Modern battlefields consume drones the way 20th-century conflicts consumed artillery shells: by the thousands, every day, with no end in sight. Ukraine built 5 million drones last year. Russia launched 805 in a single night against Ukrainian cities. In this kind of warfare, victory doesn’t go to the side with the most sophisticated weapon but to the defense industrial base that continues manufacturing at scale. And production, in the age of drone warfare, starts with a permanent magnet. Every motor in every drone flying over Ukraine and Iran today contains at least one. China makes almost all of them.President Donald Trump's June 6, 2025, executive order on drone dominance directed every federal agency toward American-made platforms and gave the industrial base a clear demand signal to organize around. Traditional acquisition timelines have been compressed from years to months, with vendors competing in field evaluations that move directly to production contracts. The Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program has committed $1 billion to purchasing more than 200,000 drones by 2027, with a staggering escalation to 340,000 systems by 2028.But translating that ambition into durable production capacity requires following the supply chain below the motor. America consumes approximately 50,000 tons of permanent magnets annually, nearly all imported from China. The magnet is not a smart component. It carries no data. It cannot surveil. It generates the magnetic field that drives lift and torque, and when it stops arriving, the program stops scaling.T.S. Allen, who ran the Pentagon's rapid drone fielding program before leaving the Defense Innovation Unit last year, told a Brookings Institution forum last year that scaling drone production to battlefield demand requires "figuring out … the batteries and all the critical components that will need to be produced at scale." The underlying challenge, he said, was singular: "Almost the only processing for most critical minerals is occurring in China and Malaysia."CHINA WEAPONIZED SCIENCE AGAINST THE US. WE'VE FIGURED OUT A KEY ELEMENT THEY MISSEDChina's rare-earth dominance was carefully constructed through state subsidies and below-cost pricing that bankrupted Western competitors over the course of decades. The same leverage enables price manipulation as easily as export restrictions. Rare earth prices have swung by triple digits within single years. Iron and nitrogen, the two domestically abundant and low-cost inputs used to create iron nitride permanent magnets, carry none of that exposure. Both are globally traded commodities with no government controls as strategic exports, making the cost of scaling predictable in a way that rare-earth inputs never will be.In April 2025, China imposed export licensing requirements on seven rare earth elements and the permanent magnets derived from them, targeting materials that flow directly into defense and industrial motor supply chains. Within weeks, fewer than a quarter of export license applications had been approved.Chinese rare earth magnet shipments fell roughly 75% year-over-year in May before a partial recovery. Motor-G, Europe's largest drone motor producer at nearly 100,000 units a month, still draws every magnet from Chinese rare earth supply. Ukraine crashed into the same wall when it tried to localize its motor production: it has mineral reserves but lacks the magnet-manufacturing infrastructure to convert them into finished products at scale. Scaling Western rare-earth capacity is not the only path to permanent magnets.CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONAllen estimated that meeting the full demands of battlefield attrition would require producing roughly 10 times what Replicator delivered, a program that itself aimed for thousands of drones. At that scale, every input to the drone supply chain gets stress-tested in ways smaller programs never encounter. A fleet of hundreds tolerates a magnet shortage. A fleet of hundreds of thousands does not. In wartime, losing access to a single critical material can halt production across an entire class of drones.Iron nitride is already being deployed across a variety of commercial sectors. Neither input of iron nor nitrogen carries export license risk, and neither can be embargoed. The magnets deliver competitive performance at elevated temperatures and reduced weight, two characteristics that matter directly to drone motor design.American university research developed the underlying science, and American manufacturers are scaling production to meet growing demand. Incorporating iron nitride into the drone motor supply chain extends a proven commercial technology into a sector where the stakes are already enormous and growing.Attrition warfare is a production contest. The side that keeps producing wins. Supply chains break under the pressure of disruptions, diplomatic crises and export controls that arrive without warning. Every critical input in the drone motor supply chain needs a source no adversary can shut off. The magnet is the one that does not yet have one.CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JONATHAN ROWNTREE