Geopolitical War Ecology: Military Mineral Supply Chains and the Socio-Ecological Rifts of U.S. War-Building

At the nexus between war, technology, and ecology, the extraction of minerals for military production is crucial for states’ geopolitical strategies, but its socio-ecological costs remain underexamined. I focus on the United States, the world’s biggest arms producer and exporter, in this mixed methods within-case study of strategies, geopolitics and histories of military minerals across the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations. The article traces antimony and tantalum in missile interceptor systems, F-35s, and military AI, which illustrate domestic and foreign supply chain dynamics. A critical discourse analysis of U.S. policy documents analyzes the themes of mineral extractivism, supply chain geopolitics, war-building energy, and military-industrial production. They are related to environmental degradation and paramilitary warfare in the Democratic Republic of Congo, devastation of maritime ecosystems in the Persian Gulf, and mining in Idaho and Alaska, where ecosystems were ravaged earlier during the 19 th -century militarized Gold Rushes. These densely layered supply chains are conceptualized through a geopolitical war ecology framework, bringing into sight global networks, and their colonial trajectories, traveled by military minerals. The article shows how the co-evolution of scales of mining, military production, and ecological destruction leads to metabolic rifts and shifts between global war machines and local ecosystems and communities.