Odd Lots · Monday, August 3, 2026
The war in Ukraine and rising tensions over Taiwan have rekindled interest in tungsten's strategic importance, shifting military thinking away from technological superiority and towards attritional warfare scenarios where such materials are critical. This contrasts with the post-Cold War era's focus on a different kind of technological dominance.
“Now we've of course had another revolution and military affairs, we've had another sort of rethinking of what wars are going to be like, because we're four years now into the war in Ukraine and we've seen in Ukraine a battlefield that looks like the big battlefield of the twentieth century and it's still grinding on, and so that makes you rethink our future.”
“And of course the other thing that's looming in the future is Taiwan, a conflict with Taiwan where you're going to be up against the biggest manufacturing power on the planet. Are you going to be able to technologically over master China in the way that the US in nineteen ninety over master. I don't think people expect that to be nearly so easy. So tungsten again comes into its own.”