Sturnella Signals
Vol. 1 · Issue 028 · October 28, 2026
Building Buffers · Critical Minerals · Food Security · Defense
Critical minerals · Industrial capacity · Energy · Defense supply chains · Cyber
This Week in Sturnella Signals
Something broader is coming into focus. The announcements this week are no longer only about securing one mineral, funding one factory or buying another weapons system. Across critical minerals, fertilizer, food processing, launch infrastructure, defense production, allied sustainment and workforce development, the United States is spending money to reduce single points of failure.
That is happening against a complicated economic backdrop. U.S. durable-goods orders rose 1.8% in September, suggesting business and industrial investment is still moving. New-home sales slipped again. Gold remains above $4,000, oil is around $100, and the Federal Reserve kept rates steady at its October meeting.
Not every program below is connected but the pattern is increasingly coherent:
another source · another processor · another plant · another launchpad · another maintenance hub · another workforce pipeline
The country is paying for optionality and optionality is expensive.
MACRO & GEOPOLITICAL SIGNAL
Hard Goods, Soft Housing
September durable-goods orders increased 1.8% to $345.4 billion, with transportation equipment up 4.6% and orders excluding transportation rising 0.5%. Orders have now increased in six of the past seven months and housing is telling a different story. New-home sales fell slightly to an annualized 676,000 units in September. There were 476,000 new homes for sale, representing 8.4 months of supply, while the median new-home price rose to $400,400. At the time of writing, gold is around $4,060, oil is near $100 and copper is above $6.60.
The Federal Reserve's decision was to keep rates steady. The larger question is whether rates need to stay elevated while strategic investment continues creating demand for materials, equipment, labor and power.
Sturnella lens: Industrial investment and household demand are moving on different timelines.
WHERE THE MONEY IS MOVING
Critical Minerals Need Capital and People
The critical-minerals story broadened again this week. DOE formally designated helium as a critical material, citing its importance to semiconductor manufacturing and advanced energy technologies, as well as supply-chain risk. Helium rarely receives the attention of copper, uranium or rare earths, but it is another example of how the list of strategically difficult-to-substitute materials keeps expanding.
Perpetua Resources also received a new $40 million U.S. Army award to evaluate tungsten production at Stibnite in Idaho. Perpetua will match the government's $40 million contribution. The United States has had no commercial tungsten mining since 2015 and is currently reliant on imports. The new award brings total U.S. government critical-minerals awards to Perpetua to approximately $126 million since 2022 and the workforce is beginning to follow the capital. DOE selected 16 universities for $16 million through its PROSPECT Planning Prize to expand mining, materials-science and critical-minerals education. The broader PROSPECT initiative has up to $100 million available for building the domestic workforce.
The public-market door is opening too. Apex Critical Metals began trading on Nasdaq under APXC on October 23, while Gunnison Copper began trading on NYSE American under GUNN on October 26.
Outside the United States, Rio Tinto approved a $1.9 billion investment in its Kangwinan bauxite project in Australia, adding 20 million tonnes of annual capacity with first production targeted for 2029.
Sturnella lens: Follow the capital first. The workforce and physical capacity usually follow.
FOOD, WATER & INDUSTRIAL RESILIENCE
Food Security Is Becoming a Capacity Problem
USDA selected eight fertilizer projects representing more than $1.34 billion of proposed investment, including approximately $573 million in proposed federal funding.
One of them is particularly relevant to the mining conversation. Intrepid Potash was selected for approximately $139 million toward a proposed $265 million sulfate-of-potash facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico. If completed, the facility is expected to produce roughly 220,000 tons annually. That is an interesting example of government capital being used where the product is strategically necessary but where the economics of building additional domestic capacity may otherwise be difficult.
USDA is also developing the SPUR Guaranteed Loan Program, with at least $5 billion contemplated for meat, poultry and seafood processing. Subject to congressional funding, SPUR would provide a 90% government guarantee on qualifying loans, with individual loans of up to $175 million.
The resilience conversation also increasingly includes water and data. USDA opened a new research facility in Tucson focused on water, soil and agricultural productivity in the semi-arid Southwest, while a new USDA-NASA agreement will expand the use of satellite observations, remote sensing, geospatial analytics, cloud-based data and modeling for agriculture.
Sturnella lens: Food security is becoming an industrial-capacity, water and data problem at the same time.
DEFENSE INDUSTRIAL BASE
Production Is Becoming a Network
The defense story this week is moving beyond individual contracts. The Department of War and Lockheed Martin finalized a 10-year F-35 framework covering a minimum of 850 U.S. aircraft, associated parts, modification kits and sustainment. In return for that longer demand signal, Lockheed has committed to self-fund at least $7 billion of initiatives supporting the program.
Long-term procurement visibility gives a company and its suppliers a reason to commit private capital now. Lockheed's own description makes the objective explicit: greater certainty allows the company to invest in capacity, efficiency and supply-chain resilience.
OSC is applying similar capital logic elsewhere. Its latest transaction is a $150 million conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space to support a second launchpad at Cape Canaveral, expanding commercial and national-security launch capacity.
Sustainment is also moving closer to where systems may be needed. Poland was selected to host a European PAC-3 missile maintenance facility, while USS Colorado has been designated as the first U.S. Virginia-class submarine for the future Submarine Rotational Force-West in Australia.
Sturnella lens: Building more equipment is only half the problem. You also have to maintain, repair, replenish and move it.
WORKFORCE SIGNAL
The Labor Market Is Splitting
The broader U.S. employment picture is cooling. September payroll employment increased by only 29,000 jobs, while unemployment edged up to 4.2%. BLS reported little change across most major industries.
At the same time, Microsoft is offering voluntary exit packages to approximately 60,000 eligible employees as it restructures around its AI investment priorities. Against that backdrop, DOE is funding mining-workforce programs and defense manufacturers are still building specialized production capacity.
The labor market may be slowing but the demand for certain skills is not disappearing with it.
Sturnella lens: Watch where employers are reducing generalized headcount and where they are still paying to build specialized capability.
THE ATTACK SURFACE
From Advisory to Known Exploitation
There was an important correction from CISA this week.
On October 22, CISA released 20 ICS advisories, many involving Siemens industrial products. An earlier CISA email incorrectly stated that 20 vulnerabilities had been added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. CISA subsequently corrected the notice: those were ICS advisories, not 20 new KEVs.
Last week, I wrote that the two newly disclosed PHP vulnerabilities required urgent patching but CISA had not yet observed exploitation.
On October 26, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 moved into the KEV catalog.
The status changed from: critical vulnerability → known exploitation
That is exactly why vulnerability management cannot be a static quarterly exercise.
CISA also released three additional ICS advisories on October 27, including Mitsubishi Electric industrial software, and added two additional vulnerabilities involving Adobe Commerce/Magento and Google Brotli to KEV.
Across the October 22 and October 27 releases alone, that is 23 ICS advisories and as agriculture, energy, mining and defense deploy more telemetry, cloud connectivity, remote access and automated systems, the number of dependencies that need to be understood continues to grow.
Sturnella lens: Cyber risk is following the physical build.
EARNINGS WATCH
Backlog Is Not the Same as Earnings
We are getting more evidence from the earnings calls.
Lockheed Martin reported Q3 sales of $20.7 billion, net income of $1.8 billion and a record $292 billion backlog, including $52.5 billion associated with PAC-3 MSE production.
Boeing reported a record $745 billion total backlog, including $100.5 billion in Defense, Space & Security. Yet the company still reported a $116 million quarterly net loss.
Backlog is evidence of demand but not of profitability.
Freeport-McMoRan also reported Q3 results today, with the Grasberg ramp-up and its U.S. copper growth plans remaining central to the production outlook.
Coming Up
October 28 — Agnico Eagle
Watch: gold production · grades · AISC · capital allocation
Results after market close; call October 29 at 11:00 a.m. ET.
October 29 — L3Harris
Watch: missiles · Aerojet · electronics · program execution
Results before market open; call at 10:30 a.m. ET.
October 30 — Cameco
Watch: uranium contracting · production · Westinghouse · nuclear demand
Results before market open; call at 8:00 a.m. ET.
October 30 — ExxonMobil / Chevron
Watch: oil realizations · upstream investment · refining · capital returns · $100 oil
Both report October 30.
November 2 — BWX Technologies
Watch: naval nuclear · reactor demand · fuel · government backlog
Results after market close; call at 5:00 p.m. ET.
November 3/4 — Mosaic
Watch: potash · phosphate · fertilizer pricing · domestic capacity
Results November 3 after market close; call November 4.
November 5 — MP Materials
Watch: rare-earth production · magnet ramp · capital spending · government-backed capacity
Results after market close; call at 5:00 p.m. ET.
November 9 — Barrick / Equinox Gold
Watch: gold · copper · costs · integration · free cash flow. Barrick reports before market open; Equinox reports after the close with its call November 10.
Earnings dates and call times are based on currently available company and investor-relations information and may change. Please confirm directly with the company before relying on any scheduled date or time.
THE SIGNAL
The United States Is Paying for Optionality
That is what connects most of this week's announcements in my view. The tension is that the United States is building those options while capital remains expensive, inflation is still elevated and government borrowing requirements are enormous.
That is why the next stage matters. Identifying the chokepoint was the easy part but now someone has to pay to build the alternative.
Sturnella lens: Resilience is expensive because redundancy is expensive. The next phase is deciding which redundancies are worth paying for.
FROM STURNELLA RESEARCH
The Cost of Waiting
Cybersecurity is increasingly a capital-allocation issue, particularly as mines and industrial companies add automation, remote connectivity and third-party dependencies. Deferring work may preserve cash today while creating a more complicated and expensive remediation problem later.
When 5% Isn't Really 5%
A 5% Treasury yield sounds attractive until inflation, taxes and purchasing power enter the calculation. The larger question is what happens when monetary policy is trying to suppress demand while strategic policy requires the country to build more mines, power generation, defense capacity and infrastructure.
WHERE WE'LL BE
Events & Speaking Engagements
OCT 23–DEC 31, 2026 — Sydnie’s 50 Turns Around the Sun
Career Coaching & Advisory · Weekly Giving-Back Series
Three hours of career coaching/advisory each week for three different people, offered at the applicable minimum-wage rate in each participant’s state.
OCT 28 — Women in Mining Nevada
Nevada · Lunch & Learn
From Mine Site to Board Packet.
DEC 9 — American Exploration & Mining Association
Sparks, Nevada · Capital Markets Technical Session
When the Mill Stops: A Cyber Incident Tabletop for Mining's Operational Technology.
MAY 2–5, 2027 — APCOM 2027
Montréal, Québec · Accepted Paper
From Connected Equipment to Operational Resilience: Cybersecurity for OT/IT Convergence in Modern Mining.
Sturnella Signals
At the intersection of cybersecurity, capital markets and national security; following the capital, policy, technology and operational risks reshaping mining, energy, infrastructure and defense.
This publication is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal or cybersecurity advice. Market information is time-sensitive and may change after publication.