Ukraine as Proof of Concept
The Rehearsal
The chokepoint archipelago is not theoretical. It is being stress-tested daily on the battlefields of Ukraine, where the world’s largest drone war has exposed the precise vulnerabilities this analysis predicts.
No other nation has scaled from improvised workshops to millions of unmanned systems per year under active bombardment. According to Ukraine’s First Deputy Minister of Defense Ivan Havryliuk, Ukraine now produces up to 200,000 FPV drones monthly. This production miracle has changed how Ukraine fights and how Russia responds. It has given NATO an early glimpse of the defense industrial landscape of the future.
But the deeper lesson is where that scale stops. Lithium salts. Neodymium magnets. Sensors. Chips. Optics. These are the chokepoints of twenty-first century warfare, and they remain dominated by foreign suppliers—above all, China.
The Dependency Arc
At the beginning of 2024, nearly 90 percent of the total value of imported drone components came from China. By the first half of 2025, this share had dropped to about 38 percent, with most of the remainder sourced from European Union suppliers.
This shift sounds like progress. It is not. The components that remain China-dependent are the ones that cannot be substituted: the magnets in every motor, the germanium in every thermal sensor, the microelectronics that no amount of Ukrainian ingenuity can fabricate domestically.
Consider Motor-G, a Ukrainian startup that launched mass production of drone motors in December 2024. According to the Kyiv Independent, the company now produces 100,000 motors per month—likely the largest drone motor plant in Europe. A genuine localization success. Yet Motor-G still imports its high-grade magnets, copper wire, and specialized winding machines from China or other foreign sources. If those supplies were cut, motor production would stall within weeks.
The pattern repeats across every critical subsystem. Ukrainian firms design and assemble thermal cameras that compete with Chinese models—but rely on imported lenses and sensors from China, because China controls over 80 percent of global germanium production. Ukrainian teams flash firmware and build flight controller stacks—but import the MCUs and sensors from Taiwan, Japan, and China. Ukrainian companies assemble battery packs using Korean Samsung cells—because importing cells is unavoidable without domestic raw materials and chemical production capacity.
A joint research report by the Security Innovation Initiative and the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry found that nearly all surveyed firms—except one—continued to import at least some components from China. At the same time, 76.7 percent indicated they would abandon Chinese sourcing altogether if competitive alternatives became available.
The will exists. The alternatives do not.
The Magnets Problem
FPV drones rely on neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets in their motors. These magnets provide the high torque and lightweight efficiency that make modern unmanned systems viable. Alternatives exist—ferrite magnets are cheap and corrosion-resistant—but they are far weaker, unsuitable for high-performance or weight-sensitive applications.
In practice, NdFeB magnets remain indispensable. And China controls the supply chain from end to end. According to the International Energy Agency, China leads refining for 19 of 20 strategic minerals, with an average market share of 70 percent. For rare earth magnets specifically, China controls over 90 percent of production. In 2024, China produced an estimated 260,000 tons of rare earth magnets. The United States produced virtually none.
In April 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce imposed export restrictions on seven rare earth elements—samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium—plus certain NdFeB magnet products. The effects were immediate. By mid-2025, some defense contractors reported samarium offered at sixty times its normal price. Other rare earth inputs rose fivefold. Automakers slowed production. Defense suppliers warned of higher system costs.
For Ukraine, which consumes magnets at unprecedented volumes in FPV and strike drone production, such disruptions translate directly into battlefield risk.
One Ukrainian drone manufacturer, Vyriy Drone, set out to build FPV drones with fully local components to avoid reliance on Chinese parts. They succeeded for most components—but not the magnets. The firm still had to use Chinese-made neodymium magnets, citing “China’s global monopoly” on those items.
Even innovative local manufacturing cannot escape the archipelago.
Russia’s Countermove
The Chinese supply chain vulnerability is asymmetric. Russia has found ways to navigate it that Ukraine cannot.
Despite Chinese export restrictions, enforcement has remained inconsistent. According to a Telegraph investigation, Chinese firms exported at least $63 million worth of parts and materials to Russian companies sanctioned for drone production between 2023 and 2024—aircraft engines, microchips, metal alloys, camera lenses, carbon fiber. Ninety-seven different Chinese suppliers provided these materials.
More troubling: Russian firms are gaining a strategic upper hand by using their financial muscle to acquire factories or entire production lines in China, often outbidding rivals. According to one Ukrainian manufacturer, he had negotiated with a Chinese factory producing 100,000 motors per month and hoped to purchase the entire output for his own company. Before he could finalize the sale, the Russians bought the factory outright.
Another manufacturer reported being told by a Chinese supplier that he could now order motors almost without waiting in line. When he asked why, the answer was that the Russians had purchased the production lines of that firm and relocated them inside Russia. The Russian buyer had become self-sufficient.
This is the archipelago being exploited in real time. One belligerent vertically integrates the chokepoints. The other remains exposed.
The Skydio Warning
Ukraine is not the only country affected.
In October 2024, Chinese authorities sanctioned Skydio, America’s largest drone manufacturer, cutting off essential battery supplies. Overnight, the company meant to provide an alternative to Chinese manufacturers found itself scrambling for new suppliers, forced to ration batteries to customers including the U.S. military.
China’s message was unmistakable: supply chain warfare had begun in earnest.
The same vulnerabilities plague America’s closest allies. Britain’s experience with Chinese economic penetration offers a preview of what coordinated supply chain warfare looks like when deployed at scale. Despite recent government intervention to reclaim British Steel from Chinese ownership, the UK remains deeply embedded in Chinese-controlled supply chains across critical sectors—from wind turbines that could potentially be shut down remotely to nuclear power plants still partly owned by state-backed Chinese investors.
Strategic Implications
For the United States and NATO, the strategic implications are immediate. Ukraine’s vulnerabilities mirror those of the Alliance itself. The same magnets, lithium chemistries, and optical components Ukraine cannot secure are embedded across Western defense programs.
If China can constrain Ukraine today, it can coerce NATO tomorrow.
Every F-35 contains rare earth magnets processed in China. According to CSIS analysis, rare earths are crucial for F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, and Predator unmanned aerial vehicles. Every military communication that crosses the Pacific rides cables that Chinese ships could cut and Chinese vessels could delay repairing.
Ukraine is not just a case study. It is an asset. According to the Atlantic Council, Ukraine’s drone industry has lessons for NATO—a defense industry producing at wartime scale already exists on the Alliance’s border. To replicate that capacity in Western capitals would take years and vast sums.
The harder choice is also the most strategic: to absorb the political and bureaucratic costs of integration now, rather than inherit the same exposure later. Multi-year contracts, co-production, and supply diversification are not favors to Ukraine—they are safeguards for NATO. The path forward is not about charity but about foresight: whether to treat supply chains as a battlespace and act before dependencies harden into vulnerabilities.
Ukraine has shown what can be built under fire. The question for allies is whether that arsenal remains an isolated national experiment or becomes a shared foundation for collective security—before China’s supply chain warfare renders such cooperation impossible.
The rehearsal is complete. The architecture is in place. What remains is the performance—and whether we will be ready when it begins.