Pentagon moves to expand wartime titanium and magnesium reserves

The Pentagon has told American metal suppliers it wants to know exactly how much titanium and magnesium the country would need to keep building fighter jets and military hardware if a real war cut off the foreign supply chains both materials currently depend on.

The Defense Logistics Agency, the Department of War’s supply and logistics arm, published two Requests for Information on July 14 through its Warstopper Program, one covering titanium and one covering magnesium, both asking manufacturers to detail their current usage, annual demand, lead times, and stockpiling practices for each metal. A Request for Information is a formal but non-binding step the government takes to gather market intelligence before deciding whether to launch an actual contract competition, meaning neither notice commits the Pentagon to buying anything yet, but both signal that officials are actively studying whether existing supplies of these two metals could hold up under wartime pressure.

Established under the 1993 National Defense Authorization Act, the program serves as the Department of War’s primary tool for keeping America’s industrial base ready to shift from peacetime production to wartime surge output, focusing specifically on items where demand could spike dramatically during a crisis, where production takes a long time to ramp up, or where materials have limited shelf lives that make simply stockpiling finished parts impractical. Rather than trying to stockpile everything, the program targets the specific bottlenecks most likely to actually stall weapons production if a conflict suddenly increased demand faster than normal supply chains could handle.

Titanium sits at the center of that concern for a reason the RFI itself doesn’t spell out but industry analysts have flagged repeatedly in recent years. The United States has had no domestic titanium sponge production, the purified intermediate form of the metal that gets melted and alloyed into aircraft-grade titanium, since a plant in Henderson, Nevada, closed in 2020, leaving American manufacturers dependent on imports from Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan for roughly all of their supply. That gap matters enormously for defense production because titanium’s strength-to-weight ratio makes it essential for aircraft structures and engines, munitions, ground combat vehicles, naval ships, and hypersonic missile programs, applications where few substitute materials can match its performance. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, American and European aerospace giants leaned heavily on the Russian producer VSMPO-AVISMA, with Boeing reportedly sourcing as much as 80 percent of its titanium from the company and Airbus up to 60 percent, a dependency that has only partially unwound since 2022 even as Western firms scrambled to diversify. China has moved to fill part of the gap left by that pullback, expanding its share of global titanium metal production from roughly 40 percent in 2019 to a projected 75 percent by 2025, leaving American planners looking at a supply chain where two strategic rivals, Russia and China, still control the overwhelming majority of the material needed to build American warplanes.

Magnesium carries less name recognition than titanium but plays an equally foundational role in defense manufacturing, and the U.S. Geological Survey formally designates it a critical mineral. The metal functions as what industry analysts call a gateway material, appearing directly in aluminum alloys and steel production while also serving as a feedstock for producing titanium, hafnium, and zirconium, meaning a magnesium shortage could ripple into shortages of other critical materials that depend on it as an input. The White House has specifically identified processed critical minerals like magnesium as essential to high-performance military equipment including fighter aircraft, munitions, armor, naval vessels, and communications and navigation systems, positioning magnesium near the base of a supply chain that touches nearly every major weapons program the Pentagon runs.

Both RFIs ask nearly identical questions of industry, requesting detailed information on which specific grades and specifications companies use for defense-rated orders, what physical forms they typically purchase such as bar, plate, or sheet, current and projected lead times, whether companies maintain their own internal buffers already, how they handle manufacturing waste, and critically, whether any of their products carry known surge requirements that longer lead times could jeopardize. That last question gets at the core purpose of the Warstopper buffer concept: identifying not just how much titanium and magnesium the defense industrial base uses in an average year, but which specific products would be hit hardest if supply suddenly tightened during exactly the kind of national emergency the program exists to prepare for.

These two RFIs land within a much broader push across the Department of War to shore up critical mineral supply chains that officials increasingly view as a genuine vulnerability rather than a routine logistics concern. The Pentagon has moved on multiple fronts recently, including a package of funding tied to legislation that allocated $2 billion to strengthen the National Defense Stockpile and $5 billion for critical minerals supply chain investments, alongside a separate $12 billion strategic stockpiling initiative the Export-Import Bank launched earlier this year specifically to buffer against supply disruptions during international crises. Titanium and magnesium now join a growing list of materials, including cobalt, antimony, tungsten, and various rare earth elements, that Washington has flagged as chokepoints where Chinese or Russian dominance could leave American weapons production stalled not by enemy fire, but by a foreign government simply deciding to stop shipping the raw materials American factories need.