Hegseth pushes drone buys past 300,000 on Rare-earth Element supply
The Pentagon has placed the largest drone order in American history and plans to push purchases past 300,000 by early 2028, while every one of those drones runs on a rare-earth element magnet. The buying spree runs into a supply chain that still leaves the United States exposed, with roughly 98% of the world’s magnets manufactured in China.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo in July planning to build up drone manufacturing by approving the purchase of hundreds of American products. In June, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” putting the issue on a faster track inside the Pentagon.
30,000 one-way attack drones
The largest order includes 30,000 one-way attack drones, a figure that shows how quickly the military is moving to expand its drone inventory. Ukraine built over 1.2 million drones in 2024, and the Pentagon’s own 2026 defense budget includes $13.6 billion for autonomous systems.
That scale also exposes a simple constraint: the drones are not the only systems tied to rare-earth element magnets. At least 80,000 components across 1,900 U.S. weapons systems depend on Chinese-sourced rare earths, putting the drone expansion inside a much wider industrial problem.
MP Materials and REalloys
The Pentagon has already tried to widen its domestic options. Last year it took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials and became the company’s largest shareholder, and it has loaned hundreds of millions more to other domestic rare earth companies.
MP Materials is making progress on the light rare earth side, including neodymium and praseodymium. REalloys says it holds the only fully non-Chinese mine-to-magnet heavy rare earth supply chain in North America, a claim that points to the bottleneck the Pentagon still faces if it wants to scale drone buys without leaning on China.
Early 2028 target
The immediate question for the Pentagon is whether production can keep pace with its target. The answer will shape whether the move from 30,000 drones to more than 300,000 by early 2028 becomes a procurement milestone or a test of whether the United States can build the magnets and components at the same speed as the drones themselves.
