National Security

After decades of watching “China become the world’s workshop as it snatches up industries, jobs and critical supply chains, [i]t’s time to restructure the global economy in our favor, and that means decisive action to shore up our most important industries,” writes Brig. Gen. John Adams (U.S. Army, retired), president of national security consulting firm Guardian Six LLC, in a recent piece for Industry Week.

COVID – which he says was “[t]the straw that broke the camel’s back,” left “[l]arge swaths of our economy (…) without an industrial base to ramp up in times of crisis, even when doing so is a matter of life and death. Scrambling to have auto manufacturers produce ventilators during a pandemic has certainly clarified the crisis.”

Writes Adams:

“Our mining industry is one of the most important pieces of the industrial supply chain that must be restored to American shores. China’s unrivaled position in mining and mineral supply chains provides an alarming view into how a dominant position in just one strategic industry can become a source of immense economic and geopolitical leverage.”

Using the United States’ reliance on Chinese supplies of Rare Earths as an example, Adams goes on to analyze the scope of our mineral resource security woes, most of which are home-grown.

Adams concludes: 

ARPN’s Dan McGroarty discusses President Trump’s decision to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur domestic REE development for The Economic Standard:

The Tech Wars Heat Up: U.S. Makes National Security Declarations to Spur Rare Earths Development

Forget the trade war – the tech war is heating up.  After weeks of Chinese threats that it could cut off U.S. access to the essential technology materials known as rare earths, the Trump Administration today took a counter-action of its own.

Jennifer Dlouhy has the story at Bloomberg News:  “Trump invoked the 69-year-old Defense Production Act — once used to preserve American steelmaking capacity — to remedy what he called ‘a shortfall’ in production of the super-strong magnets made with rare-earth minerals neodymium and samarium.”  In fact, the White House published five separate Title III declarations, carefully identifying each category of rare earths plus the powerful permanent magnets — and the smart bombs and precision-guided munitions — they make possible.

The Defense Production Act dates to the early months after North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.  Title III of the act requires the specific finding made today by the president:

“domestic production capability for separation and processing of Heavy Rare Earth Elements is essential to the national defense.

Without Presidential action…, United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the production capability for separation and processing of Heavy Rare Earth Elements adequately and in a timely manner.”

How will China respond to the new U.S. action?  And how quickly can the U.S. close the rare earths gap — with production today at zero, even as known U.S. rare earth resources exist — before China loses its leverage over materials the U.S. Government has deemed critical to “the national economy and national security?”

The U.S. and China have resumed trade talks after last month’s meeting between U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka broke a deadlock — but key issues remain far from settled. Against the backdrop of both sides preparing for a protracted battle, Jeff Green, president [...]

News headlines these days are full of doom and gloom. As the Guardian writes, “whether or not the world really is getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is.” Against this backdrop, it’s nice to see a little – albeit cautious – optimism [...]

While specialty and tech metals like the Rare Earths and Lithium continue to dominate the news cycles, there is a mainstay metal that has – for good reason – been making headlines as well: Aluminum.  Bloomberg recently even argued that “Aluminum Is the Market to Watch Closely in 2019.”  Included in the 2018 list of 35 [...]

In a new series for Capital Research Center, Ned Mamula, member of the ARPN expert panel, adjunct scholar in geosciences at the Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, and co-author of “Groundbreaking! America’s New Quest for Mineral Independence,” takes a closer look at Uranium – an “underappreciated energy source.”  In the four-part-part series, Mamula [...]

Out with the old, in with the new, they say. It‘s new year‘s resolutions time.  With the end of 2017 having set the stage for potentially meaningful reform in mineral resource policy, we outlined a set of suggested resolutions for stakeholders for 2018 in January of last year.  And while several important steps  were taken [...]

As America gets back into the swing of things after suffering from a collective “post-Thanksgiving rut,” James Clad, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense and current Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC, provides a good  recap of why we need to get our resource policy house in order from a national security [...]

“Now that President Trump has won agreement to replace NAFTA with the USMCA — the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement — he has an opportunity to build on that accomplishment, and broaden the benefits of trade to strengthen national security,” writes ARPN Principal Daniel McGroarty in a new op-ed for The Hill. The next step, says McGroarty, [...]

In an interview with InvestingNews.com, Simon Moores, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence’s managing director and a member of the ARPN panel of experts, discusses challenges relating to Lithium – one of the key materials underpinning EV battery technology. Moores says that big challenges still lie in bringing new supply to the market, but the situation is not [...]