The Trump administration plans to spend $3 billion on minerals projects because someone finally told them you can't build missiles out of hope and treasury bonds. The Iran conflict burned through weapons stockpiles faster than a retail trader burns through his Robinhood account on Tesla weeklies, and now the Pentagon needs lithium and rare earths and all the other stuff they should have stockpiled before starting a f*cking war.
China controls most of the global supply of critical minerals. This seemed fine until it wasn't. Turns out depending on your geopolitical rival for the raw materials needed to bomb other geopolitical rivals creates what experts call a strategic problem. The White House reached this conclusion roughly forty years after everyone else.
Three billion dollars sounds impressive until you remember that's what the defense industry spends on a single fighter jet that doesn't work. Now they're spreading that same amount across an entire supply chain rebuild. They'll fund mining projects in places Americans can't locate on a map to extract minerals they can't pronounce so Raytheon can replenish inventory depleted in a conflict most people already forgot about.
Retail traders will see this headline and buy penny stock mining companies headquartered in Vancouver with assets in Nevada that haven't produced anything since 2019. They'll watch their positions drop 60% in three weeks and blame market manipulation instead of their own inability to read a cash flow statement.
The real comedy is that spending $3 billion to reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains requires buying Chinese mining equipment, using Chinese processing technology, and competing with Chinese state subsidies that make $3 billion look like couch money. But sure, this will definitely work, just like every other time the government tried to rebuild domestic manufacturing by throwing money at it and hoping the free market would figure out the details.
Nothing says prepared military superpower like scrambling for rocks after you've already shot all your bullets.
Photo by History in HD on Unsplash
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