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ABSTRACT The resilience of national infrastructure increasingly depends on secure access to critical minerals. Despite the U.S. government's strategic investments and growing urgency, our mineral strategy still relies heavily on future mining projects or geopolitically entangled imports. Overlooked, however, is the latent potential in what domestic mining already produces—but fails to recover. This article presents a systems‐based perspective on redesigning mineral recovery within existing mines, arguing for a new policy, research, and incentive architecture to improve critical mineral supply security from within. 

ABSTRACT Underground engineering is entering a transformative era. It is being driven by advances in mathematical physics methods—from finite and discrete element simulations to lattice Boltzmann modeling and quantum‐inspired optimization—and by breakthroughs in advanced materials such as self‐healing concretes, nanocomposites, and sensor‐embedded composites that offer new levels of durability and adaptability. Yet the promise of these innovations will only be realized if they are integrated into a broader agenda that embeds adaptive capacity, social inclusion, and environmental integrity across the life cycle of underground systems. Frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [United Nations, 2015], ESG reporting standards [GRI, 2020], and Doughnut Economics [Raworth, 2017] provide the societal anchors for this reframing. The commentary further identifies research gaps along two axes: vertical gaps across scales (from micro‐scale material durability to governance frameworks) and horizontal integration gaps across domains (mathematical physics, materials, and societal imperatives). By embedding technical innovation within sustainability frameworks, underground engineering can be reframed as a form of adaptive, living infrastructure—strategic, robust, and indispensable for long‐term urban viability. 

Underground infrastructure systems are typically managed as discrete technical assets rather than as integrated, adaptive systems. This paper develops the Body Underground framework, a structured biological analogy that synthesizes prior clinical and epidemiological metaphors into a multiscale conceptual model linking materials, facilities, networks, and governance. Building on Little’s clinical framing of infrastructure health and Bardet and Little’s epidemiological analysis of network failure clustering, the framework extends biological interpretation to anatomical, physiological, and homeostatic scales. The approach maps structural, hydraulic, sensing, protective, and regulatory functions to functional equivalents in living systems using explicit criteria of feedback, regulation, and measurability. The central objective of the study is to determine whether biological regulatory concepts—particularly homeostasis and hierarchical organization—can provide a coherent interpretive structure for understanding infrastructure health across material, facility, network, and governance scales. The resulting framework reframes resilience as dynamic regulatory balance rather than static robustness alone. It clarifies the methodological basis for constructing biological–infrastructure analogies, identifies measurable “vital signs” for infrastructure health, and outlines pathways toward operational translation through integrated monitoring and governance feedback. While conceptual in nature, the framework provides a structured synthesis linking material science, infrastructure engineering, systems resilience theory, and policy coordination. By organizing resilience concepts through cross-scale regulatory logic, the Body Underground model offers a coherent structure for integrating monitoring, diagnosis, and governance in the proactive management of underground infrastructure systems. 

The United States (US) has sufficient geological endowment in active metal mines to reduce the nation’s dependence on critical mineral imports. Demand is increasing for cobalt, nickel, rare earth elements, tellurium, germanium, and other materials used in energy production, semiconductors, and defense. This study uses a statistical evaluation of new geochemical datasets to quantify the critical minerals that are mined annually in US ores but go unrecovered. Ninety percent recovery of by-products from existing domestic metal mining operations could meet nearly all US critical mineral needs; one percent recovery would substantially reduce import reliance for most elements that we evaluated. Policies and technological advancements can enable by-product recovery, which is a resource-efficient approach to critical mineral supply that reduces waste, impact, and geopolitical risk.