AP News72%
US companies are stepping up to cut reliance on China for critical minerals used in key weapons 58%
By DIDI TANG69% JOSH FUNK56% RODRIQUE NGOWI71%
8/3/2026, 4:09:29 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Framing Effect, with Pessimism Bias as the most egregious example at 18.9% saturation with 179 hits. Analysis detected 1,166 faulty-reasoning hits from 945 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47.5% and a BS Rank of 58% (12,196 of 28,846 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 57.70% of the article peer group.
EXETER, N.H.
(AP) — Tucked inside a New Hampshire office park, a small refinery zaps mining waste with electricity to tease out critical minerals needed for key U.S. weapons systems, including missiles used in the Iran war.
It can play a part in helping America break the chokehold China has on processing critical minerals, but it will take up to a year and a half to build a new factory as the Trump administration pushes to expand domestic production.
The company, Phoenix Tailings, recently got a $500 million loan from the Pentagon to ramp up its work, after starting out eight years ago as a backyard lab seeking a cleaner metal-refining method.
It’s just the latest critical minerals company the government has backed.
The task that workers carry out in heat-resistant hazmat suits and sealed face masks has become more urgent as the Iran conflict draws down key munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and THAAD interceptors.
While the White House is demanding military contractors speed up production, it’s also imposing stricter rules banning them from sourcing critical minerals from China.
“It will be a tall order and a challenge to replenish these stocks and scale up in the timeframe needed to meet defense demand and regulations,” said Anthony Balladon, chief commercial officer and a co-founder of Phoenix Tailings.
He said the company is working hard to boost capacity.
Although the U.S. is quickening its pace to build domestic supplies of critical minerals free of control from its most formidable rival, it will likely take years for companies across the industry to build new mines and boost production of the high-powered magnets essential in many high-tech applications.
Extracting some of the hard-to-pronounce elements from existing mine waste can help satisfy the growing demand in the meantime, but it will likely take several companies to do that.
Another US magnet maker looks to France for raw materials
Arnold Magnetic Technologies for years relied on China for samarium to produce the extremely strong, stable-in-high-temperatures magnet that goes into precision-guided missiles such as Tomahawks.
That doesn’t work anymore.
For Arnold, the solution to getting the critical minerals it needs has come from a relic of Europe’s past rare-earth industry — abandoned mining dirt in the French city of La Rochelle.
Solvay, a Belgium-headquartered chemical company, stopped separating and processing rare earths from the mined dirt in the 2000s.
That was when China was building up most of the world’s processing capacity with a determination to dominate the industry.
China weaponized that near-monopoly last year by choking off its flow of processed critical materials and forcing the U.S. government to back off during a trade war.
Solvay then restarted work and has added other rare earths this year, including samarium.
“This ramp‑up is driven by several factors: rapidly growing demand for permanent magnets, increased geopolitical focus on supply chain security, and strong customer demand in Europe and the United States for more diversified, resilient and traceable sources of supply,” a Solvay spokesperson said.
For Arnold Magnetic Technologies, paying more to get its supply from Solvay instead of China has not been a deal-breaker, because the samarium-cobalt magnets it makes account for only a small cost in a weapon system, said Matt Blake, Arnold’s CEO.
“They are not the absolute cost drivers,” he said.
Plus, the company says the surge in demand for magnets has worked in its favor.
Some concerns remain.
The U.S. is dependent on imports of the critical mineral tungsten, with China controlling roughly 80% of the global mine supply and an even larger share of processing, according to Brodie Sutherland, CEO of Patriot Critical Minerals Corp.
Sutherland, whose company seeks to explore and mine tungsten in the U.S., is concerned that America will not be able to get by without China-sourced tungsten after a Pentagon-imposed deadline of Jan.
1, 2027.
Efforts to ramp up U.S. production will take years, he said, and in the meantime, the Pentagon and its defense contractors will need to rely on existing inventories, expanded recycling and limited non-China sources.
The Iran war and Trump’s China order create pressure and opportunity
The need to increase production has become more urgent as renewed fighting with Iran digs into the U.S. military’s already diminished stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors, including Patriots and THAADs, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, according to a recent analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
It also has raised concerns that the military would have diminished firepower in any potential future conflict with China.
CSIS warned in May that it could take at least three years to replenish stockpiles of Tomahawks, Patriots and THAADs, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors.
At the same time, President Donald Trump has announced stricter controls on defense contractors sourcing critical materials from China.
“It is the policy of the United States that not only the finished equipment deployed by our military, but also the critical materials and components necessary to manufacture, maintain, sustain, and repair that equipment, are sourced domestically or from allied nations,” the July 20 executive order says.
Lockheed Martin, which makes THAADs and many other weapons systems, said “we continuously assess the global rare earth supply chain to ensure access to critical materials that support our customers’ missions.”
Several other major U.S. defense contractors, including Raytheon Technologies and Northrop Grumman, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Balladon, of Phoenix Tailings, was confident in U.S. companies.
“Ultimately, with the right support and partners across the industry, we think we can make it happen,” he said.
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Speakers
4speakers27%attributed speech693writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageBrodie Sutherland
104 attributed words41% of attributed speech89% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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