NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has announced the launch of a new multinational High Visibility Project on defence critical raw materials, bringing together 12 Allied nations to jointly strengthen the resilience of defence industrial supply chains.
The project was announced on 7 July 2026 at the NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum in Ankara. It focuses on the acquisition, storage, transport and management of critical raw materials, components and recycled products essential for defence production — addressing vulnerabilities that have become increasingly visible as China’s export controls on strategic minerals have disrupted Western manufacturing.
“For our defence to remain ready and strong, we need our industrial base and our supply chains to be resilient,” Rutte said at the forum.
The 12 participating Allies are Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. The initiative reflects growing Allied consensus that access to critical materials — including rare earths, tungsten, antimony and other defence-critical inputs — cannot be left to market forces alone and requires coordinated sovereign stockpiling, sourcing and logistics strategies.
The announcement was made in Ankara, a city that hosted the MINEX Asia 2026 forum the previous month, where Turkey’s role as a potential industrial anchor for Central Asian critical minerals supply chains was a central theme — underlining the geographic and strategic significance of the Turkish capital in the emerging critical minerals geopolitical landscape.
