AMERICAN RESOURCES POLICY NETWORK REPORT - Reviewing Risk: - Critical Metals & national security

This study by the American Resources Policy Network -- the first in a series of quarterly reports on a variety of issues relating to critical and strategic minerals -- consults these various government reports and attempts to reconcile findings that overlap and diverge, with a particular view to critical and strategic metals and minerals in the realm of national security. [...] The Department of Defense should designate a material as “critical to national security” only if it meets the “technical” criterion of a “strategic” material; and also meets two additional criteria: - “Business” criterion: The Department of Defense dominates the market for the material, and its active and full involvement and support is necessary to sustain and shape the strategic direction of the. [...] Government issues a single and definitive study of critical metals issues in the context of defense and national security, the American Resource Risk Pyramid allows a composite view of the various studies that have been done, and a relative ranking of metals and minerals identified as critical and strategic. [...] During the early years of the Cold War, the number of materials rose to 75 and to a low of 12, in response to changing national security concepts.22 In key respects, the concept of a National Defense Stockpile was a casualty of the end of the Cold War. [...] After years of gradually depleting the NDS, Congress mandated a re-examination of the need for a stockpile, the results of which were captured in the 2009 Reconfiguration of the National Defense Stockpile Report to Congress, one of the 11 reports assessed in our study.