Will Future Resource Demand Cause Significant and Unpredictable Dislocations for the UK Ministry of Defence?

Abstract

This paper focuses on the drivers which may affect future trends in material availability for defence, in particular, the availability of rare earth elements (REE). These drivers include resource concentration, tighter regulatory policy and its enforcement, export policies, their use in economic statecraft, increases in domestic demand, promoting greater efficiency in resource use, efforts to mitigate resource depletion and more efficient resource extraction while reducing its associated environmental impact. It looks at the effect these factors might have on global systems and supply chains, the impact on material insecurity and how this may exacerbate the issue of their use in UK military equipment. It finds that these drivers are likely to have an increasing impact on material availability (if measures are not taken to mitigate them), which will have consequences for the provision of military capability by the UK.