The United States military can’t fight a full-scale war without Chinese permission. That’s not a warning—it’s a fact.

Every high-tech weapons system we rely on—from F-35s to hypersonics to the targeting systems on our damn drones—runs on rare earth elements. And right now, according the U.S. Geological Survey, over 70% of those come from China. The rest? A hodgepodge of scraps from places like Estonia, Malaysia, and our one operational U.S. mine at Mountain Pass, which—we kid you not—ships the ore back to China for processing.

It gets worse. The real problem isn’t digging rare earths out of the ground. We’ve got the dirt. The problem is the processing—the complex, chemical-heavy, dirty work of separating those minerals into usable form. That entire step was offshored decades ago in the name of deregulation and cost-cutting. China didn’t just step in—they took over.

Now they’ve got us by the supply chain.

And it’s not just the “exotic” stuff. Scandium—used in advanced aerospace alloys to lighten and strengthen critical components—is imported 100% from China. So is yttrium, which makes your radar work, your lasers lock, and your targeting systems see in the dark.

Washington’s latest genius move? Twist Ukraine’s arm to export some of its rare earths. Never mind that Ukraine is a warzone. Never mind that 40% of its rare earth deposits sit under Russian occupation. This is like betting your last bullet’s buried under enemy tanks and hoping you can dig it out before they see you coming.

Meanwhile, China isn’t just watching. They’ve already weaponized rare earths before. Ask Japan—they got cut off cold in 2010 over a fishing boat dispute. That wasn’t a one-off. They are withholding the minerals to the U.S., now. It’s a warning shot. And we missed it.

Companies like Lockheed Martin, Apple, Tesla—they all depend on Chinese rare earths. So does the Pentagon. China pulled the plug on export licensing, and our production lines will begin to stall. Jets don’t fly. Missiles don’t guide. You want to explain to a Marine in the South China Sea that his systems are down because we outsourced our backbone?

This didn’t happen by accident. We let it happen.

We killed domestic processing with red tape and short-term thinking. We let China dump prices, dominate the tech, and become the only game in town. We traded industrial sovereignty for stock prices and now pretend we’re surprised.

And now we’re scrambling—dumping money into pilot projects, talking up “alliances,” and pretending Ukraine will bail us out with a few truckloads of dirt. It’s theater. Until we control mining, refining, and manufacturing—all of it, soup to nuts—we’re just hoping the next war comes with a grace period.

So here’s the bottom line:
No rare earth supply chain = no modern military.
No processing capability = no independence.
No urgency = no future.

This is not a red/blue problem. This is a red alert.