Russian President Vladimir Putin recently ordered his government to produce a national roadmap for rare-earth extraction and processing. This move wasn’t another mining policy; he was defining national power. The Kremlin’s move follows China’s two-decade lead in dominating global mining, refining, and permanent-magnet and battery production.
China’s weaponization of supply chains has already left industries across the United States and Europe scrambling, since these materials quietly underpin every digital-age economy, not to mention every munition and weapon system. Such actions by Moscow and Beijing to secure their own mineral supply chains signal that despite the growing prominence of digital-age economies in the 21st century, economic and military capabilities are still constrained by industrial capacity. We described this as the rise of mineral powers in a recent essay.
The United States, by contrast, remains an innovator without a foundation. It designs world-class systems but depends on others for the materials that make them work—although that is changing now with a new “muscular” approach to financing projects. While the Pentagon’s 2023 National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) identifies supply-chain resilience as a national priority, Washington still lacks a basic performance metric for its own industrial base. For instance, the Department of Defense does not use a single “readiness-per-dollar” measure for industrial-base investments. Readiness is tracked at the platform level (i.e., mission-capable rates, supply availability, repair cycle times), while industrial-base actions remain fragmented across programs such as Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment (IBAS), Defense Production Act Title III, and Department of Defense Manufacturing Technology(ManTech). This hodgepodge approach results in bureaucracies spending billions on “resilience” without any standard way to assess what each dollar actually buys in surge or recovery capacity.
This strategic planning shortfall matters because adversaries understand that economic growth and technological advancements pair with military effectiveness. It’s just now becoming more obvious that controlling the entire material process (e.g., mines, foundries, refineries, and specialized fabrication plants), is what enables an economy and military to gain a comparative advantage in an era of strategic competition. China’s 2023 export controls on gallium and germanium were less about markets than about leverage; they showed how quickly strategic materials could become tools of coercion. Russia’s rare-earth roadmap fits the same pattern: hardening its economy for prolonged confrontation with the West. If the United States wants the NDIS to mean something beyond PowerPoints and Congressional briefings, it must translate industrial ambition into measurable readiness, bankable financing, and built-in redundancy.
Operationalizing the NDIS requires a playbook with three lines of effort: measurement, financing, and doctrine.
First, the Pentagon needs better measurement metrics. We propose three industrial-readiness metrics: Lead-time reduction (how long until a critical subcomponent is delivered under normal conditions), time-to-recovery (how many weeks production bounces back after a disruption), and platform elasticity (how a 10-20 percent supply-chain shock maps into mission-capable rates). These metrics provide the basis for a “readiness per dollar” calculus that Congress and the Pentagon can use to compare investments, monitor progress and link industrial policy to warfighting outcomes.
Second, there needs to be financial incentives for midstream manufacturers. Due to market risks and low profit margins, many businesses struggle to find capital to fund and run magnet plants, alloy melters, and rare-earth separation, because demand is difficult to predict, especially as China essentially runs a mineral cartel, making costs, supply, and demand murky in global markets. Fortunately, existing authorities suffice: Title III of the Defense Production Act allows offtake commitments and price floors; the IBAS program funds workforce and facility scale-up; the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) provides low-interest loans and credit guarantees for private investment. When layered together, we get what the energy sector uses: demand signal, patient capital, and private scale. Domestic deals, such as the billions pledged by the Pentagon and private sector companies to MP Materials to build a US magnet manufacturing facility, illustrate how such a stack works. But these deals cannot remain ad-hoc.
Third, there needs to be a defense industrial base doctrine that guides decisions through the acquisitions process of weapon systems and munitions. Supply-chain resilience must be treated like combat logistics; it’ s an operational imperative, not an administrative nuisance to be solved by an acquisitions officer. We recommend concentration-threshold triggers. For example, if 40 percent of any key material processing is sourced from a single country or firm, a domestic or allied alternative must be activated. Dual-qualified supply lines—one domestic, one allied—provide wartime options and peacetime flexibility. Allies are not just optional; they are force multipliers. America must embed cooperation frameworks like the Minerals Security Partnership and the US–Japan Critical Minerals Framework into its defense industrial base doctrine. Such surge playbooks should coordinate Australia’s rare-earth separation, Canada’s graphite and nickel capacity, and Japan’s magnet finishing. These materials, and many other import-dependent minerals and metals, are vital to American weapon systems and munitions. Such coordination avoids parallel buildouts, aligns subsidies with strategy, and leverages allied industrial bases instead of competing with them.
These three playbook approaches might seem bureaucratic compared with stealth fighters or warships, but the real surprise in any conflict will be the factory that couldn’t deliver—not the plane that couldn’t fly. As China’s 2025 export controls on medium and heavy rare earths demonstrated, the ability to choke US supply chains is already operationalized.
Deterrence depends less on “who builds the biggest bomber” and more like “who can re-qualify their magnet line in weeks when a competitor shuts ours down.” The alloys, magnets, and refining capacity of tomorrow will define whether the United States can mobilize and sustain its industrial base for the next crisis and conflict. Modern warfare begins in the furnaces and finishing rooms of allied industrial bases, not at an airbase or seaport.
Lt. Col. Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek is a US Air Force command pilot, nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College and the Payne Institute for Public Policy, and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University. He has published over one hundred articles on strategy and warfare.
Morgan D. Bazilian is the director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he was lead energy specialist at the World Bank and has over two decades of experience in energy security, natural resources, national security, energy poverty, and international affairs.
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Image: Watts Mine (Travis Morton, https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/mountain-pass-mine-california)
