OPINION
China is not just building a bigger navy.
It is cornering the raw material America needs to build its own.
The Department of the Navy's 2026 Shipbuilding Plan calls for expanding the U.S. fleet from 291 to more than 450 vessels within a decade.
Every destroyer, every submarine, every warship in that plan requires one thing before anything else: high-grade iron ore.
Not just any iron ore.
Naval steel — the specialized alloys that keep submarines intact under crushing pressure and warship hulls intact under fire — demands ore with almost zero tolerance for impurities.
You cannot substitute lower-grade material.
You cannot use recycled scrap.
The chemistry has to be right from the start.
America's domestic iron ore reserves are abundant. But they are overwhelmingly low-grade deposits that cannot meet naval steelmaking requirements.
The ore pure enough to build warships is increasingly scarce because most of it is owned or controlled by Beijing.
China's Play
Nowhere is this clearer than in Guinea, home to Simandou, where China controls the largest high-grade iron ore deposit on earth.
Chinese state companies control both the mines and the 400-mile-long Trans-Guinean Railway carrying the ore to port.
When Simandou reaches full production, it will further tighten China's grip on the very material advanced naval steel requires.
This is not just a mining investment.
China controls every step: from ore in the ground, to rail, to port, to steel mill, to shipyard. Beijing has connected the dots. Washington is catching up.
America's Answer
Directly across the Simandou range lies Kon Kweni, the only undeveloped deposit of ultra-high-grade iron ore that rivals Simandou, and, thankfully, it's under American ownership. Its ore carries exactly the low-impurity profile that naval steelmaking demands.
As an American-owned asset, none of it will flow to China.
Getting that ore to allied markets requires infrastructure to match. Kon Kweni will anchor the Liberty Corridor, a rail and deep-water port corridor connecting Guinea to the Liberian coast.
Where China's Trans-Guinean Railway is built to serve Chinese steel mills which, in turn, feed Chinese infrastructure and Chairman Xi Jinping’s vastly expanded People's Liberation Army Navy, the Liberty Corridor is built for the United States and its allies.
The Trump administration has recognized its strategic value. Secretary of State Rubio met with Liberia's Foreign Minister in October 2025 to discuss U.S. critical minerals engagement in West Africa.
President Trump’s Executive Order 14269, "Restoring America's Maritime Dominance," directs the Secretary of Defense to identify supply chain inputs essential to rebuilding America's maritime industrial base.
Minerals in the ground are worthless without infrastructure to move them.
The Liberty Corridor is how that changes.
What Washington Must Do
The United States has spent years focused on semiconductors, rare earths, and battery minerals. High-grade iron ore has fallen through the cracks, because America has plenty of iron ore, just not the right kind.
That needs to change. Washington should formally designate high-grade iron ore within its critical mineral frameworks and back allied-owned, allied-oriented projects that deliver this material through infrastructure China does not control and cannot coerce.
Building a 450-ship U.S. Navy is an industrial challenge as much as a military one. Grand ambitions will remain little more than a pipedream if the materials those ships require are controlled by the very adversary the fleet is meant to deter.
Beijing has built its supply chain from mine to shipyard.
It's time Washington built its own.
J. Peter Pham served as U.S. Special Envoy for the Great Lakes and Sahel Regions of Africa in the first Trump administration. He is Executive Chairman of Ivanhoe Atlantic, an American mining company with development rights to the Kon Kweni iron ore deposit in Guinea, the highest-grade iron ore deposit in the world under U.S. ownership.
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