“War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

— Major General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket (1935)

*Global spending on defence is increasing as a proportion of GDP from 2.2% in 2021 to a forecast 2.8% of GDP by 2030.*

The United States is forecast to spend $1 trillion on defence in 2026, or over ⅓ of worldwide spending, and the Pentagon has asked for $1.5 trillion in 2027.

Tungsten is the war metal because its extreme density, hardness and heat resistance make it indispensable for war.

The United States propensity for war is increasing over time

Blue Moon (MOON:TSX) owns the most valuable tungsten asset in the United States of America, backed by the Elmet Group (ELMT:NASDAQ) which is in turn backed by the US Department of War and will be in production in late 2027.

Blue Moon’s Springer tungsten mine and process plant comes with the necessary infrastructure to be a multi commodity producer integrated into the United States military and industrial complex.

*Springer tungsten mine and processing plant in Nevada, USA.*

As Blue Moon successfully commissions and expands the Springer tungsten mine and plant, I believe it will be re-rated to a multiple of today’s share price.

Tungsten: War Metal

US-listed Elmet Group (ELMT:NASDAQ) is an important supplier of tungsten components for over 125 US weapons programmes, including for Patriot missiles and F-35 jets.

Elmet announced September 14th it will receive a direct investment of US$450 million from the US Department of War. Elmet is a sole supplier of many advanced tungsten components for the United States Military and Industrial Base.

*The US Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has given Elmet up to a $2 billion contract to supply tungsten products.*

Elmet will invest US$150 million into Blue Moon’s Springer Mine and Ammonium Paratungstate (APT) plant alongside Australian tungsten producer EQ Resources (EQR:ASX), the Western world’s largest producer of tungsten, discussed in Coffee With Catt: Issue #9

I visited the Springer mine and plant, a two-hour drive along the Interstate 80 highway from Reno, Nevada, on Friday, September 18th. Michael Circelli, US Project Director for Blue Moon, showed me around:

Blue Moon Operations Director Michael Circelli at Springer Tungsten Mine and Plant, September 2026.

Springer has power, water, permits and an existing plant that was last operated in 2009 and refurbished in 2014.

History

Tungsten was discovered at Springer in 1914, on the eve of World War One, and the mine produced tungsten from 1918 to 1958.

*The canteen at the Springer Tungsten Mine offers 20-year-old candy bars at some nice prices!*

General Electric Company (GE) and Utah Minerals (BHP) bought Springer in 1970 and spent $71 million acquiring the property, constructing a new mill and mine.

In 2006 GE sold Springer to Golden Predator Mines, who planned to use the plant to process ore from multiple nearby gold mines.

Golden Predator and its successor EMC Metals spent $42 million refurbishing Springer.

Blue Moon agreed to pay $18.5 million for Springer at the end of 2025 as tungsten prices started to explode and plan to rail copper and gold ore from the Blue Moon and Turner mines in California to Springer for processing.

Critical Minerals Hub

Blue Moon recently acquired additional water rights for Springer from a neighbouring property and has a gas pipeline for heating the tungsten concentrate digester, plus grid power.

Blue Moon, director of US operations Michael Circelli describes the Digester or Autoclave at the Springer Mine and Process Plant in Nevada which will produce a tungsten concentrate.

The Union Pacific railway runs within seven miles of the Springer property to California, where Blue Moon plans to source high-grade copper and gold concentrate from two 100%-owned mines.

*Springer is both a strategic endowment of critical minerals and an important processing hub for American industrial and military supply chains.*

Boomtime in Nevada

Every mining company in Nevada we know is looking for more drill rigs and crews to operate them. Assay labs are jammed with drill core awaiting testing for valuable metal. Welcome to Supercycle 2.0.

Blue Moon CEO Christian Kargl-Simard, also known as CKS, is one of those people who gets things done. He is surrounding himself with a talented, highly motivated team.

While on site in Nevada on September 18th, I met the incoming Springer site construction manager, Ward Amberson, who has most recently been a mine manager with Rio Tinto Iron Ore in Guinea.

I asked Ward why he was taking a job at Springer. He explained he was from nearby Battle Mountain and could live in the city of Winnemucca and drive down the I-80 highway that traverses Nevada to get to work at Springer.

Nevada, known as ‘the Silver State’ after the massive 1859 silver discovery at the Comstock Lode, is in 2026 sucking in men and materials as the United States reshores its industrial and military supply chain.

Starting this month, October, Blue Moon will spend $20 million to drill 67,000 metres and assay 20,000 metres of old core by the middle of 2027 to significantly expand the Springer metal inventory.

Blue Sky Bailey

Bailey Edwards is Blue Moon’s Head of Exploration at Springer. Like her CEO, she brims with enthusiasm as she describes the opportunity at Springer.

*Bailey Edwards discusses Springer geology, September 2026.*

“Springer is highly prospective for more than tungsten. General Electric only assayed for tungsten, but there is likely molybdenum, copper and gold here too. We are actively targeting all critical minerals and precious metals.”

Bailey explained she was the fourth person onto the Springer property when acquired and built the wooden drill core boxes to hold General Electric’s old drill core left behind.

Springer has a historical high-grade tungsten resource of 10.7M tons at 0.45% WO3. The current resource sits in the skarn mineralisation at Springer, but the adjacent granodiorite is also mineralised.

*A drill rig operating in Nevada in September 2026 on Mackay Gold & Silver’s Comstock Lode.*

Springer’s mineral endowment includes scheelite (tungsten), molybdenite (molybdenum) and chalcocite (copper). Integra’s Florida Canyon gold mine is 10 miles away, and there are multiple gold showings on the Springer leases.

Expect Springer to deliver significant tungsten resource growth and a few gold, copper, molybdenum and even silver ‘discoveries’.

Blue Moon’s ‘Other’ Critical Mineral Assets

The Nussir underground copper mine in Norway, which is fully permitted to produce 21,000 tpa of copper equivalent from 2028.

The Apex Germanium and Gallium in the US state of Utah could produce all of the US annual germanium consumption. Blue Moon is in discussions with Teck and Korea Zinc about supplying ore from Apex.

Blue Moon believes that a small 100–125-ton-per-day operation at Apex, selling ore to Teck’s Trail Smelter in British Columbia, could produce 100% of annual US germanium and 50–100% of US gallium consumption.

Apex is located 2 hours due east from Vegas near 5N Plus Inc (VNP:TSX) US germanium processing and strategic US repository operations in St. George, Utah.

Cashflow in 2028

The Springer Mine could produce $200 million cashflow per year producing over 1000 of tungsten from 2028 increasing to 4000 tpa.

Blue Moon’s Australian partner EQ Resources (EQR:ASX) brings important process know-how to Springer. EQ’s CEO Craig Bradshaw built and ran the western world's largest ammonium paratungstate plant, Masan in Vietnam 100km from the Chinese border.

*Canaccord values Springer at $8.00 per Blue Moon share or 31% of Blue Moon’s asset value.*

Springer is a strategic asset integrated into the US defense-industrial base that should trade at a premium reflecting the assets strategic importance to the United States military and industrial base, growth potential and medium term certainty of demand for its output.

The Elmet Group and Blue Moon are to tungsten what MP Materials is to rare earths. They each represent the US Government’s big bet on their respective critical mineral and have government guaranteed minimum floor price offtake agreements.

MP Materials are twice as expensive as Elmet and over six times as expensive as Blue Moon on 2028 forecasts.

I expect this discount to close as Blue Moon restarts Springer tungsten production and commissions its APT plant.

All the other assets in Blue Moon apart from Springer come for free. I expect to see Blue Moon advance the Nussir copper and Apex germanium-gallium assets ahead in the coming months to surface significant value.

Hate Mail

‘Whistleblower’ Viceroy Research has published 13 increasingly shrill negative articles on Blue Moon between August 12th and September 22nd this year.

That’s one swipe every three days. A weird obsession or just financial self-interest?

Curiously, a ~4 million-share short position in Blue Moon emerged around the same time Viceroy ramped up its hate mail. More on Viceroy’s business model below, but first, let’s review the substance of their tirade.

If you’re long, you love. If you’re short, you hate…

The 13 Viceroy bear raids on Blue Moon published in 2026 and spammed to their 47,000 followers on X, regulators in Norway, Canada and the European Union claim:

Blue Moon does not have all the permits it needs to mine copper at its Nussir Mine in Norway and/or the Norwegian courts may challenge the validity of its permits.
Blue Moon management are promoters, not miners.
Blue Moon is not financially robust, and its undrawn loan from Hartree and Oaktree is unavailable.
Blue Moon’s US assets are worth scrap value.

You can read Viceroy’s hatchet job on August 12th this year, here.

A little help from my research assistant Claude unearths the Viceroy business model:

Establish a profit share with a friendly hedge fund.
The hedge fund sells the target company’s shares short.
Viceroy ramps up the hate mail.

The South African regulator the Financial Services Conduct Authority (FSCA) is currently pursuing Viceroy Research for a 50 million rand (US$3 million) fine relating to their January 30th 2018 report “Capitec: A Wolf in Sheep's clothing” report in which Viceroy accused Capitec (CPI:Johannesburg) of predatory lending, accounting irregularities, and called for the bank to be placed under curatorship.

In 2021 the FSCA fined Viceroy and the three founders R50m observing that Viceroy had a deal with hedge fund Oasis worth $100,000 a month for tailor-made reports plus 12.5% of short profits; Oasis made about R82m and Viceroy's cut was about R10m.

The FSCA found that Viceroy’s reports on Capitec were false, misleading and deceptive.

Since Viceroy published its false and misleading report on Capitec in January 2018 the share price of Capitec is up over 500%.

Wrong country, wrong metal

Viceroy brought a copper knife to a tungsten gunfight.

The answer to the question; is Blue Moon a BUY or a SELL?” is in Nevada not Norway.

I have started to build a long position in Blue Moon since visiting Springer because:

Springer, the most important tungsten mine and APT plant in the United States is backed by the US Department of War via The Elmet Group to the tune of $150 million.

I believe Springer is worth a multiple of the current Blue Moon enterprise value of US$450 million.

Everything else comes for free - Nussir copper in Norway, Apex gallium/germanium, the Blue Moon and Turner copper and gold projects in California.

The Blue Moon management team led by Christian Kargl-Simard are talented, motivated and driven and have lately been buying Blue Moon shares on market.

Catt Call

The cure for high metal prices is high metal prices. Tungsten has done as well as any metal this cycle because of a coincidence of geopolitical competition for supplies and a structural change in military spending around the world. I see these forces persisting.

I assume commodity forecaster Fast Markets are about right with their forecast of long term tungsten prices at $1500/mtu of tungsten which is about half of current prices and that we should expect a gentle multi year glide path to $1500/mtu from current prices over $2800/mtu.

The surprise could be that new tungsten supply takes longer - mining is a risky business AND that NEW military demand for tungsten increases.

That would mean tungsten prices stay higher for longer.

After all the Pentagon has asked US Congress for a 50% budget increase for 2027 versus a $1 trillion of military expenditure forecast for 2026. Tungsten is THE War Metal.

Speed to production is important, new high tech missiles and weapons need a lot more tungsten and molybdenum. Blue Moon’s Springer mine has both.

I am buying Blue Moon because:

The brownfields restart of the Springer mine and process plant is relatively low risk given the significant installed infrastructure base
I believe MOON’s aggressive exploration program at Springer will yield significant growth in tungsten and molybdenum and possibly copper and gold resources
MOON and ELMT are integrated directly into the United States military and industrial complex with long term offtake agreements with both significant demand growth and floor price protection
All of MOON’s ‘other’ assets come for free.

Disclaimer

The content on this website is provided for information and commentary purposes only. It is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice, a personal recommendation, or a financial promotion within the meaning of applicable financial services legislation. The views expressed are solely my own and are provided in my personal capacity. They do not represent the views of Arlington Group Asset Management Limited or any affiliated entity. No reliance should be placed on the content for the purpose of making investment decisions.

Risk Warning

Readers are responsible for conducting their own due diligence and for obtaining independent professional advice before making any investment decisions.

Investing in financial markets, particularly in small-cap and junior resource companies, involves risk, including the possible loss of capital. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

Blue Moon: War Business