WASHINGTON — The United States possesses roughly two months of rare earth supplies available for military use, a constraint that could determine how long Washington can sustain its ongoing campaign against Iran, according to a report published by the South China Morning Post citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. The disclosure, first reported on March 10 and subsequently amplified by MINING.COM, Foreign Policy, and other outlets, has cast into sharp relief a strategic vulnerability that American policymakers have acknowledged for years but never fully remedied: the Republic’s near-total dependence on the People’s Republic of China for the processed minerals that power its most advanced weapons systems.
The implications are not abstract. The first thirty-six hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran consumed more than three thousand precision-guided munitions and interceptors, according to an analysis published by Foreign Policy drawing on research from the Colorado School of Mines’ Payne Institute. Every Tomahawk cruise missile, every JDAM guidance kit, every interceptor fired from an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer contains rare earth permanent magnets — neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium — without which the guidance and propulsion systems that define American precision warfare cannot function. Restocking the magazines that protect American forces and project American power is, therefore, not merely a question of manufacturing capacity. It is a question of mineral access.
China controls approximately sixty percent of global rare earth mining and more than ninety percent of the refining and separation stages that convert raw ore into usable industrial metals and magnets, according to the International Energy Agency. That dominance, which the IEA has described as the most concentrated supply chain among all critical minerals, means that even when rare earth ore is extracted on American soil — at MP Materials’ Mountain Pass facility in California, the only operating rare earth mine of scale in North America — much of the processing historically occurred in Chinese facilities. Beijing’s imposition of export controls on seven heavy rare earth elements in April 2025, followed by a sweeping expansion in October 2025 that introduced extraterritorial licensing requirements for any product containing even trace amounts of Chinese-origin rare earths, demonstrated that this dependency is not theoretical. It is operational, immediate, and weaponizable.
The South China Morning Post reported that Washington’s limited rare earth inventory would dominate discussions when President Trump sits down with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a meeting that has already been delayed. According to the Post’s sources, Beijing appeared less eager for a deal than Washington — a negotiating asymmetry that the mineral deficit only sharpens. The report noted that rare earth supplies would factor into broader bilateral trade talks at a moment when the bilateral tariff truce remains in force only through November 2026.
The Trump administration has not been idle. On February 2, 2026, President Trump announced Project Vault, described by the White House as a landmark initiative establishing a domestic strategic reserve for critical minerals. The Export-Import Bank of the United States approved a direct loan of up to ten billion dollars for the project — the largest financing in EXIM’s ninety-two-year history — designed, according to the agency, to shield domestic manufacturers from supply shocks and expand American production and processing of critical raw materials. An additional two billion dollars in private capital is expected to participate alongside the federal financing, bringing total capitalization to approximately twelve billion dollars, according to MINING.COM. The Center for Strategic and International Studies characterized Project Vault as an independently governed public-private partnership in which private commodity partners — including Hartree Partners, Traxys, and Mercuria — will store essential raw materials at facilities across the country, with manufacturers identifying which materials are critical and committing financially to ensure availability.
The broader architecture of the administration’s response extends well beyond stockpiling. At a February 4 Critical Minerals Ministerial hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — attended by Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, along with representatives of fifty-four countries — the United States signed eleven new bilateral critical minerals frameworks, according to the State Department. EXIM disclosed that over the past year it had issued fourteen point eight billion dollars in letters of interest for critical minerals projects, including four hundred fifty-five million for rare earth development and processing in the United States.
The Pentagon, for its part, has moved aggressively to restructure the defense supply chain. In July 2025, the Department of Defense took a fifteen percent equity stake in MP Materials through a four-hundred-million-dollar investment in convertible preferred stock and warrants, according to MP Materials’ investor filings. The deal included a ten-year price floor of one hundred ten dollars per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium and a decade-long magnet offtake agreement, as reported by the Motley Fool and Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. An equity stake of between eight and sixteen percent in USA Rare Earth followed, backed by a 1.3-billion-dollar non-binding letter of intent for senior-secured financing from the Department of Commerce’s CHIPS program, alongside approximately 277 million dollars in direct federal funding, according to recent reporting. These positions represent an unprecedented shift: the Pentagon has moved from passive buyer to anchor investor in the upstream, midstream, and downstream segments of a supply chain it previously left entirely to the private sector and, by extension, to China.
Yet the hard deadline that will test whether these investments translate into operational independence arrives on January 1, 2027. Under DFARS regulation 252.225-7052, no Pentagon contract may include samarium-cobalt magnets, neodymium-iron-boron magnets, tantalum metals, or tungsten powders sourced from China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea at any stage of production — from mining through finished magnets, according to the regulation’s text published by the Department of Defense. Defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are already overhauling their supply chains, as reported by multiple industry outlets, but the scale of the challenge is formidable. The United States currently imports approximately ten thousand tonnes of rare earth magnets annually from China, according to analysts cited by industry publication Ainvest, and no fully scaled American mine-to-magnet supply chain yet exists.
Beijing, meanwhile, is consolidating rather than retreating. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026 through 2030, explicitly calls for strengthening the competitiveness of its rare earth industry and enhancing its export control systems, according to Reuters reporting carried by MINING.COM and Kitco. Rare Earth Exchanges, an industry intelligence service, assessed that the plan transforms rare earths from an industrial asset into a strategic instrument, with domestic demand projected to absorb a growing share of production — reducing exports from roughly fifty percent historically to perhaps twenty-five percent by 2030. Chinese exports of rare earth magnets to the United States fell twenty-two point five percent in the first two months of 2026 even as total Chinese magnet exports rose eight point two percent, according to customs data reported by InvestorNews — a pattern suggesting that Beijing is calibrating supply with surgical precision, maintaining global market share while constraining the specific adversary most dependent on its output.
The Iran campaign has made the arithmetic inescapable. The National, citing Reuters, reported that the Pentagon asked mining companies the day before strikes began to help boost supplies of thirteen critical minerals used in semiconductors and weapons — every one of which is dominated by Chinese production. Foreign Policy’s analysis noted that adversaries are watching not American posture or platforms but how fast missile magazines get emptied and whether they can be refilled. A force that has burned deep into its interceptor stockpile, the analysis observed, must accept more risk in another theater or ration its defenses — a calculus that extends directly to the Taiwan Strait.
Amanda van Dyke, founder of the Critical Minerals Hub and a veteran mining-sector investment professional, has warned that global metals and minerals output must at least double to maintain current economic levels, while mining faces lower ore grades and a discovery drought. The intersection of that structural deficit with the acute demands of active combat operations creates a strategic predicament without modern precedent: the world’s most powerful military, prosecuting strikes with ferocious resolve, sustained by a mineral supply chain substantially controlled by its principal strategic competitor.
Project Vault, the DFARS deadline, the equity investments, the allied mineral frameworks — these are the pillars of a response whose ambition matches the scale of the threat. But rare earth mining and processing facilities require years to develop, and bombs are falling now. The question confronting the American defense establishment is not whether the Republic recognizes its vulnerability — it manifestly does — but whether recognition has come in time. Two months of inventory is not a strategic reserve. It is a stopwatch.