The US Is Fighting a War That's Blocking Its Own Weapons Factory

The US launched the Iran war to destroy Iran's military capability. The strait it's been fighting over is now undermining the US military's ability to replace what it's used.

That's the finding from West Point's Modern War Institute, published March 19. And 5.87 billion people — virtually the entire world outside the United States — haven't seen it.

GAI Score: 6.64 (Information Shadow). Seen in: US only. Blind regions: EU (450M), Middle East (600M), Asia Pacific (1.55B), South Asia (1.40B), Africa (1.40B), Latin America (660M).

The Chokepoint Inside the Chokepoint

Everyone knows the Strait of Hormuz carries 20% of global oil. That's the headline. The part almost no one is covering is sulfur.

The Strait of Hormuz handles about 50% of global seaborne sulfur trade. The Middle East produces roughly 24% of the world's sulfur supply — a byproduct of refining crude oil. Since the war began, that flow has been near-totally disrupted.

Sulfur isn't just a fertilizer ingredient. It's converted into sulfuric acid — the world's most produced industrial chemical. And sulfuric acid is what you need to extract copper, cobalt, rare earth elements, and other critical minerals from low-grade ores.

Those minerals go into precision-guided munitions, jet engine components, drone batteries, microprocessors, and radar systems.

West Point's analysis puts it plainly: sulfur and the critical mineral supply chain "dictate how fast things can be built and scaled under the pressure of an ongoing war."

"It May Cost Double"

USAF Lieutenant Colonel Jahara "Franky" Matisek, a co-author of the West Point analysis and nonresident fellow at the US Naval War College, told The Guardian it's "a cascading issue."

"A knock-on effect of this war is that it may cost double or more than double to replace all these weapons because all the mineral demand is going to go way up," Matisek warned.

He went further: "Markets are not going to be able to provide the amount of minerals that are needed to replace all these radars that have been destroyed and all these munitions that have to be replaced. It's a really precarious spot to be in right now."

Sulfur prices have risen 165% year-over-year. Since the Iran war began on February 28, they've jumped another 25%.

The Pre-Logistics Problem

West Point's framework is "pre-logistics" — the upstream supply chain conditions that determine whether military logistics can function at all. In peacetime, dependencies like sulfur were easy to miss. In wartime, they become binding constraints.

The US is more than 80% reliant on imports for many defense-critical minerals, including titanium, rare earth elements, gallium, and cobalt — according to research published in the journal Armed Forces and Society. China dominates the processing of most of these materials. The Middle East is the key supplier of sulfur.

The US has now launched a war that's cutting off both.

The American Prospect's analysis is blunt: "One of the more fascinating sidelights of our war of choice in Iran is how it has reinforced the devastating consequences of our hollowed-out industrial base." The US used to produce enough fertilizer-grade nitrogen for domestic needs in the 1940s. That production was wound down in the 1970s. The same hollowing-out has happened across military supply chains — consolidated into five prime contractors in the 1990s, outsourced across global supply lines, dependent on shipping lanes now under fire.

Why the World Isn't Seeing This

The invisibility of this story isn't an accident of newsworthiness. The implications are too awkward for simple narrative.

For US domestic audiences, it raises the question: did the US go to war without knowing its own industrial vulnerabilities? West Point's answer is essentially yes — "the effects of the current disruption at Hormuz... do not stop at the gas pump," and the analysis of the supply chain impact "has never been modeled" in wartime scenarios.

For global audiences, the story is absent for a different reason: Hormuz is being covered as an oil story. The sulfur-minerals-munitions chain is invisible.

For the 1.55 billion people in Asia Pacific watching the war's shipping disruptions — the chain connecting Hormuz closure to US defense capacity is nowhere in their media. The same war pricing them out of fertilizer is also pricing the US out of its own weapons replacement.

The Pattern

The Albis Global Attention Index tracks stories by how many people can't see them. This one scores 6.64 — Information Shadow — because a HIGH significance story is visible in exactly one region.

Today's scan puts this story alongside others in the PM unseen tier: China's South China Sea military buildup (6.59), the IRGC telecom takeover in Iran (6.37), Nigeria's Borno famine deadline (6.47), and the UN count of 56 Afghan civilians killed in seven days (6.83).

What connects them: each is invisible in precisely the regions where the consequences land hardest.

The US defense industry's supply chain crisis is a story visible only to the country running the war. The rest of the world — including allies asked to contribute to Hormuz security — can't see the self-undermining dynamic at its center.

That asymmetry matters. When allies can't see a vulnerability, they can't calibrate their response to it. When the public can't see a constraint, they can't hold decision-makers accountable for ignoring it.

---

This story was identified by the Albis Global Attention Index — measuring which stories the world isn't seeing. Explore today's blind spots →