Tag: Ukraine

  • Neon, Krypton, and Xenon: The Invisible Gases That Make Every Chip on Earth

    On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Within days, two companies in Odessa and Mariupol — Cryoin and Ingas — shut down their operations. Together, they had been producing roughly 50% of the world’s semiconductor-grade neon. Ukraine as a whole supplied approximately 70% of global neon, 40% of krypton, and 25-30% of xenon — the three noble gases that power the lasers used to etch circuits onto every advanced semiconductor chip manufactured on the planet. Neon prices in China rose tenfold within weeks. Krypton prices in Japan quadrupled. Xenon, which had traded at $15 per liter in 2020, spiked above $100. The world’s most sophisticated industry — semiconductor fabrication — discovered that it was dependent on gases captured from Soviet-era steel mills in a war zone, purified by two mid-sized companies in cities that were being bombed. The concentration wasn’t the result of geological scarcity. Neon, krypton, and xenon exist everywhere — they’re in the air you’re breathing right now. The concentration was an accident of industrial history, and the fact that the accident had never been corrected in three decades of post-Soviet globalization tells you something about how supply chains actually work: nobody fixes a single point of failure until it fails.

    What the gases do

    Neon, krypton, and xenon are noble gases — chemically inert elements that don’t react with other materials, which is precisely what makes them useful in environments where contamination would destroy the product.

    Neon’s critical application is semiconductor photolithography. The excimer lasers used to etch circuit patterns onto silicon wafers — the deep ultraviolet (DUV) systems that still produce the majority of the world’s chips — use gas mixtures that are approximately 96% neon, with small amounts of argon, krypton, fluorine, or xenon depending on the wavelength required. ArF (argon-fluorine) lasers at 193 nanometers and KrF (krypton-fluorine) lasers at 248 nanometers are the workhorses of the semiconductor industry. Every fab that runs DUV lithography consumes neon. The gas mixtures degrade during use and must be regularly replaced. TSMC, Samsung, Intel, and every other chipmaker on Earth — including the Chinese fabs the CHIPS Act was designed to compete against — need a continuous supply of ultra-high-purity neon to keep their lasers firing.

    Krypton serves double duty. In semiconductor manufacturing, it’s a component of the laser gas mixtures. Outside the fab, krypton fills the gap between panes in energy-efficient triple-glazed windows — a growing market as building energy codes tighten globally. It’s also used in high-intensity lighting for airports and stadium illumination.

    Xenon has the broadest application portfolio of the three. It’s an anesthetic in medicine — safer than nitrous oxide, with faster recovery times, though dramatically more expensive. It fills the flash tubes in high-end photography equipment. It’s used as a contrast agent in CT imaging. And — increasingly — it fuels the ion propulsion systems on communications satellites and Earth observation spacecraft. SpaceX’s Starlink constellation and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are driving xenon demand as satellite constellations proliferate. When a Starlink satellite adjusts its orbit, it’s expelling ionized xenon. The space economy’s growth curve is, unexpectedly, a noble gas demand curve.

    Why Ukraine had 70% of global neon

    The answer is Soviet military planning. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union treated neon as a strategic material for high-powered laser weapons research — the kind of Cold War physics that the Battlefields of the Future course covers from the other side. Every major air separation unit in the Soviet Union was equipped with neon, krypton, and xenon enrichment facilities. Air separation units produce oxygen — which steel mills need in enormous volumes — and the noble gases are captured as by-products of the oxygen production process. The Soviet Union had massive steel mills. The massive steel mills had massive air separation units. The massive air separation units captured massive quantities of noble gases. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the steel mills ended up in Ukraine — particularly in the industrial cities of the Donbas and Black Sea coast — and the noble gas capture equipment went with them.

    For three decades, Ukrainian companies collected these gases, purified them to semiconductor grade (99.999% purity for neon), and exported them to the global chip industry at prices that made building competing production capacity uneconomical anywhere else. The same by-product supply structure that constrains indium and tellurium applies here: neon is a by-product of oxygen production, which is a by-product of steelmaking. You cannot produce more semiconductor-grade neon without operating air separation units at steel mills, and the economics of operating those units are determined by steel demand, not neon demand. Ukraine’s dominance wasn’t because Ukrainian neon was better. It was because Ukrainian steel mills had the gas capture equipment installed, nobody else had bothered to install it, and the resulting supply was cheap enough to discourage competition.

    What happened after the shock

    The predicted catastrophe — fabs shutting down, chip shortages deepening, economic disaster — largely didn’t materialize. The semiconductor industry responded faster than most analysts expected, for several reasons.

    First, the major chipmakers had prepared. After neon prices spiked 600% during the 2014 Crimean annexation, TSMC, Samsung, and others diversified suppliers and built strategic stockpiles. Most large fabs had 3-6 months of gas reserves when the 2022 invasion began.

    Second, recycling technology scaled rapidly. Modern DUV scanners can recover and purify over 90% of the neon used in each laser pulse, dramatically reducing virgin neon consumption per wafer. TSMC’s neon recycling program became a model for the industry.

    Third, new production came online. Linde had invested $250 million in a neon production facility in La Porte, Texas, after the 2014 scare. Chinese air separation companies expanded noble gas capture. South Korean and Japanese producers increased output. By 2023, the acute shortage had eased. Prices retreated from their peaks. The industry congratulated itself on resilience.

    Fourth — and this is the detail that changes the long-term picture — the technology is shifting. ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems, which are required for the most advanced 5-nanometer and 3-nanometer chips, do not use neon. EUV lasers vaporize tin droplets rather than exciting noble gas mixtures. As EUV adoption expands and DUV’s share of leading-edge production declines, neon demand from the semiconductor industry will structurally decrease. The gas that nearly crippled the chip industry in 2022 may become less critical to the chip industry by 2030 — not because the supply chain was fixed, but because the technology moved on.

    Where it stands in 2026

    The noble gas market in 2026 is more diversified than 2022 but still structurally fragile. Ukrainian production has partially recovered — Cryoin’s Odessa facility has resumed operations, though at reduced capacity, and the Mariupol facilities remain destroyed. China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have all expanded noble gas production and purification capacity. The acute price crisis is over.

    But the underlying architecture hasn’t fundamentally changed. Noble gases remain by-products of air separation at steel mills and industrial gas plants. The decision to capture them — rather than venting them into the atmosphere — is discretionary, driven by the economics of the gas market relative to the cost of operating the capture equipment. When neon was $100 per liter, everyone captured it. At lower prices, the incentive weakens. The antimony supply chain showed that price normalization after a crisis doesn’t mean the structural vulnerability has been resolved — it means the market has priced in the assumption that the crisis won’t recur.

    Xenon faces its own emerging constraint. Satellite constellation demand is growing faster than xenon supply. SpaceX’s Starlink alone operates over 6,000 satellites, each requiring xenon for station-keeping maneuvers. Amazon’s Kuiper constellation will add thousands more. If the space economy’s xenon demand outgrows the industrial gas industry’s xenon capture, the same by-product ceiling that constrains indium, tellurium, and iridium will constrain the propellant supply for the satellite industry. SpaceX has already begun testing krypton as a cheaper, more abundant xenon substitute in some Starlink applications — a substitution that trades performance for supply security, and that shifts demand pressure from one noble gas to another rather than relieving it.

    Why they share a lecture

    Neon, krypton, and xenon are the Rare Earth Elements course’s case study in accidental concentration — the supply chain vulnerability that exists not because of geological scarcity or deliberate resource nationalism, but because of industrial inertia. Nobody cornered the noble gas market. Nobody imposed export controls. The Soviet Union installed gas capture equipment at steel mills for laser weapons research. The equipment ended up in Ukraine. Ukraine supplied the world for thirty years. Then a war started and the supply vanished overnight.

    The nickel case is about deliberate resource nationalism — Indonesia’s export ban was a strategic decision. The gallium/germanium and antimony cases are about deliberate export controls — China’s licensing regime is an instrument of state policy. The noble gas case is about none of those things. It’s about a supply chain that concentrated by accident, stayed concentrated through inertia, and broke because of a war that had nothing to do with semiconductors. That’s a different category of supply chain risk — one that no critical minerals policy is designed to prevent, because it’s not the result of any policy at all. It’s the result of nobody looking at the map and asking what happens when the cheapest supplier is in a country that borders Russia.

    This is the kind of supply chain our Rare Earth Elements course was built to map — where the gases that power every chip laser on Earth were by-products of Soviet steel mills repurposed for Cold War laser weapons, concentrated in two cities in a war zone, and the industry that needed them only found out when the bombs started falling.

  • The Loitering Munition Revolution: Switchblade, Lancet, and the Weapons Redefining Infantry Combat

    A Javelin missile costs $178,000. A Patriot interceptor costs $3 to $4 million. A Switchblade 300 costs roughly $6,000. A commercial FPV drone rigged with an RPG warhead costs a few hundred dollars. The arithmetic is not subtle. The most consequential shift in infantry combat since the machine gun is being driven not by a technological breakthrough but by a cost curve — weapons cheap enough to be expendable, precise enough to hit a specific vehicle from 40 kilometers away, and small enough to fit in a backpack. Loitering munitions — drone-missile hybrids that fly to a target area, orbit until they find something worth killing, and then dive into it — have gone from a niche procurement category to the defining weapon of the 2020s in the span of a single war.

    What a loitering munition actually is

    The distinction matters because not every kamikaze drone is a loitering munition and not every loitering munition is a drone. A loitering munition launches, flies to a designated area, orbits while its operator searches for targets via a live camera feed, and then — on command — dives into the target and detonates its warhead. The operator can abort at any moment, redirect to a different target, or in some systems, wave off entirely and recover the munition. A one-way attack drone like the Iranian Shahed-136 is different: it follows a pre-programmed GPS route to a fixed target, more like a slow cruise missile than an orbiting hunter. Both are expendable. Both are cheap. But loitering munitions emphasize on-station search and human-in-the-loop terminal control, while one-way attack drones behave more like programmable missiles with wings.

    The operational taxonomy breaks into three tiers. At the tactical level — the infantry squad and platoon — the AeroVironment Switchblade 300 is the benchmark. It weighs 2.7 kilograms including launcher and carrying case, fits in a rucksack, launches from a tube, pops spring-loaded wings, and flies up to 10 kilometers with approximately 15 minutes of loiter time. Its electric motor is nearly silent. Its warhead is equivalent to a 40mm grenade — enough to kill a crew-served weapon position or disable a light vehicle. AeroVironment has built over 3,000 Switchblade 600s (the larger anti-armor variant) and announced a new Switchblade 400 at AUSA 2025 to fill the gap between the 300 and 600. The U.S. Army’s fiscal year 2026 budget requests $68 million for 294 all-up rounds and 98 fire control units under the LASSO program, with the goal of equipping five brigade combat teams.

    At the tactical-operational level, Russia’s ZALA Lancet-3 — developed by ZALA Aero Group, a Kalashnikov subsidiary — has arguably been the single most effective loitering munition of the war in Ukraine. The Lancet weighs 12 kilograms with a 3-kilogram warhead, offers 40 to 60 minutes of loiter time, and reaches terminal dive speeds exceeding 300 kilometers per hour. Open-source analysts have documented a hit rate estimated between 50 and 70 percent against high-value targets including M777 howitzers, CAESAR self-propelled guns, S-300 air defense systems, Buk missile launchers, and T-64 tanks. A single-person disposable launcher completed combat testing and entered serial production in January 2026. Russia authorized export of the Lancet in February 2026 — a signal that domestic production has finally exceeded domestic demand after years of being reserved exclusively for the Russian armed forces.

    At the strategic end, Israel’s IAI Harop represents the original concept pushed to its limit — six hours of loiter endurance, an anti-radiation seeker that can autonomously detect and home on radar emissions, and a range that allows it to operate as a suppression-of-enemy-air-defense weapon without risking a pilot. The Harop’s predecessor, the Harpy, has been in service since the 1990s. Turkey’s STM Kargu — a quadcopter-format loitering munition — operates at the opposite end: short range, small warhead, but swarming capability that multiple nations are actively pursuing for urban and close-quarters scenarios.

    What Ukraine proved

    The war in Ukraine didn’t invent loitering munitions — the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan was the first large-scale demonstration, where Azerbaijani Harop and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones systematically dismantled Armenian armor and air defenses. But Ukraine scaled the concept from demonstration to doctrine. Both sides now operate integrated kill chains where small ISR drones maintain continuous surveillance along axes of advance, feeding target data to FPV drones and Lancet-type munitions that close the engagement within minutes. The “find-fix-finish” loop that once required a forward observer, a fire direction center, and an artillery battery now requires a soldier with a tablet and a tube launcher.

    The cost asymmetry is the strategic lesson. A Switchblade 300 fired at a $2 million howitzer produces a 300:1 cost-exchange ratio in the attacker’s favor. A Lancet hitting an S-300 air defense radar is even more lopsided. Defending against these weapons with conventional air defense creates its own asymmetry — using a $50,000 to $100,000 Iron Dome interceptor against a $20,000 drone is economically sustainable only if the defender has orders of magnitude more money than the attacker, which is rarely the case in a prolonged war. In saturation attacks, the cost-exchange ratio can exceed 100:1.

    The countermeasure arms race is already underway. Ukrainian forces build chain-link cages around artillery pieces to disrupt Lancet terminal guidance. Inflatable decoys and wooden dummy vehicles draw strikes away from real equipment. Electronic warfare systems jam GPS and sever datalinks. Russian EW units knocked out 90 percent of Ukrainian drones in the war’s opening months, according to a Royal United Services Institute study. But the attackers adapt — flying higher, faster, in larger salvos mixed with decoys, using onboard AI for terminal guidance that doesn’t depend on a datalink. AeroVironment’s Switchblade 600 Block 2, delivering in early 2026, includes improved processors for automated target recognition — a step toward terminal autonomy that reduces the operator’s role to authorizing the strike rather than guiding it.

    The proliferation problem

    At least six nations — the United States, Russia, Israel, Turkey, China, and Iran — actively export loitering munitions. China’s CH-901 competes directly with the Switchblade 300 in export markets across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Iran’s Shahed-type systems, while technically one-way attack drones rather than true loitering munitions, have proliferated to Russian forces, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Hezbollah. North Korea tested AI-equipped reconnaissance and suicide drones in March 2025. The technology is not exotic — an FPV drone frame, a guidance module, a small explosive, and a camera feed constitute a functional loitering munition at the low end, which means non-state actors can build them from commercial components.

    The autonomous weapons debate intersects here in uncomfortable ways. Most current loitering munitions operate with a human in the loop — an operator approves the final strike. But systems like the IAI Harpy can autonomously detect, classify, and engage radar emitters without human approval. AeroVironment’s automated target recognition is moving the Switchblade toward a model where the AI identifies and recommends targets and the human merely confirms. The gap between “human confirms AI recommendation” and “AI acts unless human overrides” is narrower than it sounds, and it’s closing with every software update.

    What it means for infantry

    The hypersonic weapons race gets the headlines because the platforms cost billions and the physics is dramatic. Loitering munitions are the opposite — cheap, unglamorous, and proliferating so fast that doctrine can’t keep pace. The U.S. Army is planning a new production facility in Salt Lake City to boost monthly Switchblade output from 500 units to several thousand. Russia’s Lancet has graduated from a niche weapon to a single-person-portable system in serial production with export authorization. The weapon that will define infantry combat for the next decade isn’t a platform any single country can control. It’s a category — and the category is expanding faster than any arms control framework can contain it.

    We cover loitering munitions alongside directed energy weapons, electronic warfare, drone swarms, and the full spectrum of technologies reshaping conflict across our Battlefields of the Future course — where the question isn’t which weapon wins but what happens when every infantry squad on earth has precision strike in a backpack.