Why an F-35 Carries 900 Pounds of Rare Earths

A single F-35 fifth-generation fighter carries more than 900 pounds of

rare-earth content — roughly 408 kilogrammes of material that is almost

entirely processed through Chinese refineries. That arithmetic, quietly

repeated across every major U.S. defence platform, explains why the

Pentagon has become the world's loudest buyer of rare-earth supply-chain

independence.¹

The 900-Pound Accounting

The figure comes from work compiled by CSIS, the Modern War Institute at

West Point and other defence analysts, cross-referenced with U.S.

Department of Defense industrial-base documents. An F-35 contains more

than 900 pounds of rare-earth-bearing components; an Arleigh Burke

DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds; a Virginia-class

submarine around 9,200 pounds.¹ Those quantities dwarf what a typical

industrial product would consume — and they sit inside platforms with

production runs that continue for decades.

The total accumulated rare-earth demand of the U.S. defence programme is

therefore measured in tens of tonnes per year at a minimum, and in

hundreds of tonnes when ancillary equipment, spares and upgrades are

included. Those quantities are small in commodity-market terms but

enormous in national-security terms, because the platforms they support

cannot be produced if the supply chain fails at any point.

Where the Rare Earths Sit in an F-35

The F-35 uses rare earths in multiple sub-systems simultaneously.

Permanent magnets made from neodymium-iron-boron and samarium-cobalt

alloys power actuators, control surfaces and electrical generators.

Europium, terbium and yttrium are present in the aircraft's displays and

sensor systems. Cerium-based polishing and lanthanum-containing optics

appear across the electro-optical targeting and navigation payload.

Scandium-aluminium alloys are used in specific structural applications

where weight and strength trade off particularly acutely.

Each application individually would be modest; collectively they produce

the 900-plus-pound figure. And each is sourced through a global supply

chain where Chinese refineries dominate the midstream, Chinese magnet

manufacturers dominate the downstream, and the only readily available

substitutes — for specific alloys or specific applications — carry

meaningful performance penalties.

The substitution question has received intense research attention.

Programmes funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Department of

Defense and major allied partners have explored ferrite-based

alternatives, iron-nitride magnets, superconducting designs and other

approaches. None has yet produced an at-scale commercial product that

can replace NdFeB magnets in the most demanding defence applications

without a meaningful power-density or weight-efficiency penalty. For the

foreseeable future, rare-earth supply remains the binding constraint.

Other Defence Platforms in the Same Arithmetic

The F-35 is emblematic but not exceptional. A Virginia-class submarine's

9,200 pounds of rare-earth content include magnets in propulsion

electric motors, sensors, sonar arrays, inertial-navigation systems and

weapons-launch control. A DDG-51 destroyer's 5,200 pounds similarly span

propulsion, sensors, weapons and electronic warfare. Tomahawk cruise

missiles, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack

Munition family of smart bombs all contain rare-earth components in

seekers, control actuators and targeting systems.¹

Beyond specific platforms, the wider defence ecosystem — radar

installations, battlefield electronics, satellite communications, laser

weapons in development, night-vision goggles — all add to the aggregate.

The 2025 Chinese export-control escalations brought the scale of that

aggregate into sharp policy focus at the Pentagon.

Allied defence establishments face the same arithmetic. European F-35

operators, Japanese destroyer builders, South Korean submarine

programmes and Australian surface-fleet expansion all rely on

rare-earth-dense systems with comparable intensities. A diversified

non-Chinese supply chain therefore matters not only to the U.S. but to a

coalition of defence partners whose industrial bases have grown

increasingly interdependent over the past two decades.

What 2025 Changed for Defence Procurement

The April 2025 Chinese rare-earth export controls affected the seven

heavy elements most important to permanent-magnet applications. The

October 2025 expansion added processing equipment to the restricted

list, directly targeting the capacity of non-Chinese operators to scale

up refining on non-Chinese territory.² Within U.S. defence procurement,

both measures were treated as a clear signal that existing supply-chain

assumptions needed to be re-examined.

The response was accelerated public commitment. Since 2020 the

Department of Defense has committed more than US$439 million to domestic

rare-earth supply-chain development, and the 2024 National Defense

Industrial Strategy set an explicit target: a complete mine-to-magnet

REE supply chain capable of meeting all U.S. defence needs by 2027.¹ The

US$400 million preferred-stock investment in MP Materials in July 2025

was the most visible single action under that policy framework.

Allied-country support followed the same logic. The Department of War's

US$10 million commitment to the Nebraska niobium-scandium-titanium

project in August 2025 and the DFC's US$465 million financing package

for Serra Verde in Brazil in November 2025 both reflect the view that a

defence-ready rare-earth supply chain must include allied-country

capacity, not only domestic capacity.

Brazil's Indirect Place in the Story

Brazilian rare-earth producers are upstream of the sub-systems that go

into F-35s and submarines. Serra Verde's mixed concentrate does not flow

directly into a defence-grade permanent magnet — it flows through

separation and metal-making and magnet-forming steps that sit in

Malaysia, the United States, Japan, Korea and potentially Brazil itself

if the Poços de Caldas hub scales.

The indirect place matters. For a U.S. defence prime contractor, a

rare-earth supply chain that passes through Serra Verde concentrate,

Lynas separation, Lynas or MP metal-making, and MP Materials or Neo

Performance Materials magnets is a chain in which no single step depends

on Chinese territory, Chinese licensing or Chinese political decisions.

That property is what the Pentagon is paying to construct, and Brazilian

production is one of its foundations.

Outlook

The 900-pound figure is not going down. F-35 production continues,

Virginia and Columbia submarines are in build, and the next generation

of U.S. defence platforms will contain even more rare-earth-intensive

systems — hypersonic missiles, directed-energy weapons and advanced

satellite constellations all rely on magnet and phosphor rare earths for

core performance. As the demand grows, the Pentagon's incentive to

secure non-Chinese supply grows with