While the UN Talked Peace, the US Was Protecting Its People | Opinion

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. That is classic Trump.

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 taxpayer is repaid. 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. These are people who spent their careers pricing risk and closing transactions. Significant results followed, including a $150 million loan to MP Materials to add heavy rare earth separation at Mountain Pass, California. Rare earths go into the magnets inside fighter jets, missiles and drones, and today China controls most of the world’s processing, which is exactly the kind of dependence OSC seeks to end.

OSC has also made a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million to Performance Drone Works to build American manufacturing capacity for drone components. Drones have become central to modern warfare, in Ukraine and in the war against the Iranian regime, and their sophistication and the threat they pose will only grow.

What struck me most was not just the numbers. It was the questions. The people at OSC go to the private sector and ask it directly: what is getting in your way, and what is preventing you from reaching the speed you need? That is a different posture from the one Washington usually takes. OSC recognizes that the government does not have all the answers, and that the companies creating the technology understand it, and the bottlenecks they face, better than any office in the Pentagon. Then it seeks to remove the barriers that prevent those companies from succeeding. The goal is a marketplace, in defense and the industries that feed it, with more competitors, more entrepreneurs, more capital and more forethought, and the humility to keep asking what the government is still getting wrong.

The same thinking now runs through the largest procurement decisions the department makes. For decades the Pentagon bought munitions one year at a time, and suppliers responded exactly as any business would to a customer who might not come back. This year the White House and Congress worked together to fund multiyear purchases. The Department of War signed a seven-year deal with Lockheed Martin, worth up to $58.6 billion, to more than triple production of the Patriot PAC-3 interceptor.

A separate framework agreement will quadruple THAAD interceptor output, and the department has signed similar long-term agreements with the companies that build the seekers, rocket motors and structural components those interceptors depend on. A supplier that knows the order is real for seven years hires, buys materials in bulk and builds a second line. That is how an industrial base gets fired up. Decisions that used to take years can now be compressed into significantly shorter time frames.

Interceptors are built to be fired. Much of the media coverage criticizing the war against the Iranian regime treats every Patriot and THAAD launch as a drawdown the United States cannot afford, as if these weapons were meant to sit in a vault and never be touched. They were built for exactly this war, which is an essential one, and the job now is to make sure that every interceptor fired is replaced faster than Tehran can build the missile it was fired at.

Tehran’s strategy rests on the belief that America and its partners will run short before Iran does. Tripling and quadrupling interceptor output is the answer to that bet, and it is what the department is busy doing while others argue about whether the weapons should have been used at all. Winning wars and defending the United States is the point of the whole exercise.

OSC does not hand over the money and wish a company luck. It marries the talent and capital of the private sector to the reach of the United States government and stays in the deal, working the problem alongside the company as the plant gets built and the line comes up, and staying involved long after the line is running. This is how a serious investor behaves, and it is how President Trump expects the government to behave.

The U.N. General Assembly’s high-level week has wrapped up, and its polished speeches will change little in the real world. The people at OSC, and across the rest of the United States government, are hard at work protecting the United States and, through it, America’s allies and partners around the world. It is hard to imagine a sharper contrast than the one I saw last week.

Jason D. Greenblatt was the White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration. He is the author of In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East—and How to Stop Joe Biden From Unmaking It, the founder of Abraham Venture LLC and the publisher of the Substack “How to Watch.” Follow him on X: @GreenblattJD

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.