‘On par with what the DoD pursued during the Cold War’: Pentagon’s war stockpile plan hits a minerals wall

The Pentagon wants to stockpile enough critical minerals, fuel, and munitions on American soil to keep fighting a major war even if cyberattacks and sabotage knock out factories and power grids at home. One defense expert says the scale of the planned effort is “on par with what the DoD pursued during the Cold War.”

The minerals may be the hardest part. The U.S. produces less than 1% of the most common type of rare-earth magnet it uses, and China, which dominates the processing of many critical minerals, has kept American companies short even in peacetime.

The initiative, known as FORTRESS America, short for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability, was formally established on Sept. 30 . It is designed to keep U.S. forces operating if a conflict disrupts domestic power grids and manufacturing supply chains, and it is the same program behind the Pentagon’s push for major bases to plan for 90 days without the grid .

Stockpiling materials isn’t unusual for the U.S. military, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Fortune . What distinguishes FORTRESS is its planned scale and its shift toward domestic reserves rather than overseas stockpiles.

During the Cold War, the Pentagon stored as much or more war matériel overseas, near anticipated battlefields in Eastern Europe or Northeast Asia, Clark said. FORTRESS instead focuses on protecting supplies inside the United States, reflecting growing concern that American factories could themselves become targets.

China could disrupt U.S. industrial production through cyber operations, drones, electromagnetic warfare, or attacks carried out by people inside the country, Clark warned. U.S. agencies have already warned that Chinese state-sponsored hackers had positioned themselves inside American critical infrastructure .

That concern has a recent precedent in Europe. On Dec. 29, 2025, cyberattacks hit about 30 renewable energy sites, a manufacturing company, and a heat and power plant serving nearly 500,000 customers in Poland. Polish officials linked the attacks to Russia’s Federal Security Service and said the attackers tried to destroy industrial systems, but the country avoided a major outage.

Building stockpiles on the scale Clark described runs into a stark industrial reality: America’s defense industry remains deeply reliant on foreign supply chains for its raw materials.

In 2025, the U.S. imported about $60 billion worth of critical minerals other than rare earths, including nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite, and tungsten, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics.