In the last forty‑eight hours, the missile math around Iran has taken a darker turn. Iran is now assessed as being able to produce “over 100” ballistic missiles a month, while the United States and its allies are turning out perhaps half a dozen top‑end interceptors in the same period. Each Iranian round may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars; each Patriot, THAAD or equivalent interceptor fired at it can easily run into the low millions. On its face, that gap looks like a budgetary and industrial problem. In reality, it is a minerals problem in disguise.
In The Mineral Imperative, I argued that modern power rests on command over the periodic table: whoever controls the minerals controls the machines, and whoever controls the machines shapes the century. In The Minerals of War: Criticality in an Age of AI and Artillery, I pushed that argument into the battlefield, showing how every “good night’s work” of cruise‑missile diplomacy quietly converts stockpiles of tungsten, antimony, tantalum, silver and rare earths into wreckage. What the Iran confrontation is revealing, in real time, is a further twist: the mineralisation of missile defence itself. It is not just tanks, drones and precision munitions that are built from scarce, contested minerals; the shield that is supposed to protect our cities and allies is, too.
That shield is not holding up as well as we thought. The Pentagon now admits that US Patriot interceptor stocks sit at roughly a quarter of what its own war plans require, after two years of draining inventories over Ukraine and repeated deployments to the Middle East. Gulf partners like the UAE and Qatar, whose entire survival strategy rests on dense Patriot and THAAD cover against Iranian missiles, are drawing from the same thin pipeline of interceptors and the same upstream pool of critical minerals. As Trump’s team quietly explores using the Defence Production Act to squeeze more missiles and interceptors out of the industrial base, we should be honest about what that really means: not just more shifts at Raytheon and Lockheed, but a far more aggressive competition for tungsten, rare earth magnets, antimony, tantalum and gallium in a world already stretched by electrification and AI.
Missile math is mineral math
Rubio’s warning sounds simple enough: Iran can roll 100 ballistic missiles off the line each month, while the US manages perhaps six or seven interceptors capable of knocking them down. Iran supplements those missiles with swarms of relatively crude one‑way attack drones, trading exquisite precision for volume and saturation. On the other side of the ledger sit Patriot PAC‑3 and THAAD batteries in the Gulf, Aegis destroyers in the region, and US and Israeli air defence systems, all firing interceptors whose unit cost can be five, ten or even seventy times that of the missile or drone they are trying to stop.
That asymmetry is usually framed as a question of money and factories. It is that – but it is also a question of what those weapons are made of. A modern missile interceptor is not just a steel tube with fins. It is a compact bundle of high‑spec steels and nickel‑based superalloys, tungsten or other very dense materials in its kill vehicle, antimony‑containing explosives, tantalum‑rich capacitors and a lattice of rare‑earth‑magnet motors and actuators steering it in flight. Its radar and seeker electronics ride on gallium‑ and germanium‑based semiconductors, themselves dependent on fragile and concentrated supply chains. In The Minerals of War, I described how every batch of cruise missiles fired in Ukraine or the Middle East quietly chips away at global stocks of tungsten, antimony, tantalum and rare earths. The same logic applies here: Iran’s missile output and the US‑Gulf response are, beneath the headlines, two different ways of burning through the same narrow band of minerals.
The offensive systems are not mineral‑cheap either. Iranian short‑ and medium‑range ballistic missiles, as well as Shahed‑type drones, draw on high‑strength steels and aluminium alloys, composite materials, solid propellants, electronics and small but significant quantities of specialty metals in their guidance systems. But there is a crucial difference: Tehran has oriented its arsenal around relatively simple, good‑enough designs that can be produced in quantity and sourced through diversified, often opaque supply routes linking it to Russian and Chinese industrial ecosystems. Washington, Abu Dhabi and Doha, by contrast, rely on exquisitely engineered interceptors and sensor systems whose mineral inputs are tightly bound up with Western, Japanese and Korean tech supply chains – and with civilian demand for EVs, wind turbines and data‑centre hardware.
The Shahed drone is the purest expression of this imbalance. Depending on whose numbers you believe, a Shahed‑136 class drone can cost anything from tens of thousands of dollars in a stripped‑down domestic configuration to roughly 50–200 thousand dollars on export contracts, while the Patriot, SM‑6 or similar interceptor used to kill it routinely costs in the low‑single‑digit millions. For every dollar Iran spends on a Shahed, one recent estimate suggests it can cost the UAE twenty to twenty‑eight dollars to intercept it – and, crucially, the interceptor embodies far more tungsten, antimony, tantalum, rare‑earth magnets and gallium‑based electronics than the plywood‑and‑commercial‑chip drone it destroys. Trump can invoke the Defence Production Act, and Washington can pour $12 billion into Project Vault, but without a deliberate plan to expand upstream supply of those minerals, we are still fighting a Shahed war with a Patriot‑grade mineral burden – a cost asymmetry that no amount of clever contracting can erase
The Patriot bottleneck is a minerals bottleneck
When The Guardian reported last year that the US had only about 25% of the Patriot interceptors needed to execute its own contingency plans, most readers understandably saw it as a procurement story: too few missiles, too many commitments. Industry sources and defence‑tech outlets have since sketched out the fuller picture: years of limited production, high consumption rates over Ukraine, repeated surges to the Middle East, and finite capacity in the highly specialised foundries and fabrication plants that make key components. If it were simply a matter of bolting more aluminium and steel together, the problem would be serious but fixable. It is not.
As I argued in Critical Minerals for Defence, the defining feature of defence minerals is not just their importance but their concentration and non‑substitutability. Tungsten’s density and high‑temperature performance make it hard to replace in penetrators and certain guidance and control components. Antimony’s role in stabilising propellants and enhancing explosive performance is not easily replicated at scale without performance and safety trade‑offs. Tantalum’s combination of high capacitance and stability under stress makes it the capacitor material of choice in many aerospace and defence electronics. Rare earth elements, particularly neodymium, praseodymium, samarium and dysprosium, sit at the heart of permanent magnets used in everything from radar gimbals to fin actuators.
These are exactly the minerals where the United States and its allies are most exposed. China dominates rare earth mining and processing, controls key gallium and germanium output, and is a major player in antimony. Tungsten production is heavily concentrated in China and a small number of other jurisdictions. Tantalum supply runs through a handful of countries, including Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with all the governance and ESG complications that implies. In The Mineral Imperative and The Mineral Imperative: The Hidden Cost of Technological Supremacy, I described this as the quietest form of subjugation: strategic dependence disguised as globalisation. The Patriot “shortage” is therefore not just a question of how many missiles Raytheon can assemble in Arizona; it is a reflection of how much tungsten, antimony, tantalum, rare earths and associated processing capacity the West can secure and divert from civilian uses into air defence.
This is where Project Vault comes in – and where, I would argue, it still falls short.
From Project Vault to a missile‑minerals reserve
Project Vault, the new US critical minerals stockpile scheme, is being sold as a $12 billion backstop against China’s chokehold on key materials. EXIM financing, private‑sector contributions and long‑term offtake commitments are supposed to build a strategic reserve covering all sixty minerals on the USGS critical list, from aluminium and copper to antimony and zirconium. In my own writing on Project Vault, I welcomed it as a necessary – if overdue – first step in treating minerals with the same seriousness we once reserved for oil. But I also argued that, set against the scale of the Mineral Imperative, even a multibillion‑dollar vault looks more like a pilot project than a comprehensive shield.
The Iran war brings that imbalance into sharp relief. The Minerals of War made the point that every sustained high‑tech conflict is, implicitly, a multi‑thousand‑tonne critical‑minerals event. The Ukraine war, over four years, has seen tens of thousands of missiles and hundreds of thousands of drones and guided munitions consumed by both sides, backed by Western shipments of Patriot, NASAMS, IRIS‑T and other air‑defence rounds. Even on conservative assumptions, the tungsten, antimony, tantalum and rare earths locked up in that hardware would make a visible dent in global production over time. Now layer on an Iran confrontation in which Iran can fire 100 ballistic missiles a month, each inviting one or more intercepts, and you begin to see how quickly a US‑Gulf‑Israel air‑defence campaign could chew through both missile and mineral stockpiles.
Project Vault is explicitly designed as a cross‑sectoral buffer: a way to keep EV factories, chip fabs and defence contractors supplied through temporary shocks. What it does not yet do is recognise that missile defence is emerging as a sector in its own right from a minerals perspective. The composition and timing of Vault’s purchases, and of any future “Vault‑2” expansions, will determine how much tungsten, antimony, tantalum, rare earths and gallium are available for Patriot batteries in Poland, THAAD sites in the Gulf, and Aegis ships in the Mediterranean when it matters. In that sense, we should think of a portion of Project Vault not just as a generic industrial reserve but as a missile‑minerals reserve – a stockpile whose explicit purpose is to underwrite the defensive shield that US strategy now assumes will protect its own forces and its partners from Iran‑style arsenals.
DPA without a mineral plan is theatre
The Trump administration’s reported deliberations over invoking the Defence Production Act to accelerate munitions output are understandable. After years of drawn‑out conflicts and episodic crises, stockpiles of everything from Patriot interceptors to 155mm shells have been run down faster than they can be replenished. Congress is alarmed; allies are nervous; planners are discovering that “surge capacity” on paper does not always translate into real‑world throughput. The DPA is one of the few levers the White House can pull on short notice.
But a 1950s law designed for a steel‑and‑oil war economy can only do so much in a world where the binding constraints lie in specialty metals and processing steps controlled half a world away. The DPA can prioritise contracts, unlock capital expenditure, and coordinate industrial mobilisation. It cannot conjure new tungsten mines, antimony smelters, tantalum refineries or rare earth separation plants overnight. It cannot force Chinese or Russian‑aligned producers to keep selling gallium or germanium into US‑allied supply chains if they decide that withholding them is strategically useful. In The Mineral Imperative: The Hidden Cost of Technological Supremacy, I warned that we are marching into a technological war with no supply chain to feed the front. The DPA debate around Iran shows that we are also, in an important sense, trying to fight a missile war with no mineral plan for the shield.
This is where the policy conversation has to move next. We cannot keep treating “munitions production” as a self‑contained industrial problem and “critical minerals” as a vaguely green or tech‑sector issue. As Critical Minerals for Defence and The Minerals of War both argued, defence demand is the under‑priced, under‑modelled fifth driver of the Mineral Imperative, sitting alongside development, decarbonisation, and digitalisation. Iran’s 100‑missile‑a‑month capacity is forcing us to see that, at least in the realm of air and missile defence, this is no longer a theoretical concern.
Gulf air defence as a mineral sink
Nowhere is this clearer than in the Gulf. The UAE and Qatar have spent the better part of two decades building an air‑defence architecture whose core rationale is straightforward: in a crisis, Iranian missiles must be intercepted before they can devastate Abu Dhabi, Dubai or Doha. Patriot and THAAD batteries dot their territory; US and European aircraft and ships sit on call to plug any gaps. These systems are often analysed in terms of their coverage envelopes, engagement timelines and integration with American and allied command‑and‑control networks. They are rarely discussed as what they also are: a standing stockpile of defence minerals in hardware form, maintained at high readiness a few hundred kilometres from Iran.
From a mineral‑flow perspective, every Patriot battery in the UAE represents a claim on US‑ and allied‑controlled stocks of tungsten, rare earth magnets, gallium, antimony, tantalum and other speciality materials for years into the future. Every additional launcher or radar shipped to the region represents another increment of demand that must be balanced against Ukraine’s needs, NATO’s rearmament plans and civilian projects. If the scenario Rubio fears comes to pass – a sustained missile campaign in which Iran fires triple‑digit numbers of ballistic missiles a month, and Gulf plus US forces respond with dozens of high‑end intercepts per day – the UAE and Qatar will, in effect, be consuming missile‑grade critical minerals at a rate that has never been modelled in any mainstream energy‑transition or AI supply‑demand forecast.
This raises uncomfortable questions. Should Gulf buyers pay an explicit premium reflecting the mineral‑security cost of sustaining their interception rates? Should Project Vault or a similar stockpile run a dedicated tranche earmarked for allied air‑defence needs, whose drawdown triggers automatic replenishment via new mining and processing investments? Should Western governments start conditioning arms sales on Gulf participation in upstream critical‑minerals projects that expand global supply rather than simply bidding for the same finite resource? If, as I argued in The Mineral Imperative, nations that forget the mineral imperative become tenants in their own economies, what does it mean for small but wealthy states whose very survival now depends on imported stocks of missile‑grade minerals as much as on imported missiles?
Towards a missile minerals doctrine
Seen through this lens, the Iran missile crisis is not just another flare‑up in a troubled region. It is a stress test of whether Western governments have absorbed what the last decade of energy‑transition and tech‑supply‑chain debates have already taught us: that we live in an age of mineralised power, where every new domain of competition eventually collapses back to the periodic table. In The Minerals of War, I wrote that modern war is not only dollar‑expensive; it is critical‑mineral‑expensive. The events of this week suggest a corollary: modern missile defence is not only technically demanding; it is minerals‑hungry in ways we have barely begun to count.
A serious missile‑minerals doctrine would have at least three pillars. First, explicit recognition that air and missile defence is a distinct demand centre in the critical‑minerals system, with its own profiles for tungsten, antimony, tantalum, rare earths, gallium and germanium, and that this must be integrated into long‑term demand projections alongside EVs, batteries and AI hardware. Second, a stockpiling strategy that does more than accumulate generic “critical minerals”: it allocates specific quantities of particular minerals to particular strategic functions – including interceptors and radars – and funds the upstream investments required to replace those stocks after a crisis. Third, a diplomatic and industrial policy push that links arms sales, alliance commitments and access to Western defence technology to joint development of new mines, refineries and magnet plants, especially in jurisdictions that can diversify supply away from current chokepoints.
None of this will be cheap, quick or easy. But the alternative is to keep pretending that we can fight, or deter, a missile‑saturated adversary like Iran with a shield whose material foundations we have never properly secured. As I wrote in The Mineral Imperative: The Hidden Cost of Technological Supremacy, a technological civilisation runs on its minerals. In the age of 100‑missile‑a‑month production lines, so does its missile defence.
On paper, Washington is doing the right things: tightening defence‑procurement rules on Chinese components, threatening the Defence Production Act, and throwing $12 billion at a new mineral vault. In practice, stockpiles of both missiles and the minerals that make them are running dangerously low – and, by the Pentagon’s own timelines, it will be the mid‑2030s before America has enough domestic mine‑to‑magnet capacity to rebuild them at scale. We have banned Chinese parts faster than we have built alternatives, just as Beijing and Moscow are signalling that any metal or component with defence uses is fair game for restriction. I do not believe the US would have walked into this fight without thinking it had enough missiles; the uncomfortable question is what happens when this war is over, the arsenals are half‑empty, and the only countries sitting on ample stocks of both minerals and munitions are the ones we are trying to deter.
The minerals framing is exactly right, but it also raises a deeper allocation problem.
Many of the inputs you mention — rare earth magnets, gallium, tungsten, tantalum — are the same materials underpinning the energy transition and the AI build-out. As missile defence consumption scales, those sectors are no longer separate demand pools but competing ones.
At some point governments will have to decide which uses receive priority access in a constrained supply system.
In that sense the “mineral imperative” may ultimately become a strategic allocation problem, not just a supply problem.
You make an excellent point, and I hope that someone in authority is listening. I would hope that our leadership would reconsider giving/selling our armaments to other countries, such as Ukraine, which result in putting the US at a strategic disadvantage if/when we become engaged in a war. I would assume that our supply of armaments to NATO & Ukraine will cease at least until the Iran war is concluded, which may give Ukraine incentive to make a deal with Russia.