The 10,000-Pound Gorilla vs. The Department of War
Two CEOs, one sleepless month, and a plan to feed the U.S. war machine without asking Beijing for permission.
If you drive across China looking for a bird, you might be driving for a long time. That was the grim, if slightly hyperbolic, travelogue offered by Gary Evans, CEO of United States Antimony Corporation (NYSE American: UAMY), during a recent appearance on the Payne Points of Wealth podcast. "There's no rodents, there's no squirrels... there's no birds," Evans recounted to the hosts and his fellow guest. "I'm a big hunter, you know. I'm like, where's the animals? They've eaten them all."
While the anecdote drew a laugh, it served as a dark appetizer for the main course of the conversation: China’s insatiable consumption of natural resources and its vice-like grip on the global supply chain. But Evans wasn't there just to swap travel stories. He sat alongside Paul Huet, CEO of Americas Gold and Silver Corporation (TSX: USA; NYSE American: USAS), to announce a partnership designed to break that grip, a deal finalized in a sleepless, 30-day sprint that feels less like a corporate merger and more like a tactical mobilization.
For years, the story of critical minerals in the West has been a tragedy of logistics. Evans, a former banker who once financed the Hunt Brothers’ silver play, bluntly described the problem to the podcast hosts. His company possesses the only significant antimony processing facility in the United States, but it has been starving for raw material. He has been forced to scour the globe, buying "feed" from six different countries, Chad, Bolivia, Australia, just to keep his smelters running. "My only competition is the 10,000-pound gorilla called the People's Republic of China," Evans noted.
Meanwhile, Huet’s company has been sitting on a mountain of the stuff in Idaho’s Silver Valley. For decades, his mines produced antimony as a byproduct, which was then shipped to a Canadian middleman who paid absolutely nothing for it. It was waste. It was slag. It was a strategic asset being thrown away because the domestic infrastructure didn't exist to refine it.
The new joint venture changes the calculus overnight. By trucking Huet’s antimony-rich slag directly to Evans’ facility in Montana, the two companies are closing the loop. They are creating a vertically integrated, domestic supply chain for a mineral that is essential not just for solar panels and AI data centers, but for the munitions that stock the U.S. arsenal. This military necessity is why Evans doesn’t refer to his primary customer as the Department of Defense. He calls them, with a nod to history and gravity, the "Department of War."
This private sector hustle is finally getting air cover from Washington. The podcast conversation highlighted "Project Vault," a new $12 billion federal reserve designed to establish a price floor for critical minerals. This is the ultimate hedge against the "gorilla." If Beijing tries to flood the market and crash prices, a tactic that has historically bankrupted Western mines, Project Vault effectively guarantees that U.S. producers remain solvent.
For investors, the signal is clear. The days of shipping American resources abroad to be refined and sold back to the USA are ending. Evans and Huet aren't just digging holes; they are submitting white papers for non-dilutive government funding and preparing to feed a defense industrial base that has realized, perhaps a little late, that you can't fight a war with software alone. As the Payne Points of Wealth hosts noted, while the market chases tech stocks, the real smart money might just be in the dirt.
Sources:
- Payne Points of Wealth Podcast, Episode: "The New American Mining Revolution" – Payne Capital Management, Feb 2026
- United States Antimony Corp Announces Joint Venture with Americas Gold and Silver – TradingView News, Feb 10, 2026
- Project Vault: US builds $12 billion strategic mineral reserve – The Decoder, Feb 3, 2026
- Trump launches $12B critical mineral reserve to curb foreign reliance – Supply Chain Dive, Feb 3, 2026