The US Department of Defense (DoD) will finance a pre-feasibility study for a new mining site in Nevada to extract a critical metal known as tungsten, which is used in the production of various defence platforms and systems.
Crucially, the government will pay for this long-term extraction effort using funds originally earmarked for emergency support to Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion under the Additional Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act (2022). These funds remain available until 30 September 2025.
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Around $6.2m will be redirected to begin with. There are seven more successive awards to follow, which will bring the total sum up to $314.9m. It is unclear whether the government will continue to redirect the funds to Ukraine after this instance.
Tungsten: properties
“Tungsten is an essential alloying metal for aerospace, ground vehicles, munitions, and many other defence systems”, noted Dr Vic Ramdass, acting assistant secretary of defence for industrial base policy at the DoD. “Developing a domestic source for tungsten is one of our top critical and strategic mineral priorities”.
Tungsten is used in defence for its density and hardness properties in military-grade steel production.
Moreover, the heat resistance of tungsten will only increase global demand with the rise of hypersonic capabilities. Such weapons must operate at 4,000mph, or five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), according to a GlobalData report. At such speeds, there are persistent technical challenges related to atmospheric heating, which increases exponentially.
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By GlobalDataUS revanchism in critical minerals
The fiscal shake-up will contribute to revanchist policy objectives laid out in Executive Order 14241 concerning ‘Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production’, issued by President Donald Trump on 20 March 2025.
“The United States was once the world’s largest producer of lucrative minerals,” the drafters of the executive order induced. “Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers’ mineral production”.
This veiled assertion of fear centres around China, on whom the US has specific dependencies for graphite. However, Chinese presence in American supply chains for other midstream commodities such as nickel and manganese is less significant, observed the Council on Strategic Risks in a report days after Trump issued the order.
Likewise, in February 2025, China’s commerce ministry implemented export controls on items related to tungsten and other similar critical minerals.
The previous US administration under former President Joe Biden similarly decried the value of tungsten in December 2024, as the administration’s waning days in office.
At that time, the DoD identified Canada as a global supplier of responsibly sourced critical minerals and the department sought to formulate a secure value chain with the country.
Of course, since then, such projects have naturally come under intense scrutiny following Trump’s continued threats of annexing the sovereign, Commonwealth country.
