Rebuild Our Defense Industrial Base From the Mine Up
The U.S. can learn much from the ongoing war in Ukraine but perhaps there is no more important lesson than to reinvest in America’s defense industrial base and our productive capacity.
From the munitions to the materials used to produce them, U.S. productive capacity is a shell of its once war-winning self. Our inability to produce the weapons and supply the components and even minerals needed for our weapons systems has become an extraordinary vulnerability.
Consider our struggle to scale up production of 155-millimeter artillery rounds, the critical munition to keep Ukraine’s artillery in action against Russian aggression. At the start of that war, the United States was producing just 14,000 155-millimeter artillery rounds a month. In key moments of the conflict, the Ukrainians have fired as many as 8,000 rounds a day and the Russians far more.
The U.S. Army has now invested billions of dollars to ramp up production to 80,000 155-millimeter rounds a month. But getting there has taken three years, and even that level of production could be swallowed in a major war of our own against another industrial power like China.
More troubling still is the loss of control of the supply chains needed to produce weapons and munitions. From artillery rounds to drones, cutting-edge anti-drone systems and laser guided bombs, the materials and components we need for production are stretched across the globe and often controlled by geopolitical rivals. A single munition today can require as many as 500 suppliers from dozens of countries.
We can’t possibly hope to deter China – or other potential adversaries – if they control key pieces of our defense industrial base. Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened with China’s dominance of global mineral supply chains.
China’s control of critical minerals far exceeds just news-making rare earths—it stretches across the periodic table. And Beijing is now openly using this control as a means of geopolitical extortion.
As the U.S. has responded to unfair Chinese trade practices, Beijing has retaliated with export controls and even outright bans on mineral exports, including minerals essential to U.S. national security. Consider a recent ban on exports of antimony, a metal essential to various technologies but most notably weapons systems. Antimony is used to produce more than 300 types of U.S. munitions.
To the Trump administration’s credit, it has made mineral security a day-one issue. In his “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, President Trump has directed the government “to establish our position as the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals, including rare earth minerals.” That policy directive notably instructs the Department of Defense to, “take all appropriate steps to ensure that the National Defense Stockpile will provide a robust supply of critical minerals in event of future shortfall."
What the administration recognizes is that our current overreliance on mineral imports – notably from China – is untenable and that the U.S. can and must produce far more of these essential materials.
The U.S. has vast mineral resources – once a key strength of the vaunted arsenal of democracy – but a series of policy missteps has let U.S. productive capacity whither. Our complete reliance on antimony imports is a prime example.
The U.S. even has a world-class antimony resource in Idaho but a proposed mine there has awaited permitting for a decade, just receiving its initial approvals this January. The mine will need another 50 state and federal approvals before hopefully commencing production in 2028. While China tightens its grip on global mineral supplies, our ability to respond has been tied up in self-imposed red tape. That must end.
Along with far-reaching and forceful permitting reform, vastly expanding the U.S. National Defense Stockpile – as Trump’s executive order would allow – should be a priority. There’s ample precedent to do so.
Today, despite the rising risks of a high intensity U.S.-Chinese conflict, the value of materials in the National Defense Stockpile has fallen 98% since its height during the Cold War. That robust stockpile provided the material needs estimated for a high intensity five-year conflict with the Soviet Union. It was a stockpile of deterrence used to support domestic productive capacity and that of key allies.
Today’s meager stockpile – a vulnerability China is well aware of – provides our adversaries enormous strategic leverage. Any prolonged, high-intensity conflict would pose crippling problems. Simply outlast an initial American military response and watch American planes and artillery fall silent for lack of munitions.
Now is the moment to vastly expand our National Defense Stockpile and use the authority afforded the Department of Defense to ramp up domestic mineral production, rebuilding the secure supply chains our economic and national security require.
We won the Second World War on the shoulders of America’s unrivaled productive capacity. That advantage is now unquestionably China’s. Deterrence is built on strength, but the weakness of our defense industrial base sends all the wrong signals at an extraordinarily dangerous moment.
John Adams, an Army brigadier general (retired), is president of Guardian Six Consulting and a former deputy U.S. military representative to NATO’s Military Committee.
