The Quiet War Beneath Our Feet

By Mohamad Hammoud

Lebanon – As Washington and Beijing trade bans and threats, the real battlefield lies in the dirt — where a handful of rare minerals could decide who controls the future of military power.

Drive past the barren flats of California’s Mojave Desert, and you will see no barbed wire, no missile silos — only a pale-green lake of wastewater glinting beside the Mountain Pass mine. Yet, according to Reuters, every pound of ore tugged from that pit contains neodymium and dysprosium, metals that end up inside the guidance fins of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets. The paradox is brutal: the most advanced aircraft on earth cannot leave the hangar without rocks first touched by Chinese hands.

Mountain Pass sends its ore to China because no US plant can refine it cheaply — or cleanly — enough. As one Pentagon supply-chain officer told CNN last March, “We can mine greatness, but we still have to ship it halfway around the world to make it useful.” This dependency is more than an economic quirk; it’s a strategic liability. Rare earth elements — seventeen minerals few Americans can name — are the backbone of modern warfare, embedded in everything from night-vision goggles to precision-guided missiles.

Beijing’s Leverage Play

That dependence turned into leverage on May 20, 2025, when customs officers in Shanghai quietly added four rare-earth oxides to an export-license watch list. The South China Morning Post quoted a ministry source who called the move “purely technical,” yet shares of American defense contractors sagged within hours. The Guardian noted that the list matched metals used in Tomahawk cruise-motor magnets — an overlap too precise to be a coincidence.

Beijing had flipped the semiconductor script. Washington barred China from buying high-end chips; Beijing responded by threatening to ground the planes that those chips power. A White House economic adviser, speaking anonymously to AP News, called the symmetry “elegant and terrifying.” The message was unmistakable: in this era of financial warfare, China would not play defense.

A Supply Chain on Life Support

America once refined its own rare earths, but the last US solvent-extraction tanks shut down in 1998 after price crashes engineered — ironically — by Chinese state miners. The US Geological Survey estimates that rebuilding capacity would take 6 to 8 years and cost at least $3.7 billion, assuming environmental lawsuits don’t multiply.

According to Bloomberg, MP Materials, the owner of Mountain Pass, has begun construction of a Texas refinery backed by Pentagon grants. Yet the plant will process only light rare earths; the heavy kind — terbium, ytterbium, holmium — will still travel abroad. “We are building half a bridge,” a company engineer told The New York Times. “The river keeps flowing.”

For Washington, the challenge isn’t finding rare earths — it’s refining them at scale. China’s dominance stems not just from reserves but from decades of mastering the complex, toxic chemistry of separation. It built an industrial ecosystem that others dismantled for environmental reasons.

The World Beyond China

In Australia, Lynas Rare Earths operates the only major non-Chinese refinery, with expansion planned for 2026 with US backing. Namibia and Brazil hold promising deposits, though both face environmental and logistical hurdles.

Washington is also partnering with Canada on refining and Japan on recycling. However, even if every project succeeds, a CSIS report cited by CNN warns capacity will still fall 40 percent short of Pentagon needs by 2030. The race is not about who owns the rocks — it’s about who owns the chemistry.

Minerals as Megaphone

What looks like geology has become political theater. When China tightened export permits, state media revived slogans about “self-reliance”. Washington answered with its own: the Inflation Reduction Act set aside $1.1 billion for strategic minerals, and Congress began debating a “Rare Earth Readiness Act” to stockpile magnet metals.

But symbolism outpaces logistics. The Pentagon calls rare earth dependency a “critical national security risk,” yet the fix extends beyond any election cycle. Analysts note that even if US output triples, China will still dominate refining for another decade. Both powers claim self-reliance while relying on each other’s weakness to project strength.

The Future Written in Magnets

On a humid July afternoon, a Baltimore factory hums with robotic arms assembling magnets for Navy railgun prototypes. A foreman, a former Marine, holds a sintered disc and says, “This is where great-power war ends — on a magnet the size of a coin.”

The plant still imports neodymium from China, because the US alternative would triple costs. Until that math changes, strategy papers and refinery grants mean little — the minerals beneath Chinese soil will keep writing the last line.

The quiet war beneath our feet is already here.