From the Financial Times:

The US army is trying to woo Wall Street as it hunts for outside capital to fund the bulk of a $150bn infrastructure revamp, according to a great scoop from my colleagues Steff Chávez and Antoine Gara.

Army secretary Daniel Driscoll told the Financial Times that he and Treasury secretary Scott Bessent met with about 15 top private capital firms last Monday — including Apollo, Carlyle, Cerberus, KKR, Advent and BDT & MSD — for a deal forum that he hopes will entice the attendees to engage in “meaty projects” with the US government.

Driscoll’s pitch was to claim to attendees that the army is sitting on underused assets across arsenals and depots. He wants private credit to help unlock value — think data centres and rare earth processing sites built on federal land — that the public sector alone would struggle to fund.

The hope is that unlocking value could help the state profit from the current AI boom and help challenge Beijing’s dominance in the production of critical minerals.
How much does the army need to raise? Driscoll is hoping they will be able to plug a $135bn gap in the balance sheet — while the service needs $150bn for infrastructure, it has just $15bn budgeted over the next decade.

“We are in a hole” that requires creative financing, he told the FT. It could, he hopes, be filled by “clever financing models or unique financing models” of the sort the firms attending the meetings are renowned for.

Jeff