Antimony is a mineral that doesn’t make headlines like rare earths, but the dull, brittle metalloid sits deep inside the defense industrial base.

Antimony is the key ingredient for antimony trisulfide, which is used to make fireworks and matchheads.

The friction-sensitive compound is also essential for firing pins to ignite primers in over 300 types of munitions, including 155mm howitzer shells. Collectively, almost 30% of military munitions require antimony trisulfide to function.

Despite decades of research to find natural or synthetic alternatives, it remains the only material that meets stringent military requirements.

Antimony is mostly found in Asia, which means China and Russia play an outsized role.

China has the world’s largest antimony deposit and produces about 36% of global antimony output; it has previously shown it can triple production for upwards of 80% of global output.

Russia isn’t too far behind. They have the second largest reserves, account for about 29% of antimony mined, and have a growing ability to process.

Tajikistan ranks third in antimony production, but exports almost all of it to China for refining.

Translation: China and Russia have 50% of the world’s antimony reserves, account for 65% all antimony mined annually, and refine 89% of the world’s supply.

In late 2024, China placed an export ban on antimony for U.S. military use, and Chinese shipments to Western markets dropped 97%. This coincided with the rising demand for 155mm artillery and other munition production surges. The ban has since been lifted (more on that later), but the underlying problem is not gone.

The domestic picture is a “ground-to-round” problem: bottlenecks in mining, processing, refining, and producing military-grade antimony trisulfide have impacted primer production, which has in turn impacted ammunition production.

There are 3 key U.S. antimony players: Americas Gold & Silver, United States Antimony Corporation (USAC), and Perpetua Resources.

The latter 2 are making moves with the Pentagon.

USAC is not only the sole domestic producer of antimony, but it’s also the only fully integrated antimony company in the world outside of China and Russia, and it has the Pentagon’s attention.

In 2025, USAC received a sole-source, 5-year, $245M contract from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) to supply antimony metal ingots for the defense stockpile.

In addition, this year alone, USAC received $58.5M from the Defense Production Act (DPA), including $27M to expand extraction, processing, and refinement of antimony in Montana and Alaska.

For context on how much attention the U.S. government is giving to USAC, before all of these contracts, the company’s annual revenue was under $15M.

Perpetua Resources is the other key player, but a rising star rather than an incumbent.

In 2024, the Pentagon awarded them $81M for mining construction for the Stibnite Gold Project in Idaho. While the headline says gold, this also holds the largest antimony reserve in the U.S. (and one of the largest non-Asian reserves in the world). The mine is expected to start delivering antimony in 2029.

In parallel, Perpetua was awarded $22.4M from the Defense Ordnance Technology Consortium (DOTC) to mature the processing of raw ore into military-grade antimony sulfide.

In late 2025, Perpetua entered into an agreement with Idaho National Laboratory to host a flexible, modular processing plant for ore from the aforementioned Stibnite Gold Project. This mirrors a broader Army public-private partnership initiative to lease underutilized land on military installations to private firms to establish modular refineries to process essential minerals domestically.

China’s export ban on antimony to the United States will expire on November 27, 2026, but there’s no guarantee they won’t extend it or re-implement the ban in 2027. Why: the 2024 export ban came on the heels of China placing antimony on its dual-use export control list.

The U.S. is working to reduce the dependency, but the timeline from contract to impact for all the efforts we mentioned is roughly 4 years. So don’t expect to start seeing meaningful change until 2028.

More bad news: antimony is also used in night vision optics, IR sensors, flame retardants, and lead-acid batteries. So a supply chain squeeze may result in production trade-offs among these.

Notable mentions: Two other antimony players to keep an eye on are Felix Gold and NevGold. They both have antimony deposit exploration initiatives in Alaska and Nevada, respectively.

The Air Force finalized a deal with Lockheed Martin to buy 11,200 JASSM and LRASM stealth cruise missiles over the next 5 to 7 years.

The Air Force also finalized framework agreements with Anduril, CoAspire, and Zone 5 to buy 28,000 low-cost cruise missiles over the next 5 years under its Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) program.

TRIVIA

The Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. During that walk, they planted an American flag and took this famous photo…but how long did this flag stand?

A) 1 day
B) 1 week
C) 1 year
D) trick question, it’s still standing

Medium-Range Air Defense. The Marine Corps test-fired its new Medium-Range Intercept Capability (MRIC) on Guam during Exercise Valiant Shield. The trailer-mounted platform has a 43-mile range, making it the service's first dedicated medium-range air defense asset since decommissioning the HAWK system in the 1990s.

First U.S. sea drone combat use. During the recent resumption of attacks on Iran, the U.S. employed 3 Saronic Corsair unmanned surface vessels (USVs) to strike an Iranian submarine facility at the Bandar Abbas naval base. The AI-enabled autonomous craft successfully struck the facility to degrade threat capabilities targeting regional commercial shipping lanes. Previously used for surveillance, the strikes mark the first kinetic USV use by the U.S.

Latest APFIT selections. Thirty small and non-traditional defense companies were awarded over $548M in contracts as the final round of FY26 APFIT selections. As the name implies, the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) identifies innovative solutions ready for initial production that can be funded through the Pentagon’s typical processes.

“This could be my last job — I don’t care. I just want to make sure that we get drones in the hands of troops, and we build up a capability in space that cannot be matched for 10 years by our enemies.”

— Owen West, Director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), speaking regarding his strategic vision to accelerate the delivery of lethal, high-tech weaponry to frontline forces.

The Show!

In this episode, Mike sits down with Kara Kramer from Vantor to dig into visual-based navigation (VBN) and GPS-denied targeting.

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ANSWER
A) The Apollo 11 American flag stood for less than a day. Planted on the Moon on July 20, 1969, the flag was knocked over the very next day by the exhaust blast of the Eagle lunar module's ascent engine as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin prepared to leave. Subsequent Apollo 12, 16, and 17 mission flags are still standing.