A Second Critical Minerals Tranche Opens: DIBC Solicitation RPP-CM-26-02 Targets Indium, Magnesium, Manganese, and Titanium

The Defense Industrial Base Consortium (DIBC) released Request for Prototype Proposals RPP-CM-26-02, "Domestic Processing Capabilities of Critical Minerals," on August 21, 2026, and quad charts are due by September 17, 2026, at 12:00 PM Eastern Time. The solicitation is sponsored by Industrial Base Policy (IBP) within the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment, administered by Washington Headquarters Services, Acquisition Directorate, and managed by Advanced Technology International. It is the second critical minerals call DIBC has issued in 2026, and it carries a new mineral list: indium, magnesium, manganese (including high purity and electrolytic forms), and titanium (including sponge and sponge substitutes). For companies in those four supply chains, this is a short window onto an award vehicle that sits outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation and can take the shape of a grant-like agreement, an equity investment, an offtake commitment, or a federal loan guarantee.

The solicitation publishes no funding ceiling. What it publishes instead is a set of evaluation thresholds, and those thresholds are the clearest signal of scale in the document: proposals between $100 million and $500 million draw an added review of feasibility and of whether the authority being used is essential, and proposals above $500 million must be justified against an essential national security objective. Awards may be made as Research Project Agreements under 10 U.S.C. Section 4021 or as Prototype Project Agreements under 10 U.S.C. Section 4022. Section 6.0 of the solicitation then goes further than a conventional research call, opening the door to direct equity stakes, Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs), convertible notes, royalty and revenue-share agreements, guaranteed-price offtake agreements, and Defense Production Act (DPA) Title III purchase commitments, loans under 50 U.S.C. Section 4532, and loan guarantees under 50 U.S.C. Section 4531.

RPP-CM-26-02 is the follow-on to RPP-CM-26-01, released February 27, 2026, which closed to quad charts on March 20, 2026 and covered a different basket of thirteen minerals including graphite, hafnium, nickel, tungsten, and the rare earth elements samarium, gadolinium, ytterbium, and yttrium. Both calls trace to Executive Order 14241, "Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production," signed March 20, 2025 and published at 90 FR 13673. The pattern matters for planning: the Department of War is issuing these calls in tranches, by mineral, on roughly a four-week response clock. A company outside this tranche's mineral list should read the cadence as an argument for consortium readiness rather than as a closed door.

The mineral selection is not arbitrary. The U.S. Geological Survey puts 2026 net import reliance at 100 percent for indium, manganese, and titanium sponge metal, 88 percent for titanium mineral concentrates, more than 75 percent for magnesium metal, and 59 percent for magnesium compounds. Gabon supplied 64 percent of U.S. manganese imports over the 2021 to 2024 period, and titanium sponge arrives from Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan. Every one of the four minerals in this call is a supply chain where domestic processing capacity is thin or absent, which is precisely the gap the six areas of interest are drawn to fill.

What Does RPP-CM-26-02 Fund?

The solicitation funds the full processing chain, not just the mine. Submissions must address at least one of the four in-scope minerals and at least one of six areas of interest (AOIs), which together run from the deposit to the qualified defense component.

• AOI 1, Raw mineral sourcing and beneficiation: identification, extraction, concentration, and beneficiation, including feasibility studies, infrastructure improvements, by-product recovery, and productivity enhancements.
• AOI 2, Separation and processing: the processes required to transform raw or beneficiated material into intermediate chemical forms such as oxides, chlorides, and salts.
• AOI 3, Metal production, metallization, refining, and upscaling: smelting, refining, and scale-up to purified forms suitable for critical applications.
• AOI 4, Alloying and finish processing: alloy creation, coating and plating, and transformation into products ready for integration into critical components.
• AOI 5, Recycling, recovery, and alternative sourcing: recovery from mine tailings, industrial waste, scrap, and end-of-life material.
• AOI 6, Supporting supply chains: chemical reagents, key inputs, tooling, equipment production, and support for Department of War system qualification.