Beijing Owns the Building Blocks of Modern Defense — and America's Permitting Bureaucracy Is Helping Them Keep It
Beijing Owns the Building Blocks of Modern Defense — and America's Permitting Bureaucracy Is Helping Them Keep It
If you wanted to design a national security vulnerability from scratch, you could hardly do better than the one the United States has spent the last three decades building for itself in critical minerals. China controls an estimated 60 percent of global rare earth mining and — far more critically — approximately 85 to 90 percent of global rare earth processing and refining capacity, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency. These are not obscure industrial inputs. Rare earth elements and critical minerals are the foundational materials of modern defense systems, advanced electronics, and the energy infrastructure Washington is simultaneously mandating through green energy policy. The United States, in a display of strategic negligence that ought to alarm anyone paying attention, has made itself dependent on the People's Republic of China for the raw materials of its own military capability.
What "Critical Minerals" Actually Means
The term gets thrown around loosely, so precision matters. The U.S. Department of the Interior maintains a list of 50 minerals designated as critical to national security and the economy. These include rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium — essential components of the permanent magnets used in F-35 engines, guided missile systems, and military radar — as well as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite, which are central to battery technology across both defense and commercial applications.
The United States has meaningful domestic deposits of many of these minerals. The Mountain Pass mine in California remains the only active rare earth mining operation in the country, and while it has resumed production after years of closure, it ships the majority of its ore to China for processing because the domestic refining infrastructure was allowed to atrophy almost entirely. That is the core of the problem: even where America mines, it often cannot refine, and China has deliberately built the refining chokepoint that gives it leverage over the entire global supply chain.
According to a 2023 report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, China has invested more than $100 billion over two decades in securing mineral supply chains globally — locking up deposits in Africa, South America, and Central Asia through state-directed investment that American private capital, hobbled by regulatory uncertainty, has been unable to match.
How Washington Built This Vulnerability
The United States did not stumble into this position accidentally. It was constructed, piece by piece, through a permitting regime that makes domestic mineral development one of the most legally and financially treacherous undertakings in American industry.
The average time to obtain a mining permit in the United States currently runs between seven and ten years, according to figures cited by the National Mining Association — compared to two years in Canada and Australia, both of which have environmental standards comparable to or stricter than America's in key respects. The process involves overlapping review requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a patchwork of state-level regulations, each of which provides a litigation hook for environmental groups whose explicit strategic goal is to prevent domestic resource development regardless of national security implications.
The Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada — one of the largest known lithium deposits in the Western Hemisphere — spent years in legal limbo after environmental groups and tribal representatives filed suit to block its development. The Resolution Copper project in Arizona, which could supply up to 25 percent of U.S. copper demand, has been tied up in permitting disputes for more than a decade despite receiving congressional authorization. These are not edge cases. They are the predictable output of a regulatory architecture designed, whether intentionally or not, to make saying no the path of least resistance.
Meanwhile, Beijing has faced no such constraints. Chinese state-owned enterprises operate with government backing, diplomatic cover, and none of the environmental litigation that American developers must budget for before turning a single shovel of dirt.
The Defense Implications Are Not Theoretical
In 2010, China briefly cut off rare earth exports to Japan during a territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands. The episode lasted only a few months before international pressure forced a reversal, but it demonstrated clearly that Beijing views its mineral dominance as a coercive instrument — and is willing to use it. American defense planners have noted the lesson. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that multiple U.S. weapons systems contained components dependent on Chinese-sourced rare earth materials, and that the Department of Defense lacked a comprehensive strategy to address the vulnerability.
The situation has not materially improved since. In 2023, China imposed export controls on gallium and germanium — metals critical to semiconductors and night-vision technology — and followed in 2024 with restrictions on graphite exports. Each of these moves was a calibrated demonstration that China understands the leverage its mineral position provides and is prepared to exercise it.
For a country that spends nearly $900 billion annually on national defense, the United States has been remarkably casual about allowing a strategic adversary to control the supply chain for the materials that defense capability depends upon.
The Conservative Case for Action
Some on the right have been skeptical of industrial policy in this space, concerned that government intervention in mineral markets risks replicating the distortions of the green energy subsidy regime. That concern is legitimate as far as it goes, but it misreads the nature of the problem.
The primary obstacle to domestic critical mineral development is not a market failure requiring government subsidy — it is a government failure requiring regulatory reform. The permitting system is not a neutral market mechanism; it is an actively hostile bureaucratic environment that imposes costs and timelines on domestic producers that their Chinese state-backed competitors never face. Fixing that is not industrial policy. It is removing the government's thumb from the scale.
The conservative agenda here is straightforward: streamline NEPA review for projects on federal land with clear national security applications, establish firm permitting timelines with automatic approval provisions when agencies miss statutory deadlines, limit the grounds for litigation that can delay approved projects by years, and treat mineral independence as a strategic priority coordinate with energy dominance — not as an afterthought to environmental policy.
The CHIPS and Science Act demonstrated that there is bipartisan appetite for addressing supply chain vulnerabilities in semiconductors. Critical minerals present a vulnerability of comparable or greater strategic significance, and the regulatory solution is considerably less expensive than the subsidy approach used for chips.
The Cost of Continued Inaction
The window for correcting this imbalance is not indefinitely open. China is not standing still. Beijing continues to invest in processing capacity, global supply agreements, and the diplomatic relationships that secure access to deposits on every inhabited continent. Every year of American permitting paralysis is a year in which the gap widens and the cost of closing it grows.
Energy dominance became a signature conservative policy achievement when the regulatory barriers to domestic oil and gas development were systematically dismantled. The same logic applies with equal force to critical minerals. The resources are in the ground. The technology to extract and refine them exists. What is missing is the political will to remove the bureaucratic obstruction that prevents Americans from accessing what is rightfully theirs.
A nation that cannot mine its own defense materials is a nation that has quietly outsourced its sovereignty — and Beijing is counting on Washington to keep doing exactly that.
