Washington seeks a vertically integrated domestic rare-earth supply chain and rapid prototype culture to secure defense and AI systems.
Washington is accelerating efforts to rebuild a domestic rare earth elements (REE) supply chain to protect AI, autonomous systems, and precision weapons from foreign interruption.\n\nMP Materials, owner of the Mountain Pass mine in California, is pitching an end-to-end model: expand mining, produce separated oxides, and fabricate permanent magnets onshore. A recent public–private deal with the Department of Defense makes DoD MP’s largest shareholder, guarantees a 10-year price floor, and secures long-term magnet purchases to back a new 10X Facility for magnet manufacturing and heavy rare earth separation. MP says it has invested nearly $1 billion and halted concentrate exports to China.\n\nPolicy makers warn that without follow-through on refining and magnet production, the United States risks reshoring raw extraction only to ship critical stages abroad. Congress is urged to fund magnet fabrication, offtake procurement, and integration with defense manufacturing, and to pair industry scaling with national labs and universities—an approach likened to a “Manhattan Project for magnets.”\n\nExperts also stress linking materials security to faster military innovation: adopt rapid prototyping, public design repositories, and embedded frontline testing to mirror the iterative drone developments seen in Ukraine.\n\nBipartisan support is possible by framing the effort as both industrial renewal and strategic insulation from Beijing’s leverage.