Where is the U.S. currently importing the metals and minerals the DoD studied? Of the 72 metals surveyed, one country -- China -- currently produces 64. That's 89 percent; but when you examine the Pentagon's unclassified list of 19 identified metals and minerals designated as being in shortfall, China presently mines all 19.
That's a problem, when one of the scenarios posited in the report involves a one-year metals embargo instituted by China.
DoD's total projected cost to remedy the shortfall -- metals purchases just above $1.2 billion -- is a rounding-error in the world of federal spending, equal to about three hours of what the U.S. Government spends every day, 365 days a year. But that amount masks the true economic cost of a U.S. mining industry capable of responding to the Pentagon's purchase offer. With a typical mine requiring as much as $1 billion in construction costs before the first kilogram of material is pulled from the ground, the assumption that the U.S. would be home to operating mines for each of the 23 metals and minerals deemed to be at-risk is a collective assumption that the private sector is ready to wager $20-plus billion to extract the metals the Pentagon may seek to stockpile.
Right now, with the U.S. rated worst-in-the-world in the time it takes to bring a mine into production -- seven to ten years, on average -- and with U.S.-based metals exploration spending slumping from 20 percent of the global total 20 years ago to about 8 percent today, odds are the metals the Pentagon needs most won't be mined in America. That is, unless the DoD becomes an advocate of mining reform, in addition to being a willing buyer of critical metals.
Regardless of the most meticulous planning, war is always a "come as you are" exercise; the same is true for the materials that form the input end of the defense industrial base. And in that regard, the United States is in some peril. The DoD scenario postulates a one-year conflict commencing in 2015, followed by a 3-year recovery and regeneration phase ending in 2018. In Australia, a mine being explored today would likely be producing metals in 2015; in Canada, it might take until 2017 to complete the permitting process. But in the United States, a deposit of any of the 23 key resources on the Pentagon's list discovered today won't run the permitting gauntlet until 2020 to 2023.
Little wonder a 2008 defense study found that shortfalls in 22 metals had "... already caused some kind of significant weapon system production delay for DoD."
This "single-point of failure" in Pentagon parlance is beyond the purview of the newly-released report, but it is no less a clear and present danger.
The question now, in a Washington where the government is funded from month-to-month, and strategic thinkers are savants who see an hour into the next news cycle, is whether the U.S. Government can muster a sustained policy to reverse our metals dependency -- before the shortfalls posited in the Pentagon's hypothetical scenarios become all too real.
