Tungsten at the front line: why defense planners are racing to secure strategic metals

From armour-piercing munitions to missile systems, tungsten is woven into modern defense – yet the West’s reliance on Chinese supply is forcing a high-stakes rethink of national security strategy.

For decades, tungsten played a quiet but critical role in Western defense systems — from armor-piercing munitions to aerospace counterweights. Today, it has moved to the center of geopolitical calculations. With 90 per cent of global supply coming from China, Russia, and North Korea, and Beijing now imposing new export controls, the scramble for secure sources has begun. It’s also led to some surprising paradoxes when it comes to defense procurement, say experts.

“The current nature of tungsten supply means that, for example, the 50-caliber tungsten-tipped penetrators the US sends to Ukraine are used to defend against the very nations that provide 90 per cent of the raw materials to make them,” says Lewis Black, CEO of Almonty Industries. “It’s a challenge that needs to be addressed.”

The strategic squeeze

China’s dominance of tungsten — accounting for over 80 per cent of global output — is no accident. Its government treated critical minerals as strategic assets from the 1980s, flooding markets with cheap supply, forcing competitors to close, and climbing the value chain into processing and finished goods. Export restrictions in 2010 spiked prices; subsequent market flooding drove new entrants out. The result: a dependency baked into Western manufacturing and defense procurement.

Now, with China tightening controls, Western rearmament plans face a severe supply-chain bottleneck. “Keep in mind, though, that this is just business for the Chinese,” says Black. “If the roles were reversed, and the US had spent 30 years building this supply chain, would it turn the taps back on to feed its competition? Of course not.”

Andy Home, commodities columnist at Reuters, wrote a February 2025 article that underlined this urgency: “Tungsten is a critical component of the 21st-century industrial supply chain, both civilian and military,” he says. “It’s a small market with global output of just over 100,000 metric tons and an estimated value of around $5 bn in 2023. But the industries that depend on it are exponentially bigger, which is why it is on everyone’s critical mineral list.”

Why Western mines fail

Replacing Chinese supply is easier said than done. “It’s a very difficult metal to mine,” says Black. “Our mine in Portugal has been running for five generations. Knowledge was preserved after the Chinese culls of the 1990s. However, most new projects fail because they lack that expertise.”

He is skeptical of government-run ventures. “China didn’t run the mines itself — it created an environment that encouraged capital to go into the sector, with subsidies and contracts that gave them price control. In the West, we should focus on taking back price control in a free-market framework. Then capital will flow to the projects that can actually deliver.”

The backdrop to this is the U.S. REEShore Act — or Restoring Essential Energy and Security Holdings Onshore for Rare Earths Act of 2022 — which  prohibits the use of Chinese tungsten in military equipment, starting in 2026. At the same time, the US Defense Logistics Agency’s 2025 Annual Materials Plan called for 4.5 million pounds of tungsten but, according to Black, “to this day, they haven’t filled one ton of it. It doesn’t exist.” That shortfall matters, as the deadline for filling the current procurement requirement falls within the next financial year — a window that is rapidly closing given the lack of available supply.

China, Japan, and South Korea all hold stockpiles. The US had a large one during the Cold War, selling it off over the past 20 years. “Two and a half years ago, it was depleted — and now they need it,” Black says.

In March 2025, the urgency was underscored by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which wrote to Black warning that “tungsten is critical to our national security, economic security, and technological competitiveness” and urging Almonty to prioritize supply to the US and its allies.

South Korea’s return to the map

One bright spot is the imminent reopening of the Sangdong mine in South Korea — historically one of the largest tungsten producers in the world. Shut in the 1990s amid low prices, it is now poised to produce 50 per cent of the world’s supply outside China. Both the mine and its processing plant are scheduled to be commissioned by the end of 2025 — a milestone that aligns with the procurement deadlines set under the US REEShore Act, and a signifier of its strategic importance to Washington.

Black says the project, developed over a decade, was designed with flexibility: “When prices go up, you want to produce more; when they go down, you produce less. We built it to be able to survive in a low-price environment, but also to scale quickly when the market is strong.”

The mine’s scale could give South Korea a pivotal role in US strategic metals planning. “It’s technically possible to keep expanding it,” Black says. “Imagine a scenario where you had one mine that could provide all of the requirements of the United States for every sector. That, of course, puts Korea in an extremely important position — and the US is already its biggest defense partner.”

A narrowing window

Global tungsten production stood at around 81,000 metric tons in 2024, with China supplying about 67,000 tons, according to Nasdaq data. Outside China, production is fragmented across Vietnam, Russia, Bolivia, and a handful of Western operations — none close to Sangdong’s projected output.

For Western defense planners, the clock is ticking. New mines take years to develop; processing capacity takes longer. Export controls and geopolitical tension are likely to keep markets volatile.

Black’s prescription is simple: “Step one is to take back control of the price and put it into a free-market mechanism. Only then will capital build the supply chain we need.” To that end, he currently advises the DARPA Critical Minerals Forum on setting transparent prices for tungsten and other strategic minerals dominated by China – a process he sees as essential to attracting sustained investment.

Minerals policy may once have been considered the preserve of trade ministries and commodity traders. Today, it is shaping defense strategies and alliance politics — a shift in which securing tungsten is no less critical than acquiring advanced weapons systems. In the new security era, the metals that underpin military capability are as decisive as the munitions themselves.