China has discovered that the bureaucratic machinery of export licensing provides a precision instrument for modulating access to critical materials. It can approve allies and deny adversaries. It can grant licenses to commercial applications while blocking military end uses. It can tighten the tap during trade negotiations and loosen it as concessions are extracted. It can harvest granular data about Western supply chains with each application, mapping exactly which defense contractor needs tungsten for which munition program and which semiconductor fab requires tungsten hexafluoride for which node technology.

That looks like a nice way of getting data. I guess they already had it to some extent, but now they can really dig deep into anything by requiring more info about what the tungsten is going to be used in, with actual scientific and engineering explanations and data about uses in things, specially high end infrastructure like chipmaking.

The DM53 and DM63 rounds used by Leopard 2 tanks require tungsten. No tungsten, no penetrators. No penetrators, no armor-defeating capability. The causal chain is that direct.

Drones are already making tanks take new roles in war, being much less about tank vs tank and more about heavy support for advancements on open ground while under indirect, direct fire and drone attack, which don’t use tungsten, so I don’t think this specific part of the article is as important.

Interesting article overall, specially in regards to how China is going about the control of critical minerals, though I didn’t see sources which makes it hard to see how accurate everything is.