The civilian.
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Washington was shrouded in anxiety in October. As the federal government shutdown entered its second week, an eye-popping phenomenon began to spread across the United States. Active-duty military members in military uniform appeared in front of charities and waited in line to receive food relief.
This picture is almost unimaginable to ordinary Americans-the country with the highest military expenditures in the world cannot afford to support its own soldiers? Trump immediately issued an emergency order requiring the Pentagon to ensure the payment of military salaries, even if funds from other key projects were diverted.
To understand the game, it is necessary to look back a month back, at the end of September, when the U.S. Congress was stuck because of budget issues, and few realized that the political chaos would evolve into a systemic crisis.
The Republican Party's plan to drastically reduce government spending was strongly opposed by the Democratic Party, and the two sides confronted each other on issues such as medical insurance coverage and social welfare expenditure. This kind of political confrontation is not new in the United States, but this time the consequences are particularly serious. The operating funds of the federal government are completely interrupted, and all government departments, including the military, are in financial difficulties.
After the news of the military's failure to get their wages spread, the shock sparked far more than expected, and the U.S. Army Rescue Foundation revealed that they received thousands of aid applications in just a few days, totaling tens of millions of dollars.
The impact on military morale is obvious, and the Trump administration understands that it can’t let the military out of trouble anyway, so it made a difficult decision to use the Pentagon’s special funding for weapons development and technology evaluation to prioritize the distribution of military personnel.
The price of this decision is heavy. That fund was originally intended to be used for the research and development of the next generation weapon system to maintain the leading edge of the United States in military technology. Now it is forced to be used for other purposes, which means giving up some long-term strategic goals to maintain the immediate stability. This is a typical example of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It seems to solve the urgent need, but it is actually overdrawing the future.
What worries Washington even more is that just when the United States was overwhelmed with itself, China released a new rare earth export control policy in early October. The technical details of this policy are worth pondering. It not only restricts the export of rare earth raw materials, but also establishes a complete product tracking mechanism.
Any product containing more than 0.1% of Chinese rare earth ingredients, even processed in a third country, must be approved by the Chinese government to enter the international market, which means that the United States cannot bypass Chinese control by purchasing related products from Japan, South Korea or Europe.
Rare-earth metal elements appear to be unobtrusive, but are the modern high-tech industry vitamins, from smartphones to electric vehicles, from wind turbines to precision guided missiles, almost all cutting-edge technology products are inseparable from rare-earth materials.
China not only holds most of the world's rare earth reserves, but more importantly, it has the most complete rare earth refining and processing industrial chain. Although the United States also has rare earth deposits, after decades of de-industrialization, relevant processing capabilities have been basically lost.
History can be found that in the early 1980s, the United States, due to environmental protection considerations and cost factors, gradually transferred the rare-earth mining and processing industry overseas, mainly undertaken by China.
The strategic decision makers of the United States believe that these dirty livelihoods are not worth keeping in the country, but China seized this opportunity, using decades of time not only to establish the world's largest rare-earth industrial cluster, but also to refining technology, application R & D and other high-end links to breakthroughs, when the United States realized the seriousness of the problem, it was difficult to rebuild a complete industrial chain in a short time.
In the face of this strategic passivity, the Trump administration can play a few cards, threaten to impose tariffs? this trick has been used for several years, the effect is getting worse and worse, instead pushed up domestic prices in the United States, seeking allies support? Japan, South Korea, Europe's rare earth processing capabilities also rely on China, investment in rebuilding the domestic industrial chain?
Not to mention the astronomical amount of capital investment required, it will take ten years or even longer to cultivate enough technical talents and establish industrial clusters. What's more, even the government's funds for normal operations are tight, so how can there be any spare energy to carry out large-scale industrial reconstruction?
This is the deep logic of Trump's strategy of abandoning cars and protecting the commander. With limited resources and multi-line operations, trade-offs must be made. Maintaining the military is the bottom line. Others can be delayed and saved as they can. However, the problem with this strategy is that it can only solve the immediate crisis, but it will make the United States more and more passive in strategic competition.
The game reflects the collision of two development models, one focused on long-term planning and willingness to continue investing in key areas for decades, and the other is constrained by political cycles, and policy continuity is difficult to guarantee.
When these two models confront each other head-on in the field of strategic resources, the result is almost doomed. Some people of insight in the United States have realized this problem, but it is by no means easy to change the policy inertia and interest pattern formed over the past decades.
This battle is far from over, but the trend has become more and more clear, and what really determines the victory is not a temporary policy adjustment, but a judgment on the future and a determination to invest in it for the long term, and history will finally prove that those who focus on the long-term, stable and stable choices, often have more vitality than short-term radical strategies.
Source of information
U.S. military-industrial enterprises hype: the China-U.S. conflict has been burning for 50 years, and now it is a "during war"
Red Star News Trump orders US Defense Secretary: Use "all available funds"