Antulio J. Echevarria II
ABSTRACT: This Strategic Competition Corner analyzes a recent war game dealing with strategic competition in Africa over critical minerals. It argues US military and policy practitioners need to think more about ways to leverage crises to America’s advantage and to its competitors’ disadvantage.
Keywords: strategic competition, critical minerals, rare earth elements, preclusion, soft power
Recently, in a war game involving a crisis caused by a militia group known as the M23 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the US team was tasked with crafting a response.1 The M23 had threatened to harm US interests in the region, namely, US and European firms engaging in the mining and refinement of critical minerals and rare earth elements. Most rare earth elements are not rare, but the capacity to refine them is. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) controlled roughly 70 percent of global rare earth mining and about 90–93 percent of rare earth refinement and production in 2025.2 Beijing recently weaponized rare earth elements in response to US tariffs, forcing Washington to recalibrate some of its trade policies.3 Beijing apparently intends to continue expanding its refinement and production capacities to extend its lead and its leverage.4 The White House has openly acknowledged America’s shortfalls in the mining and refinement of critical minerals, and US industry is working diligently to close the gaps.5 But the country is still years away from being able to rely comfortably on its own resources. The US shortfalls made the war game timely and instructive for military and policy practitioners, who learned the importance of thinking about ways to leverage crises, not just resolve them.
Africa has become increasingly important in strategic competition because it holds a wealth of essential critical minerals, and it is expanding the infrastructure necessary for their refinement; the continent holds some of the world’s richest deposits of cobalt, copper, gold, lithium, and platinum-group metals.6 For context, NATO has classified cobalt as a “defence-critical raw material” because it can withstand high pressure and extreme temperatures, making it ideal for use in precision-guided munitions, jet engines, gas turbines, and communication and radar systems, among other applications.7 Currently, seven African states host most of the continent’s critical mineral mining and refinement: the DRC, Mali, Morocco, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.8 As of 2024, approximately 1,888 significant mineral deposits have been uncovered on the African continent and 586 (31 percent) of these have active mines.9 Africa’s expanding strategic value made it a smart choice for the war game.
To its credit, the US team expertly solved the war game’s most immediate crisis, that of protecting US interests against the threat posed by the M23, but it did not solve the game’s most serious crisis. The team coordinated with all the relevant actors in the US interagency and crafted a coherent whole-of-government response to the crisis caused by the M23. It communicated the objectives and intentions of that response to the local population, to the government of the DRC, as well as to the various foreign interests backing the region’s mining and refinement infrastructure. The team also developed several clever information operation campaigns which would have spun events in ways that would have shed favorable light on the United States and the nature of its involvement in the region.
Nevertheless, the US team lost the war game. It lost not because it lacked knowledge or expertise in understanding how to defuse a crisis and protect US interests. It had players with decades of military and policy experience. Some players also had expert knowledge of the mining industry. Some had a wealth of regional expertise, including an impressive understanding of the other local African states, as well as the modus operandi of the M23 and its ties to Rwanda. The US team even had Chinese experts well-versed in Beijing’s recent repurposing of the Belt and Road Initiative.
The US team lost the game’s most serious crisis, the strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China for critical minerals. The team misjudged how the PRC (represented by the white cell) would leverage the crisis to increase Beijing’s political and military presence in the region and its influence over the DRC. China has invested more than any other country in African mining and transportation infrastructure.10 In fact, the state-of-the-art transportation infrastructure featured in the scenario had been wholly financed by Beijing. The US team also considered, albeit with a healthy dose of skepticism, whether the PRC might be willing to cooperate with US efforts to resolve the crisis. But Beijing had already outflanked Washington and its European partners by securing political and military agreements with the DRC under the auspices of restoring stability; those agreements essentially made the Peoples Liberation Army the DRC’s sole security guarantor and granted Chinese firms a monopoly over the state’s critical minerals and transportation infrastructure. Under Chinese pressure, the DRC nationalized all mining facilities within its borders, forcing the United States and its partners to attempt to negotiate access to the state’s resources at a disadvantage. Beijing, thus, won the game and this episode in strategic competition, and it did so legally and more-or-less ethically.
The US team learned a tough but important lesson. It should have explored ways to leverage the crisis, not just manage it. Instead, it approached the crisis as a discrete event, not as part of a larger chess game. The team had a short but crucial window at the beginning of the game in which it should have negotiated directly with the DRC for guarantees to ensure US interests would not be suspended, even if the government nationalized its mining and transportation infrastructure. Even better, the US team should have attempted to offer the DRC a more attractive deal than Beijing had, perhaps promising to increase US military presence in the area (though that might have been a tough sell to the American public). Ideally, the US team should have discussed ways to secure American interests during the crisis while diminishing or precluding Chinese influence. In short, the US team needed to approach the crisis exactly the way Beijing did—by getting there first.
Thinking proactively amounts to getting there first, and “there” means a physical location or a qualitative or quantitative lead. In a practical sense, it means employing a strategy of preclusion, that is, taking anticipatory measures to ensure the United States and its partners surpass their competitors (and their strategic rivals) in the generation of power. Preclusion can take many forms. Typically referred to in military terms as strategic preemption, preclusion also involves controlling geographic and economic choke points to prevent their weaponization, concluding agreements that guarantee access to vital resources, constructing rare earth refining capabilities at home or among partners, and developing leap-ahead or offset technologies to render a rival’s weaponry obsolete or noncompetitive. Admittedly, preclusion may carry negative political and ethical baggage, much like preemption, because governments can abuse it to circumvent laws and norms to deliver faits accomplis. As the war game shows, however, preclusion can be employed legally and ethically. Doing so contributes to the West’s soft power (oddly, often overlooked as a realm of strategic competition) and adds to its collective legitimacy within the established rules-based order.
The war game’s designers created a stimulating scenario that revealed a key weakness in the habits of thinking of US policy and military practitioners. Admittedly, it was just one game, one instance, but it suggests the practitioner community may know what strategic competition is in theory. In practice, however, it may need to think more proactively about how to solve crises while also putting America’s chief competitors, especially its strategic rivals, at a disadvantage. Fortunately, Washington can accomplish most of what America needs it to do, legally and ethically, by simply getting there first.
Antulio J. Echevarria II
Antulio J. Echevarria II currently serves as the professor of strategic competition at the US Army War College. He holds a doctorate in modern history from Princeton University and has authored six books and more than 120 articles and chapters on strategic thinking. He formerly held the General MacArthur Chair of Research and the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the US Army War College and has served as the editor in chief of the US Army War College Press.
Endnotes
- 1. This essay follows Chatham House Rules, though the war game’s hosts did not make that a requirement.
- 2. IEA, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025, International Energy Agency (IEA, May 21, 2025), https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025.
- 3. Tye Graham and Peter W. Singer, “How China’s New Rare-Earth Export Controls Target the Pentagon—and the World,” Defense One, July 9, 2025, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2025/07/how-chinas-new-rare-earth-export-controls-target-pentagonand-world/406606/.
- 4. Brooke Escobar et al., Power Playbook: Beijing’s Bid to Secure Overseas Transition Minerals (AidData at William & Mary, January 2025), 13–16.
- 5. “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production,” Exec. Order 14241, March 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/immediate-measures-to-increase-american-mineral-production/.
- 6. “Africa’s Critical Minerals and the Future of the Global Energy Transition,” African Energy Chamber, January 12, 2026, https://energychamber.org/africas-critical-minerals-and-the-future-of-the-global-energy-transition/.
- 7. “NATO Releases List of 12 Defence-Critical Raw Materials,” NATO, December 11, 2024, https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2024/12/11/nato-releases-list-of-12-defence-critical-raw-materials.
- 8. “Africa’s Critical Minerals.”
- 9. Pietro Guj et al., Mineral Resources of Africa, World Bank Group, October 14, 2025, https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/099073125102510938.
- 10. “Africa’s Critical Minerals.”
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