At the moment that would be overkill (of course, overkill is under-rated). Anyone who could actually go there and make a profit can simply do it. Putting missiles on the thing would probably bankrupt even the deep pockets of the CCP (or the US for that matter).
I think that initially it will be more a race than a war. Think the Alaskan gold rush…it was seriously difficult and dangerous to get there, lots died, and most didn’t make anything. The folks who really made out like bandits were…the grocers. And saloon keepers I suppose, but really it was the folks who sold food and supplies who made the real money. This time, however, I see it as mostly automated drones going to the easy places (relatively anyway) and mining enough to bring back on the slow boat to Earth. Maybe some space stations as transit points, logistics and staging areas, and for techs to work on the various craft.
The next generation of space stations, outside of the Chinese one currently being built and the proposed international one orbiting the Moon will be built by private companies. NASA is already requesting proposals, just like they did for the Moon lander, and, at a guess, as they will for Moon bases. It will be just like SpaceX (and, theoretically Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, if either of them can actually ever get something in orbit with people on it).
As true as that is, you will probably still need to make round trips, assuming you are not planning on just slinging big chunks of reg into space. It takes at least as much fuel to land on the moon as it does to get off it, because those parachute things are dreadfully ineffective.
But when you look at the practical side of it, if you want to make a profit, the miners will all be machines, not humans. If your machine is out there digging into the rim wall for the good stuff and someone else’s machine comes along, bonks your machine and takes its stuff, you might not even be able to figure out who sent that thieving robot. It either has to be an environment where we all have to learn to coöperate to succeed or we will all ultimately not succeed. Traditional competition is likely to prove more of a problem than a useful paradigm out there. Our attitudes will simply have to change.
Yeah, parachutes on the Moon don’t seem to work well, for some odd reason. But yeah, you’d basically have the drone fly to your mining site that’s automated, refuel itself and fill it’s tanks, then lift off to refill your satellite then rinse and repeat. The real issue is…how many of these iterations would you get before the drone failed? That is probably what would make or break the endeavor.
You would probably know, as I’m pretty sure you would have (hell, you’d almost certainly need) communications relays and satellites. What you could do about it is another thing, though if you are a nation state you could always put trade tariffs or embargos on the country that did the deed. I think this would not be an issue, initially, as it would cost almost as much to create a bonking machine to steal someone’s mined material as to just make your own automated mine and do it yourself. The cost is figuring out how to get there, after all…once you do, I don’t see a ton of reason to try and steal someone’s claim when you could just find a good spot yourself. In the first…hell, couple of centuries at least…the issue won’t be finding good claims, it will be getting there at all cheaply enough to make it worth while. There is just so much out there that it’s hard to even grasp.
But yeah, you’d basically have the drone fly to your mining site that’s automated, refuel itself and fill it’s tanks, then lift off to refill your satellite then rinse and repeat. The real issue is…how many of these iterations would you get before the drone failed? That is probably what would make or break the endeavor.