Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the Department of Defense plans to unveil the Trusted Capital Marketplace program to strengthen the industrial base against China and other potential adversaries in late October or early November, National Defense reported Tuesday.
“The idea here is that we don’t often look down into the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh layer of our supply chain to understand where we’re sole source or where we’re dependent on a foreign entity that might not be a trusted source,†Lord said at the Defense-Protection-Security Conference in Washington, D.C on Tuesday.
“Our objective is to get secure sources of capital together with typically small, innovative companies that have technology and early-stage products in the sectors that we identified in this [Executive Order] 13806, … to try to get investment in areas that the Department of Defense thinks are critical,†she added.
In addition, Lord said at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International-hosted event that small drones and rare earth elements are focus areas for the Pentagon.
