The Pentagon just dropped a $700 million hammer on two little-known companies in Indiana and North Carolina—Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies—in a long-overdue bid to build something this country hasn’t had since disco: a real, functioning rare-earth magnet supply chain.
If you’re wondering why that matters, here’s the short version: the U.S. military runs on tiny magnets you’ll never see. Fighter jets, nuclear subs, drones, chip manufacturing, satellites, industrial motors—if it moves, rotates, or stays in the air, it’s got Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnets buried in its guts. And for decades, we’ve depended almost completely on China to make them.
So now, in the year 2025, Washington has finally woken up.
The Players: Small, Scrappy, and American
Before this week, most Americans had never heard of Vulcan Elements or ReElement Technologies.
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ReElement Technologies, based in Fishers, Indiana, actually refines the rare-earth materials we need. They take old electronics, end-of-life magnets, and mined concentrate and turn them into high-purity oxides—exactly the stuff China has had a monopoly on.
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Vulcan Elements, operating out of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, takes those oxides and turns them into finished metals and the actual NdFeB magnets—the high-powered kind that make a jet engine spool up and a drone stay airborne.
Together, they say they can crank out up to 10,000 metric tons of magnet material in the next few years. For a country with almost no domestic production, that’s like going from a dry well to a fire hydrant.
And then there’s the third leg of this stool:
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MP Materials, the company running the Mountain Pass mine in California, is the only operating rare-earth mine in America. Mountain Pass digs the stuff out of the ground—ReElement refines it—Vulcan turns it into metal and magnets. For once, someone in Washington figured out that you can’t defend a nation on PowerPoints alone.
The Money: A Big Bet from a Government That Usually Blinks
The Office of Strategic Capital—yes, it’s part of the Pentagon, despite sounding like a hedge fund that invests in battle tanks—is offering $620 million to Vulcan and $80 million to ReElement. All “conditional commitments,” meaning the government keeps the checkbook closed until the companies hit their marks.
The cash comes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—Congress’ big, blustery, bipartisan admission that maybe outsourcing America’s entire industrial spine wasn’t such a hot idea after all.
There’s also a $50 million CHIPS Act incentive riding shotgun to help pay for equipment. The Commerce Department gets a slice of equity in Vulcan for its troubles—because even in Washington, nobody shows up without a fork when the pie comes out.
The Stakes: Peace Through Strength… or Just Peace Through Not Being Stupid
Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering Emil Michael didn’t mince words when he said these loans “build on the swift and decisive actions” to rebuild America’s ability to make its own damn magnets.
Translated from Pentagon-ese:
We finally realized China owns our supply chain, and that’s bad.
Ryan Lindner, the OSC’s investment chief, put it plainer: “This is how we rebuild our industrial base.”
For once, they’re both right.
Because here’s the truth: if you can’t make the little things—magnets, chips, alloys—you can’t make the big things—jets, submarines, missile defense networks. And if you can’t make the big things, you stop being a superpower and start being a cautionary tale.
Bottom Line
This isn’t about magnets.
This is about whether America still knows how to build things that matter.
Vulcan, ReElement, and MP Materials are now carrying a load the size of a battleship: proving that the U.S. can rebuild a critical-minerals supply chain after sleepwalking through 30 years of offshoring.
If they pull it off, we get a stronger economy, a stronger military, and less dependency on a rival who’d love to see us trip over our own shoelaces.
If they don’t?
Well… we better hope we like buying magnets from Beijing forever.