EXCLUSIVE: America’s War Machine Has A China Problem. These Manufacturers Want To Fix It

WASHINGTON — American aluminum manufacturers are moving to restore domestic production and create thousands of jobs, lessening America’s dependency on China for a metal critical to national defense.

Though it the metal is critical for U.S. defense infrastructure, America is not a dominant aluminum producer. Bringing its manufacturing back to the U.S. lessens the country’s dependence on China and creates American jobs, panelists said at an Oct. 16 event hosted by the American Primary Aluminum Association at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.

“When I first came to Washington, I didn’t have gray hair and the US aluminum industry was the largest producer in the world. And today we produce just 1% of total global aluminum production,” economist Adam Hersh said at the fireside chat. “We don’t only have no capacity to produce it here in the United States, but there’s no capacity to produce it anywhere in a NATO country. We have to rely on getting that … high purity aluminum either from China, Russia or the United Arab Emirates.”

China now produces 59% of the world’s aluminum, up from just 11% in 2000. With state backing, China’s aluminum industry has become a global giant. China’s dominance in this realm has led to America’s decline, according to Hersh’s new economic study he provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation at the event.

This foreign dependence poses a potential national security risk, panelist and retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus warned.

“Geopolitics now trumps economics and supply chains are not as dependable. And you now have to engage in just in case logistics,” Petraeus, who served as CIA director during the Obama administration, said. “The problem is that whomever now is not necessarily a friend or an ally and you don’t want to be in the position where you’re dependent on someone with whom you’re competing in a variety of other ways who can use that then as a lever on you.”

“The fact is that we have allowed China to achieve at least oligopolistic control over many of these strategic and rare earth mineral categories and processing in particular”, Petraeus continued, “And that should make us very, very uncomfortable.”

A supply chain shortage would hinder America’s ability to produce munitions from missiles to aircraft. Revitalizing the American aluminum industry would mitigate the risk of economic coercion, especially during a time when the nation is at war.

Regarding the consequences of Beijing disrupting aluminum supply to America, “That would just literally take us — it’d be like kneecapping us,” Petraeus claimed.