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Iran War Exposes America’s Unfixed Supply Chains

But there’s a far bigger problem here, as Mark Bowden has written about: America lacks the components for these weapons as much as it lacks the capacity to build them. And the biggest missing components are the rare earth minerals used in missile guidance and other essential systems.

According to the South China Morning Post, the U.S. has just two months of rare earth supply left for its military needs. Now, a Chinese-owned paper may be intentionally saying that, because China has a near-monopoly on the processing of rare earths, the raw materials of which are not that rare. But it certainly wouldn’t be surprising, since rare earths have been used as a tool for leverage in the endless U.S.-China trade wars. China has been turning export controls off and on over the past year, though they were up in January and February by about 20 percent relative to 2025. A high-level meeting will be held on rare earth exports next month.

The Trump administration has been buying stakes in domestic rare earth companies and mining operations, and they are generally aware of the need for resiliency and self-reliance, as the Biden administration was. But destroying the electric-vehicle sector in America, as the Trump administration did, eliminated an additional market for rare earths that might have sustained domestic producers. And the cronyism at work in these financing deals—the recent stake in USA Rare Earth is marred by the fact that Howard Lutnick’s former bank Cantor Fitzgerald is the company’s chief placement agent—suggests that the main goal is less restoring domestic supply chains and more nest-feathering.

Even if they were legitimate deals, rare earth mining and processing can take years to set up, with bombs dropping every day. This means the duration and intensity of our war effort is in some very real way at the discretion of China. That will almost certainly become a subject in upcoming trade negotiations, as the SCMP report indicates.