In December 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III launched the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) to attract and scale private capital in support of national security. This week, Secretary Austin announced the release of the first Investment Strategy for the Office of Strategic Capital.
The Investment Strategy identifies priority critical component technology industries for OSC focus and describes how OSC will catalyze private investment in these priority industries. The public release of the Investment Strategy supports open engagement with public and private sector stakeholders to advance OSC's mission.
"I created the Office of Strategic Capital to foster U.S. private-sector investment in the cutting-edge tech that will keep America secure in the 21st century," Austin said. "This important investment strategy will leverage America's core advantages in innovation and free enterprise to strengthen our industrial base and invest in tech areas that are critical for national security."
The Investment Strategy presents a guiding framework for OSC programs to complement existing DoD and U.S. government programs. It also addresses how OSC determined which technology areas to prioritize for its initial program activities, based on rigorous analysis of national security applications, U.S. market competitiveness, and capital needs for critical technology industries.
The Investment Strategy identifies initial priority areas for the first OSC program, the DoD-Small Business Administration Small Business Investment Company Critical Technologies (SBICCT) Initiative. The SBICCT Initiative pairs private capital with federally-guaranteed loans to increase investment in DoD's critical technology areas.
OSC's initial technology priorities for private sector investment are: Nanomaterials and Metamaterials (Advanced Materials), Bioenergetics (Biotechnology), Synthetic biology (Biotechnology), Open RAN (FutureG and 5G), Sensor hardware (Integrated Sensing and Cyber), Assembly, Testing, and Packaging (Microelectronics), Materials (Microelectronics), Quantum computing (Quantum Science), Quantum security (Quantum Science), Quantum sensing (Quantum Science), Battery storage (Renewable Energy Generation and Storage), Space-enabled services and equipment (Space Technology).
