Pentagon works with U.S. rare earths company to counter China's dominance

Secretary Doug Burgum: They also weaponize it, because if anybody in the rest of the free world said, "Hey, we're gonna start mining and we're gonna start refining," then they would target that particular mineral, dump a quantity onto the market, drive the price down. So they're used often the way you might use spices in cooking because if you add just a little bit of a certain rare earth element, say, to a magnet, that enables that magnet to be both very small and very powerful. But if you look back, whether it was the railroads or aluminum for aviation prior to World War II or the semiconductor industry, there's actually a long tradition of really critical industries where our country needs to bring on line infrastructure and I think this is one of those industries.

Author: Jon Wertheim, Graham Messick

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