Pentagon Hoards Critical Minerals That Could Power the Clean Energy Transition

Pentagon Hoards Critical Minerals That Could Power the Clean Energy Transition

Pentagon Hoards Critical Minerals That Could Power the Clean Energy Transition
December 20, 2025
Reading time: 3 minutes

Full Story: Grist
Author: Sophie Hurwitz



David B. Gleason/Wikimedia Commons



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Pete Hegseth, who has taken to calling himself the Secretary of War, says the U.S. Defense Department “does not do climate change crap.” Just last week, he asserted that the agency “will not be distracted” by climate change or “woke moralizing.”

But a new report suggests the Pentagon is engaging with the issue in one serious way: As it stockpiles dozens of critical minerals, it is threatening the energy transition by hoarding resources that could be used to decarbonize transportation, energy production, and other sectors.

Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated $7.5 billion to bolster the Pentagon’s reserves of critical minerals like cobalt, lithium, and graphite that are held in six depots nationwide, an effort supervised by the Defense Logistics Agency. Such materials are used in everything from jet engines to weapons systems, and often are mined or processed in China or other nations. The materials in the stockpile are only accessible during times of declared war, or by order of the Undersecretary of War, a Defense Logistics Agency spokesperson said.

A report on potential peaceful uses for those materials was released by the Transition Security Project, which analyses the economic, climate, and geopolitical threats posed by the U.S. and British military. Lorah Steichen, a strategist who prepared the document, said America is essentially facing a choice between missiles and buses. The Pentagon’s planned cobalt and graphite stockpiles (7,500 tonnes and 50,000 tonnes, respectively) could electrify 102,896 buses—dwarfing the 6,000 or so currently operating in the U.S. Or they could be used to produce 80.2 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity, which is more than twice the energy storage the country has now.

The International Energy Agency also has said such minerals could be used for peaceful ends, like building the batteries, wind turbines, and other technologies underpinning the green transition. But designating a mineral as “critical” allows the government to fast-track mining and procurement for military ends.

“The term ‘critical minerals’ originates out of military stockpiling—the criticality of a mineral is linked, in part, to its significance to national security,” Steichen said.

The last time the Pentagon hoarded non-fuel materials was during the Cold War, when the government sought to create storehouses of industrial raw materials (like metals and agricultural supplies) and limit dependency on other nations. By the late 1990s, the United States began to see other countries—particularly those in the Caribbean—as generally reliable suppliers, and by 2003 the stockpile was reduced to nearly nothing. During Joe Biden’s presidency, there was some movement toward reviving the stockpile specifically to fight climate change. (That plan, according to a DLA spokesperson, never came to fruition.)

This year, however, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill allocated $2 billion for expansion of the hoard, and $5.5 billion toward the supply chain infrastructure needed to secure those minerals.

Even some military and governmental experts have agreed that expanding the government’s stash is concerning. A Department of Defense report from 2021, for example, said that if the supply chain for rare earth elements— a subset of critical minerals—is disrupted, “the civilian economy would bear the brunt of harm.”

“The point here is to push back against some of the bellicose associations of critical minerals and the different assumptions that go into that,” Steichen said. “What are the materials that are actually necessary for the energy transition, compared to this other definition of criticality?”