About CritMintel
An open-source intelligence platform tracking geopolitical risk, supply chain vulnerabilities, and strategic dependencies across the critical minerals that support modern defense, energy, and technology systems.
Platform Goal
Critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, rare earths, tungsten, and dozens of others are the foundation of advanced weapons systems, energy storage, semiconductor manufacturing, and modern infrastructure. Control over their supply chains has become a primary axis of geopolitical competition, and disruption to those chains represents a genuine national security risk.
CritMintel was built to make that risk visible. The platform aggregates open-source intelligence on production geography, country-level instability, export dependency, and market concentration to produce structured risk assessments for each mineral. Every brief is built to intelligence production standards — not financial analysis — with an explicit focus on decision-relevant findings for policy, defense, and industrial stakeholders.
The goal is simple: give analysts, policymakers, and operators a clear, current picture of where supply chain exposure exists and why it matters.
How It Was Built
Each mineral brief is researched and written using structured OSINT tradecraft — the same methodology applied in government and defense intelligence environments. Source material spans USGS reports, UN Comtrade trade data, World Bank governance indicators, open congressional testimony, and open-source geopolitical analysis.
Risk scores are derived from a multi-factor framework covering production concentration, political stability, export controls, allied-nation dependency, and strategic criticality to U.S. defense and energy systems. All assessments are analyst-produced; no automated scoring replaces human judgment on the underlying intelligence.
Special Operations Association of America
CritMintel is a project of the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA).
SOAA advocates for the special operations community, bringing the ground truth from the front lines to the highest levels of government. The organization works across national security, operations, and policy — channeling insight from frontline operators to policymakers, supporting American strategic interests globally, and engaging Congress and government leadership on issues affecting the special operations community.
About the Author
Austin Higgins serves as CFO of the Special Operations Association of America. He is also Co-Founder and Threat Finance Lead at the Global Counterterrorism and Threat Intelligence Research Institute (GCTIRI) at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he served as a lecturer. A service-disabled U.S. Air Force veteran with a linguistics background and Defense Language Institute training, he has applied intelligence and data analysis across some of the most complex humanitarian and national security environments of the past decade.
Austin conducted real-time OSINT operations supporting civilian evacuations from Gaza and Lebanon, helping reunite 500+ American citizens with family trapped in conflict zones, and has briefed more than 20 congressional offices on conflict intelligence and threat finance. He previously led Risk Analytics at Dun & Bradstreet, overseeing a $500M+ global risk intelligence platform.