance reflect a failure to recognize the importance of industrial capacity to national security. With silicon, the intellectual property was American, but the chips were “Made in Taiwan.” If similar blind spots persist, the United States risks repeating this failure with gallium nitride, a wide-bandgap semiconductor that outperforms silicon at high voltage, high frequency, and extreme temperatures. It’s the beating heart of every modern radar and electronic warfare system. The answer to America’s vulnerability in gallium nitride-based chip manufacturing is not more fundamental research. What’s needed is a hard pivot to heterogeneous integration: a domestic supply chain — from gallium extraction and wafer fabrication to advanced packaging — built on dual-use, production-scale facilities that supply the warfighter and the American civilian at the same time.

Learning from Silicon

The United States solidified technical dominance in high-power, high-frequency systems through World War II-era efforts like the MIT Radiation Laboratory. That dominance was short-lived. Around the 1970s, semiconductor offshoring began. Intel was the first U.S. semiconductor company to offshore, but many followed. In 1987, Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, built on a foundation of American knowledge. The U.S. Radio Corporation of America had trained Taiwanese engineers through a 1976 licensing agreement with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute. As of 2024, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company controls nearly 70 percent of the global foundry market. Today, the United States retains design and intellectual property strength, but has little control over advanced manufacturing. The United States treated microchips as an economic commodity with few national security implications. The 2022 Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science (CHIPS) Act was a response to these vulnerabilities, but the release of funds has been inexcusably slow. The success of the act is debated. The National Center for the Advancement of Semiconductor Technology was shut down in August 2025.

The act promised the creation of close to 50,000 jobs, yet Intel received approximately $7.8 billion in subsidies and still laid off around 35,500 workers in less than two years. GlobalFoundries received up to $1.5 billion and announced $500 million in share buybacks.

Meanwhile, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s Arizona fab has taken twice as long to build equivalent facilities to those in Taiwan and faced significant cost overruns, exposing the depth of the manufacturing gap the United States must close. The United States must learn from these mistakes with silicon. Repeating these failures with the next generation of semiconductors would be a colossal error of public policy and will.

Gallium Nitride: The Next Strategic Semiconductor

While silicon reigns supreme for digital and logic applications, the U.S. semiconductor revolution began with the advent of radar. Nearly a century later, revitalizing the domestic chip industry may depend on radar once again. Gallium nitride is the state-of-the-art for high-frequency, high-power amplifiers essential for modern radar. It handles high voltage, high frequency, and extreme temperatures simultaneously, the exact conditions of modern electronic warfare, making it the ideal semiconductor for radar systems as well as other national security applications. Numerous U.S. ground-based and naval systems currently utilize gallium nitride. The Raytheon AN/SPY-6(V)1 is the Navy’s next-generation Integrated Air and Missile Defense radar. Lockheed Martin’s AN/SPY-7 powers allied Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense platforms. The Northrop Grumman AN/TPS-80 provides air surveillance and defense for the Marine Corps. Beyond sensing, gallium nitride is vital for electronic warfare. The Raytheon Next Generation Jammer Mid-Band enables the EA-18G Growler to disrupt adversarial communications. Gallium nitride will not replace silicon. The two will coexist. The marriage of the two semiconductors is critical for the buildup of modern, highly optimized chips, an idea known as heterogeneous integration. Silicon can provide the digital backend for modern radar phased arrays, at scale. Gallium nitride enables high-frequency circuits with high-output power but lacks digital capabilities.

Unless the United States is willing to build the advanced packaging facilities to do this at high volume, it will repeat the mistake it made with silicon chips. Heterogeneous integration solves a problem that has constrained radar and electronic warfare hardware for decades. Gallium nitride provides unmatched radio frequency power. Silicon provides dense digital control. Piezoelectric films provide excellent filtering. Yet these materials cannot be grown on a single substrate. The industry assembles radio frequency front ends from discrete chips connected by traces that degrade signal quality, limiting performance, inflating cost, and preventing the scaling that next-generation phased arrays demand. The challenge is not the science, but manufacturing at scale. The Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing program at the University of Texas at Austin is a meaningful start, but focuses on prototyping, not production. The United States still lacks the high-volume advanced packaging infrastructure that next-generation defense systems will require, and Asia is building it faster.

The Gallium Problem

Primary gallium — gallium in its raw, unrefined form — is low purity. It must be refined further to produce high-purity gallium required for gallium nitride wafers. China produces 99 percent of the world’s primary gallium and has weaponized that position. In 2023, it placed export controls on gallium in response to U.S. chip restrictions, threatening the refined gallium supply on which U.S. gallium nitride foundries and allied wafer producers both depend on for in-house wafer growth and external wafer procurement. In December 2024, China escalated to an outright ban on U.S. exports. The ban was temporarily suspended in November 2025 following a U.S.-China trade truce, but it remains in effect for military end-users, and the suspension itself expires in November 2026. China can flip the switch again at any time. The vulnerability exposed by the Chinese gallium export restrictions reveals a long-term industrial decline in U.S. gallium refinement. In 1985, the United States was the first country to have a dedicated gallium mine. The Apex Mine in southwestern Utah closed after just three years because international gallium imports produced as a byproduct of aluminum production were cheaper. Since then, the United States has had no domestic capability to produce primary gallium. As of 2024, Indium Corporation operates the only high-purity gallium refinement facility in the United States, relying on imported semiconductor scraps. The Chinese government heavily subsidized aluminum production, allowing aluminum production to rise from 2.6 to 45 million tons between 2000 and 2025. As a byproduct, China’s gallium production capacity rose from 20 to 900 metric tons of output between 2000 and 2025.

Several Members of the European Parliament have urged Norway, whose energy companies have seen sharply higher revenues due to the current market situation, to redirect a larger share of those earnings toward support for Ukraine, NRK reports. Swedish MEP Karin Karlsbro of the liberal Renew Europe group framed the issue from Kyiv’s perspective. “Now we need to look at this situation from Ukraine’s standpoint — which also has to overcome challenges with rising prices in order to defend its country… I hope all countries that have the financial capacity to strengthen support for Ukraine will do so. And it is clear that Norway, with the latest price trends, has a new opportunity,” she said. German Green MEP Rasmus Andresen argued that the current price environment justifies a closer look at additional taxation on oil and gas company profits, including those of Norway’s Equinor.

Finance minister points to pension fund exposure and existing aid levels

Norwegian Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg responded in writing, arguing that the windfall narrative captures only part of the picture. "When oil prices rise — our oil revenues rise, but when stock prices fall, the savings of the pension fund also lose value. The pension fund is 5 times larger than the value of all oil and gas reserves still remaining in Norway. And if turbulence in the world continues to weaken the prospects of thousands of companies in which Norway holds shares — then the ‘drop’ in our fund will be significantly greater than the benefit from higher oil revenues. So Norway in every sense benefits from a world of peace and stability, and we are actively working to contribute to such a state of affairs," Stoltenberg stated. He added that, relative to the size of its economy, Norway already provides assistance to Ukraine at more than 10 times the level of other European partners. Earlier reports indicated that in 2026, the total volume of Norwegian financial support for Ukraine will reach 19 bn euros. Since the start of the war with Iran, the European Union has lost 22 bn euros on fossil fuel imports. The European Commission is preparing systemic measures to address the energy crisis, which will be discussed by EU leaders on 23–24 April.

The United States has quietly used the current US-Iran ceasefire to reposition critical THAAD and Patriot missile defence batteries across Jordan, immediately transforming a temporary operational pause into a wider contest over regional survivability. High-definition Chinese satellite imagery released on April 19 has exposed the new American deployments, demonstrating that even during a fragile ceasefire, large missile defence systems remain visible to increasingly sophisticated foreign surveillance networks. The redeployment carries consequences extending far beyond Jordan because it reveals how the United States, Iran, and China are now competing simultaneously across missile warfare, operational concealment, and space-enabled intelligence collection. The movement followed Iranian strikes during March that damaged the previous THAAD deployment near Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, forcing Washington to reconsider whether its earlier defensive layout remained operationally viable. The American battery originally entered Jordan during late January, reflecting growing concern that Iranian ballistic missiles and armed drones could threaten US facilities throughout the Levant and Gulf.

The current two-week ceasefire, announced on April 8 and brokered by Pakistan, provided the first sufficiently low-risk opportunity for the Pentagon to move sensitive launchers, radars, generators, and supporting logistics equipment. Chinese commercial imagery companies rapidly identified the new deployment areas, publishing annotated photographs showing dispersed launchers, support vehicles, radar arrays, and freshly prepared defensive positions near existing Jordanian military facilities. The released images appeared to show both THAAD launchers linked with AN/TPY-2 radar components and Patriot batteries operating alongside AN/MPQ-65 engagement radars and supporting command vehicles. The resulting public disclosure has intensified concern inside Western defence circles because the imagery emerged from commercial Chinese providers rather than Beijing’s more capable classified military reconnaissance architecture. No American official has publicly confirmed or denied the redeployment, yet the visual evidence corresponds closely with earlier base layouts, known radar signatures, previous launcher configurations, and established American force posture patterns. The exposure of the new Jordanian sites also indicates that future American missile defence deployments across the Middle East may require far greater mobility, deception, camouflage, and electronic concealment than previously considered necessary. For Washington, the Jordan episode has therefore become more than a regional force-protection issue because it demonstrates that every future crisis will unfold beneath continuous Chinese overhead observation.

Ceasefire Used to Repair a Damaged Defensive Shield

The United States appears to have treated the ceasefire primarily as an operational breathing space, allowing damaged missile defence infrastructure inside Jordan to be repaired, replaced, dispersed, and reintroduced without immediate attack. Iranian retaliation during early March reportedly struck the original THAAD site, leaving visible debris, burn marks, and apparent damage surrounding the battery’s principal radar installation. That earlier deployment had been concentrated around Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where the THAAD system protected American aircraft, logistics hubs, and command facilities supporting operations throughout the broader Middle East. Because THAAD relies heavily upon its AN/TPY-2 radar, any successful strike against that component can significantly degrade the entire battery’s detection, tracking, and interception effectiveness.

…

New Positions Suggest a Shift Toward Dispersed Survivability

The newly visible deployment areas appear deliberately selected to reduce vulnerability against ballistic missiles, armed drones, cruise missiles, and loitering munitions approaching from several directions simultaneously. Rather than returning the systems to their previous, easily identifiable locations, American forces appear to have positioned launchers closer to terrain features and existing infrastructure. The fresh layout also seems more widely dispersed, making it harder for Iranian planners to destroy the entire defensive architecture through a single coordinated strike package. Several launchers appear separated from their associated radar systems, indicating an effort to complicate enemy targeting and reduce the likelihood of simultaneous catastrophic losses.

this also shows the problem with dispersal - there’s a reason those launchers come together in a package with the radar systems, separate them and while they may be more survivable, they’ll also be less effective

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Chinese Satellite Imagery Has Exposed a New Battlefield Reality

The Chinese imagery that exposed the redeployment reportedly originated from commercial providers using sub-meter resolution optical satellites supported by artificial intelligence-based analytical software. Those systems can automatically identify launchers, radar arrays, logistics vehicles, roads, prepared sites, and camouflage patterns before rapidly distributing annotated products across social media platforms. The imagery released publicly on April 19 reportedly came from firms associated with MizarVision, which draws upon commercial satellite constellations and automated geospatial interpretation tools. Even those publicly available systems are not considered China’s most advanced overhead surveillance assets, making the episode strategically significant far beyond Jordan. China’s classified military reconnaissance network reportedly offers far greater revisit rates, higher resolution, improved persistence, and substantially stronger all-weather observation capability through combined optical and radar satellites. That means large missile defence systems such as THAAD and Patriot can increasingly be tracked almost continuously, even when deployed rapidly during periods of crisis. The Jordan redeployment therefore illustrates how former assumptions about operational secrecy are rapidly becoming obsolete under modern commercial and military satellite surveillance. American forces may still conceal smaller mobile systems, yet large fixed assets now appear increasingly vulnerable to immediate discovery, analysis, and public dissemination.

Beijing Gains Strategic Leverage Without Direct Involvement

China’s decision to allow the imagery to circulate publicly adds a strategic signalling dimension extending well beyond the immediate question of American missile defence positioning. By exposing the redeployment during a ceasefire, Beijing effectively demonstrated that it can observe, interpret, and publicise sensitive American military activity almost in real time. That capability provides China with indirect leverage because it allows Beijing to influence regional perceptions without deploying forces or issuing direct political threats. The imagery also strengthens China’s narrative that the United States can no longer assume information dominance across the Middle East or Indo-Pacific. For regional states watching the confrontation, the satellite disclosures reinforce perceptions that China now possesses a rapidly expanding intelligence and reconnaissance advantage. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other American security partners may therefore begin questioning whether future US deployments can remain concealed during a prolonged conflict. The episode also creates potential deterrence complications because visible missile defence positions can become easier targets for adversaries planning future precision strikes. China therefore gains strategic value from merely revealing the deployments, even without participating directly in the ongoing confrontation between Washington and Tehran.

Fragile Ceasefire Masks Continued Preparations for Future Conflict

The American redeployment strongly suggests that Washington does not believe the current ceasefire will produce a lasting reduction in regional military tensions. Instead, the repositioning indicates that US commanders expect hostilities could resume quickly if negotiations collapse over Lebanon, the Strait of Hormuz, or additional Iranian missile activity. The movement of THAAD and Patriot systems into less exposed locations therefore represents a hedge against renewed conflict rather than preparation for withdrawal.

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The redeployment also suggests that Washington is preparing for future attacks specifically targeting radar systems, launch vehicles, and support infrastructure rather than only personnel. The most important lesson from the episode is therefore not merely that THAAD and Patriot moved inside Jordan, but that every future movement may now occur under nearly total overhead visibility.

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