Der Gallium-Engpass

In 2025, the most critical resource for missile defense isn’t oil, steel, or even lithium. It is Gallium.

For decades, military dominance was defined by kinetic potential: engine thrust, armor thickness, and explosive yield. Today, dominance is defined by detection. In the hyper-fast environment of modern aerial warfare, the ability to see the enemy first is the only variable that matters. And in this invisible war of electromagnetic spectrums, silicon is legally blind.

The United States has implicitly acknowledged this vulnerability through a strategic pivot that would have seemed improbable just five years ago. In May 2025, defense giant RTX (formerly Raytheon) signed a landmark deal with Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) to refine gallium in the UAE.

This agreement acts as a desperate, necessary bypass around China’s stranglehold on the metal that makes modern radar possible. The future of aerial supremacy now depends on mining the desert for a metal that melts at room temperature.

The Physics of the “Invisible” Wall

To understand why generals and procurement officers are focused on a minor metal, one must understand the physics of “seeing” in the 21st century.

Modern warfare relies almost exclusively on AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radars. Unlike legacy systems that rely on rotating mechanical dishes, AESA radars steer beams of radio waves electronically, shifting focus thousands of times per second. These systems are required to track hypersonic missiles, coordinate drone swarms, and jam enemy communications simultaneously.

For years, the industry standard for these high-performance systems was Gallium Arsenide (GaAs). But the new operational necessity is Gallium Nitride (GaN). The transition is driven by a single, governing physical property: Bandgap.

Wide Bandgap vs. Silicon

Silicon, the material backbone of civilian computation, possesses a bandgap of roughly 1.1 electron-volts (eV). This physical constant limits the voltage the material can withstand before breaking down. When pushed beyond its limits, silicon essentially “leaks” energy as heat, degrading performance and risking catastrophic failure.

GaN is a Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductor with a bandgap of approximately 3.4 eV. This difference is not merely incremental; it is exponential in its impact on power handling.

$E_g(\text{GaN}) \approx 3 \times E_g(\text{Si})$

This wide bandgap allows GaN components to withstand electric fields 10 times stronger than silicon, unlocking performance tiers that were previously physically impossible.

The Power Density Revolution

The implications of this bandgap difference are visible in the “Power Density” metric. GaN can pump out 5x to 10x the power density of silicon. In practical terms, this allows a radar array the size of a suitcase to emit the same effective radiated power as a legacy silicon-based system the size of a van.

This miniaturization is critical for modern airframes. The F-35 ‘Lightning II’, for instance, relies on the AN/APG-85 radar, a system that demands extreme performance in a highly constrained volume. GaN allows these aircraft to “burn through” enemy electronic warfare jamming by brute-forcing a signal that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the background noise.

Thermal Resilience

The second advantage is thermal management. Silicon begins to fail at temperatures around 150°C. GaN operates efficiently at temperatures exceeding 300°C.

This thermal tolerance allows engineers to reduce the weight and complexity of cooling systems. In an aircraft where every kilogram of cooling equipment is a kilogram of fuel or munitions not carried, this efficiency gain is strategically vital. The ability to run hotter and harder means the radar acts as a longer stick in a knife fight; detecting the adversary before they can detect you.

The Supply Chain Choke Hold

While the engineering case for GaN is unassailable, the supply chain supporting it has proven to be catastrophic.

As of late 2024, China controlled approximately 98% of the global production of primary low-purity gallium. This monopoly was not achieved through geological scarcity; gallium is relatively abundant in the earth’s crust—but through industrial dominance.

Gallium is almost never mined directly. It is a trace element found in bauxite (aluminum ore) and zinc ores. It exists as a byproduct of the Bayer process used to refine alumina. For thirty years, Western aluminum producers ceased extracting gallium because Chinese refineries supplied it at prices below the cost of Western production. This created a classic dependency trap.

Then came the “choke.”

• August 2023: The Chinese Ministry of Commerce imposed export controls, requiring specific licenses for gallium and germanium exports. This served as the initial warning shot, disrupting spot markets and authorized supply channels.
• December 2024: The restrictions tightened significantly, with stricter end-user verifications designed to prevent transshipment through friendly third nations.
• 2025 Status: The global market has bifurcated. Domestic prices in China remain stable, while international prices have surged. Defense contractors face lead times that have stretched from weeks to months.

The fragility is concentrated in the “MMIC” (Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit) supply chain. These are the specific chips that power the transmit/receive modules in a Patriot missile or an AEGIS destroyer. Without the raw gallium, the semiconductor foundry stops. Without the foundry, the radar assembly line halts. Without the radar, the defense architecture is blind.

Mining the Desert: The RTX/EGA Gambit

This context creates the backdrop for the agreement solidified on May 16, 2025.

RTX, the manufacturer of the Patriot missile system and the SPY-6 radar, partnered with the Tawazun Council (the UAE’s defense acquisition authority) and Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) to secure an independent supply.

The focal point of this deal is the Al Taweelah alumina refinery in Abu Dhabi, one of the largest single-site aluminum producers in the world.

The Strategic Logic

The operational logic of aiming for the UAE is threefold:

1. Feedstock Availability: The UAE is a massive importer of bauxite for its aluminum smelters. This bauxite contains the necessary trace gallium, currently discarded or left in the aluminum bulk.
2. Industrial Infrastructure: Al Taweelah is already a world-class industrial site with the chemical processing infrastructure required for the Bayer process. Retrofitting this facility to extract the gallium from the “liquor” stream is significantly faster than permitting and building a greenfield mine in North America or Europe.
3. Geopolitical Alignment: The UAE successfully navigates a middle path between major powers. For the United States, this represents a “friend-shoring” victory, securing a critical mineral outside of the direct sphere of competitors. For the UAE, it represents an ascent up the industrial value chain, moving from a raw material exporter to a key node in the high-tech defense ecosystem.

The stated ambition is to position the UAE as the world’s second-largest producer of gallium, providing a non-aligned buffer to the market shockwaves emanating from East Asia.

Forward-Looking Analysis: Can It Scale?

The RTX-EGA deal serves as a proof of concept for a new era of localized defense industrial bases. However, physics and economics remain stubborn opponents to rapid scaling.

The Scale Challenge

China produces hundreds of tons of gallium annually to feed its domestic electronics and solar industries. A single refinery in the UAE, regardless of its efficiency, will take years to ramp up to a production volume that can meaningfully offset global demand. The window between 2025 and 2027 remains a period of acute vulnerability for Western defense production, where shortages could dictate delivery schedules for critical platforms.

The Subsidy Era

Extracting gallium at Al Taweelah will almost certainly be more expensive per kilogram than the historical market rates set by subsidized Chinese production. The defense sector is entering an era where governments must subsidize the inefficiency of redundant supply chains. This is no longer about profit margins; it is about insurance premiums paid to guarantee sovereignty.

The Next Domino

If the UAE initiative proves successful, the industry expects to see similar “bolt-on” extraction facilities proposed for aluminum refineries in Australia and Canada. The technology for extraction (using ion-exchange resins or solvent extraction to pull gallium from the Bayer liquor) is well understood. The missing ingredient has always been the political will to pay for it.

The “New Oil” is not a fuel source. It is the capacity to process the periodic table with greater autonomy than the adversary. In the intense heat of Abu Dhabi, the United States is placing a bet that gallium is worth its weight in national security.