The Iran conflict has revealed a doctrine of war focused on global rather than strategic impact, the CEO of supply-chain firm Exiger said at Semafor World Economy.
Earlier in the war, Iran attacked Ras Laffan, a Qatari LNG facility.
The site “has nothing to do with the war-fighting effort,” said Brandon Daniels, head of Exiger, which maps supply chain vulnerabilities for the US federal government.
Tehran chose the target because it produced two-thirds of the helium used by South Korea’s chip manufacturing industry.
“They attacked Ras Laffan not because of its strategic importance in battle,” Daniels said, “but because of the diplomatic and economic impact.”
The strike, Daniels argued, exposed how global supply chains often rely on single points of origin, and the vulnerability of key bottlenecks to such attacks is “terrifying.”
He cited “one spot in the United States that if it went out of operation today, every semiconductor that you’re using would be immediately removed from use.”
Another potential future example, he noted, is lithium salts, vital to modern batteries: They are only made in Japan and China, and a conflict in that region would lead to the West “not being able to do energy transition work, not being able to build drones at scale, not being able to do any of the things we want to do.”