Description
What do military critical mineral supply chains look like? Well, it seems, nobody really knows for sure. Military ‘prime’ contractors, such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, rely on tens of thousands of subcontractors and suppliers to obtain the vast portfolio of minerals embedded in their hardware. To put this into context, it is widely reported that a F-35 fighter jet needs up to 900 pounds of rare earths, and a Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine, close to 9,200 pounds. Yet, rare earths, a group of 17 heavy metals that are abundant throughout the Earth's crust, are neither rare, nor many of them sourced directly from the Earth at all, but obtained as secondary products of industrial fly ash, slag, and red mud. How does one make sense of it all, and what are the theoretical and methodological tools available that can handle these unwieldy and complex issues of military extraction and procurement?
This paper takes a geopolitical ecology lens, or geopolitical and political economic analyses of military supply chains, to see what is behind the veneer of military critical mineral use and critical mineral reliance more broadly. We use a full social-life cycle assessment tracing the veins of one of the most lethal killing machines of the past 25 years – the MQ-9 Reaper Drone. We measure and map the global climate and local socio-ecological footprint of its critical mineral supply chain and check-out what’s ‘under the hood’ of the Reaper through a forensic analysis of its constitutive parts.
