China Is Gaining Too Much Military Leverage in This Area: State of Play
A war with China might not be lost on the battlefield. It could be lost on a factory floor. How?
Beijing has tightened its chokehold on the rare earth magnets inside almost every American weapon, cutting off buyers with any military tie and rejecting anything bound for defense use. Here is the scale of the dependence, the war-game math, and the slow scramble to fix it.
China’s Ledger:
- China controls roughly 70% of rare earth mining, 90% of processing, and 93% of magnet manufacturing.
- As of December 1, any firm tied to a foreign military is largely cut off, and military-use requests are automatically rejected.
- The net now catches foreign magnets containing as little as 0.1% Chinese-origin heavy rare earths.
- Beijing is scaling up its munitions production five to six times faster than the United States.
By the numbers:
- Unclassified war games show US forces running out of many munitions within a week of a Taiwan Strait fight.
- The dependence is physical: a Virginia-class submarine needs about 9,200 pounds of rare earths, an F-35 more than 900.
- A national stockpile worth an inflation-adjusted $42 billion at its Cold War peak is now valued under $1 billion.
- The Government Accountability Office puts the cost of closing those gaps at $18.5 billion.
What Next?
- The Pentagon took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials and set a $110-per-kilogram price floor.
- It added a $150 million loan to expand the Mountain Pass site and signed a 10-year deal for 100% of a new magnet plant’s output.
- Even so, only one company, Noveon, currently makes rare earth magnets in the United States.
This is the critical security gap the media misses until it is too late: a superpower that can design anything but cannot always build it alone. The fixes are real and bipartisan, but they will not be ready before 2027, and Beijing knows it. Deterrence in the Pacific now depends as much on magnets and mines as on carriers and jets.
-The Editors
