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Minerals at War: Strategic Resources and the Foundations of the U.S. Defense Industrial Base – by Gracelin Baskaran and Samantha...

The CSIS paper traces the United States’ century‑long pattern of mobilizing massive state resources—stockpiles, price controls, financing, and foreign procurement—to secure critical minerals during wartime, then dismantling those mechanisms in peacetime. Post‑Cold War drawdowns hollowed out domestic mining, processing, and expertise, leaving the defense industrial base dependent on foreign, often adversarial, supply chains. Historical analysis shows that reliance on stockpiles without industrial capacity and neglect of refining have repeatedly undermined security. The authors argue that mineral security must become a permanent, integrated policy, not an episodic crisis response.