There is a single sentence in a 2025 defense-industry study that ought to end a certain kind of complacency in Washington. Researchers at Govini, a firm that maps the Pentagon’s supply chains, found that more than 80,000 parts across roughly 1,900 weapon systems incorporate just five processed minerals — and that the global supply of all five is dominated by China. The conclusion, in the report’s own words: nearly 78% of all Department of War (DoW) weapon systems are potentially affected. Renaming the department the “Department of War” changes the letterhead, not the arithmetic. Nearly four out of five American weapon systems depend, somewhere in their supply chain, on materials controlled by the country they are most likely to be used against.
The five elements are antimony, gallium, germanium, tungsten, and tellurium. None is a household name. Together they form a chokepoint on American military power more absolute than any adversary’s missile, and the uncomfortable part of the story is not that China built it. It is that the United States handed it over — deliberately, incrementally, and with ample warning, across decades of procurement decisions that treated the cheapest supplier as the best one.....
Here is where accountability has to move from the abstract to the specific, because “the supply chain runs through China” is a passive construction that hides a chain of decisions made by people with authority.
For thirty years, American defense procurement optimized for cost and efficiency in a globalized market that assumed supply would always be there. Refining these minerals is dirty, energy-intensive, low-margin work, and the United States was content to let China absorb the environmental cost and the capital expense while American primes bought the finished material cheaply. Every acquisition officer who picked the lowest-cost qualified part, every program that declined to fund a redundant domestic source because it blew the budget, every administration that treated critical-minerals warnings as a problem for the next one — each made a locally rational decision that added up to a strategic catastrophe. The Govini data showing 23% annual growth in these contracts since 2010 is the paper trail. This dependency was deepened on the watch of multiple administrations of both parties, long after the risk was understood.
And it was understood. The vulnerability of rare-earth and critical-mineral supply chains has been the subject of government reports, think-tank warnings, and congressional testimony for well over a decade. China telegraphed its intentions too — it demonstrated mineral coercion against Japan as far back as 2010. The information was never the missing ingredient. Political will was.