While the United Nations General Assembly was meeting in New York, I attended an event hosted by The David Network on the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital and how it does its job. The David Network is a nonprofit that connects conservative students, alumni and young professionals from the Ivy League, MIT and Stanford with mentors and employers in technology, finance, public policy and defense. A few blocks away, the General Assembly was doing what it does year in and year out.
It describes a world without weapons, adopts resolutions that bind no one and change nothing, hosts lots of fancy, expensive parties and adjourns. The hope of the presidents, prime ministers and diplomats who fill its hall is no doubt sincere, but the institution behind the podium has spent decades proving it cannot produce that world, and pretending otherwise is wishful thinking. The people in the room I was listening to were describing the work they do to protect the United States and its allies and partners in the world we actually live in, where peace is kept only when it is backed by power and by weapons.
That truth is unwelcome, and it is not going away. I worked alongside President Donald Trump for nearly a quarter of a century, in business and then at the White House. I know how he approaches a problem: as a deal, with the discipline of a man who has spent his life driving deals to succeed quickly and completely.
The Office of Strategic Capital, known as OSC, did not begin with him. He took an office that sat largely idle under the Biden administration and put it on steroids, and in doing so he turned a paragraph in a statute into one of the most useful tools the United States has for staying ahead of its enemies. Modern wars are decided by technologies that grow more sophisticated and more dangerous every year, which is why the United States has to stay at the top of its game and why President Trump is so focused on it.
OSC's mission is to keep the United States ahead of its enemies in the industries that decide those wars and that power much of the civilian economy as well: satellites, semiconductors, software, space, cyber, communications, drones, critical minerals, the supply chains beneath them and more. It identifies the technologies the United States cannot afford to depend on others for, brings private capital to the companies building them, and provides technical assistance and expertise as well as money. Through OSC's hard work, a company expands a vital production line or builds a plant the United States needs, private investors share the cost, and OSC supplies the piece that lets the project go forward.
The United States gets essential capacity that would otherwise take years to build. The Trump administration has OSC firing on all cylinders. Deputy Secretary of War Stephen Feinberg, who built Cerberus Capital Management, and a team that includes OSC's director, David Lorch, a former managing director at Cerberus, have rolled up their sleeves.
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