In an email sent at 6:05pm ET on Sunday, the Director of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, Jason Rathje, stated that the Office had spent the last 48 hours "actively collaborating with our DoD and other government colleagues to advocate for our national security community". Rathje partially attributed the Pentagon office's advocacy to the fact that "the SVB failure" impacted businesses which "employ close friends" of the Office.

The Office of Strategic Capital was announced at the beginning of December 2022 and aims to "scale investments" with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Innovation Unit "by increasing the capital available to critical technology companies to help them reach scaled production".

As reported by Tech Inquiry, the national security focused venture capital firm America's Frontier Fund -- whose backers include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel -- stated at an event at Silicon Valley Bank on February 1st that many of its "choke point" investments would "10x overneight, like no question about it" if "the China/Taiwan situation happens". America's Frontier Fund CEO Gilman Louie was the founding CEO of the U.S. Intelligence Community's primary venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, which has long been criticized over its trustees' conflicts of interest.

It should perhaps not come as a shock that an arm of the Pentagon would use its national security influence to "advocate" for its "close friends" in the venture capital community.

The full text of the email follows:
Good Afternoon,

At OSC, our mission relies on strong public-private partnerships. As a result, since late last week we have been tracking the Silicon Valley Bank situation closely.

While we have been heads-down in assessing impacts to national security, I wanted to let you know that we understand that this is an incredibly difficult time. Over the past 8 years, our OSC teammates have had the fortune of witnessing the exponential growth in national security-focused entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators who both directly and indirectly support the DoD mission. As such, many of the small businesses affected by the SVB failure are not only organizations that have worked alongside us, but also employ close friends, including reservists and veterans we’ve had the opportunity to serve with.

Over the past 48 hours, we have been actively collaborating with our DoD and other government colleagues to advocate for our national security community and provide insight into ongoing mitigation efforts. We are constantly monitoring national security-related impacts to the crisis, and we are looking forward to providing more information as it becomes available.

Thank you for being a partner,

Jason
Director, Office of Strategic Capital