The National Defense Stockpile

In 1942, with the United States fully at war, the Metals Reserve Company (MRC), a government-owned corporation, was actively buying the raw materials that kept American factories running. It spent the equivalent of roughly $42.9 billion in current dollars to acquire 50 strategic materials from 51 countries, purchasing tungsten, chromium, and tin at the source to supply American factories. This was an active procurement of materials in the global supply chain that were critical for national security (winning the war).

That company was quickly dissolved in 1945 and its holdings were liquidated. What survived it was a quieter instrument, the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act of 1939, which authorized the government to store materials in preparation for a future emergency rather than buy them on the open market when the need arose. That statute is the ancestor of today's National Defense Stockpile, the reserve of critical materials the United States still holds for war and crisis.

This group is managed by a unit within the Department of War called the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA Strategic Materials) from Fort Belvoir. It keeps roughly 50 material types across a handful of locations in the United States. Since the end of the Cold War, the stockpile’s value has shrunk from a $9.6 billion peak to $888 million by 2021.

Right now, after decades of drawdown, the government is trying to restore it. The FY2027 budget request frames its use of funds as fixing longstanding shortfalls in the stockpile. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act added $2 billion to the transaction fund that finances it, and in 2025 the Defense Department signaled its intent to buy up to $1 billion in materials. Even more recent instruments like Project Vault have a proposed $12 billion reserve to extend the effort beyond defense to commercial supply chains.

How we got here and how the NDS works

After the Cold War, the materials the NDS held were judged unnecessary, and Congress authorized their sale. Inventory that reached 46 million tons in 1961 shrank steadily, its value falling from $7.1 billion in 1992 to $888 million by 2021, with the Defense Logistics Agency declaring 99 percent of what remained as “excess” in 1997 and began vacating and selling off materials and locations. The premise, and false assumption, was that global markets would always provide. The restocking that’s happening now is a direct reaction to the geopolitical tensions with countries like China and Russia (who were increasingly treating exports as leverage) as well as disruptions to the global supply chain (that COVID so clearly exposed a few years back).

How they decide what goes in the NDS: every purchase starts with a war scenario. The Pentagon runs an assumed conflict through a model called RAMF-SM, estimates the equipment that would be lost and the materials needed to replace it, and turns that into stockpiling targets submitted to Congress biennially. The office that executes the plan is small: about 72 civilian staff under DLA Strategic Materials at Fort Belvoir, holding inventory across six sites in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, New York, and Arizona. Sales are managed to avoid distorting the market, moving through an Annual Material Plan reviewed by a Market Impact Committee.

NDS + Project Vault

It’s worth noting that the United States does not control a meaningful share of any global stockpile or resource in the NDS. Today, the reserve holds about 50 material types, from copper and nickel to antimony, lithium, and 16 rare earths, but in quantities too small to influence a market. Separately, to address some of the commercial supply chain risks, Project Vault (announced in February 2026) is a public-private effort to stockpile rare earths and other critical minerals for use by American companies. Its significance is that it is built to protect commercial supply chains, not only defense stocks, which is a parallel approach to safeguard U.S. national interests.

It’s worth highlighting a few of the materials that would truly have tough ramifications for commercial and defense use cases if there was a disruption:

• Antimony: Hardens ammunition and primers, and is used in flame resistant materials and solar glass. The US produces no antimony domestically, a gap China exploited with its December 2024 export ban, since suspended under the 2025 trade truce. The reserve has been buying since then.
• Rare earth magnets (NdPr): The basis for permanent magnets that steer guided munitions and drive the motors in electric vehicles and wind turbines. This is the clearest case of defense and energy demand competing for a supply constrained material.
• Titanium: Used in jet engines, airframes, and medical implants. It was the material behind the 692 percent increase in stockpile targets, an indication of how exposed American supply had become, particularly to Russian production (U.S. GAO).
• Cobalt and lithium: The core of battery chemistry, where military and grid-scale demand draw on the same limited sources.

Looking ahead, the government's approach is no longer just warehousing and holding forever. It is locking up price floors on critical materials, repositioning around key areas of risk in the supply chain, and reacting faster. In addition, Project Vault is taking the same approach yet with a longer list of materials and, for the first time, to commercial as well as defense users. Between direct purchases, price floors, offtake agreements, and equity, the Pentagon is assembling a toolkit that resembles the purchasing operation of the 1940s more than the passive stockpile strategy of the past 80 years since then.

Whether it scales depends on funding that has so far arrived in increments, including a $2 billion addition to the transaction fund and multi-year contract authority, against requirements the Pentagon models in the tens of billions.

Takeaway: What the United States let drain from its depots matters less than the tools it is now using to refill them. A stockpile hedges against a disruption after it hits; price floors, long term contracts with mines, and options contracts are all tools they are using to offset the impact of a supply shock. That shift, from storing tonnage to shaping how supply is sourced, is the real change, and it is already underway across rare earths, antimony, titanium, and other contested materials. This is also not a new approach, as it is the active-procurement model that the U.S. used to fuel the industrial machine to win WWII. The key question is whether Congress will continue to fund this approach long enough to sustain the trade wars and supply chain disruptions caused by a multitude of geopolitical events and power struggles.

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