The Pentagon, aka the Department of War, aka the Department of Defense, is recruiting corporate executives to the tune of $400,000 annually to help it fund the underbelly of the nation’s defense readiness through a multibillion-dollar loan program.
The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) is hiring savvy professionals to support its $400 billion lending program, ensuring the nation has the strategic infrastructure for all its military needs. Instead of providing grants, OSC is giving out loans for everything from mineral mining to missile production — and more.
Started under Joe Biden with a much smaller budget, OSC is now overseen by Under Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, who himself hails from an executive-suite background with Cerberus Capital Management, a private-equity firm. Feinberg has already hired 30 former corporate executives and plans to add 40 more.
“These are people, many of whom have taken seven-figure pay cuts to do this,” OSC Director David Lorch, also formerly with Cerberus, told the Wall Street Journal. He said the deals involve “highly complex, multibillion-dollar transactions that require the deep transactional expertise that’s only found in the private sector.”
Loans so far total $5 billion this year, with another $14 billion ready to go. The goal is to ensure defense and military readiness and capability, a task all the more important now that the Iran conflict has expended vast supplies of missiles and other high-tech weapons of war.
