Pictured is a U.S. Navy aerial photo of the Pentagon.

The Defense Department on Thursday said its Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) has established a new mechanism to provide capital to private lenders that will pool funds from investors and in turn invest the money with companies involved in critical minerals to strengthen upstream areas of the domestic defense industrial base (DIB). The National Security Fund Finance (NSFF) program is another tool to further OSC’s mission of attracting and scaling private investment in areas of the DIB where private capital…