 Supervisor Bill Hughes, left, and technician Ryan Young along an aluminum pot line at Century Aluminum's plant in Hawesville, Ky. (Luke Sharrett for The Washington Post) By Ana Swanson HAWESVILLE, Ky. — When Bill Hughes went to fight in Iraq in 2003, members of his Army unit lined their vehicles with scrap metal, sandbags and bulletproof vests to protect themselves from roadside bombs. By the time his younger brother Ryan Young was in Iraq in 2008, the vehicles were made of a high-purity aluminum alloy that was much more effective at absorbing the blast. "At the beginning of the Iraq War, the Humvees were folding up like pop cans," Hughes said. "It was a really big deal until they started putting the different metals in." Today, Hughes and Young work side by side here at the last U.S. smelter that makes the high-purity aluminum used in armored vehicles, sons of a region where jobs in the metal industry, ubiquitous for decades, have become a rapidly disappearing way of life. Hawesville's Century Aluminum Co. plant constantly teeters on the edge of shutting down, typical in an industry where a glut of cheap metal from China has forced many plants to close. But hope came to Hawesville in April, when President Trump announced that his administration was considering restricting imports of foreign-forged aluminum in the name of national security, arguing that domestic plants needed to be protected to ensure that the country can make its own war machines. "When that come out, there was a buzz in the area. You could just see the excitement on people's faces," said Hughes, 34. A decision by the Trump administration to use national security to protect an industry would be among the most dramatic — and risky — moves in the president's trade agenda.
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