Army and Treasury team up to pull in defense-tech investments
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The U.S. Army is tapping Treasury Department leadership and investors for a conversation this fall on the sidelines of one of Washington's splashiest defense conferences.
Why it matters: The military's wants and needs are changing, influenced greatly by wars abroad. Also shifting: when, why and how defense tech gets financed.
Driving the news: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told reporters at the Pentagon the service is "going to partner with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and host a day for private-equity investors to come here."
- The hope, Driscoll told Axios in a follow-up conversation, is that "this is the first step toward a complete and utter rejuvenation and reinvigoration of our partnership with a lot of America's most talented, wealthy investors."
Zoom in: The finer details of the get-together, coinciding with the annual Association of the U.S. Army convention, are still being hashed out. But there are at least two items on the table:
- Discussing the Army's needs and ways to strike public-private partnerships to address them.
- Thinking through the advancement of government-owned depots and arsenals, including access to computing power and rare earth resources.
"We have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital needs, whether it's barracks or maintenance facilities," Driscoll said.
- "We think we can bring in the best of the private-funding models and the best of private industry to help us think about: How do we start to scale out builds much more like how Walmart builds its stores?"
The intrigue: In a past life, Driscoll was COO at a $200 million venture-capital fund.
Flashback: The Army this week unveiled Fuze, a new trying-and-buying model for emerging tech that concentrates hundreds of millions of dollars.
- "The traditional government cycles of taking 12-18 months to even get a company on contract is not very helpful. Tech will change many times over within that timeframe," Matt Willis, the Fuze director, told Axios at the time.
Go deeper: Army must modernize much faster, can't keep buying "VCRs" of warfare
