America’s critical technology, maritime, infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing base is one of the clearest places where tax incentives, private capital, and national security should meet. We already know this model can work. Opportunity Zones helped drive billions of dollars into real estate, community development, and designated investment areas by giving investors a reason to move capital into places that policy makers wanted to support.
Now we should apply that same logic to the sectors that will determine America’s ability to compete, defend itself, and rebuild its industrial strength.
Recent proposals around Maritime Investment Zones point in the right direction. The basic concept is simple: use the tax code to pull private capital into shipyards, ports, vessel construction, ship repair, marine navigation, workforce development, advanced manufacturing, and the broader maritime supply chain. If tax incentives helped attract capital into real estate and community development, a similar model could help rebuild the industrial base that underpins American sea power and national resilience.
But this should not stop with physical shipyards or port infrastructure.
The next generation of American industrial power will be built across a broader ecosystem of investment funds, operating companies, manufacturing platforms, critical infrastructure projects, and technologies that strengthen national security and economic security. That means sectors like autonomy, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, maritime systems, secure communications, cybersecurity, energy resilience, critical minerals, space infrastructure, drones, counter-drone systems, AI-enabled defense tools, logistics, and domestic supply chain resilience.
Qualified investment funds focused on these sectors should be considered for Opportunity Zone-style designation. These funds can aggregate private capital, diligence complex technologies, support hard-tech companies, and bridge the gap between emerging innovation, government demand, commercial scale, and mission relevance. Many individual investors cannot properly underwrite a defense technology company, an advanced manufacturing platform, a shipyard modernization project, or a critical infrastructure asset on their own. Qualified managers can help channel capital into these areas with discipline, experience, and a better understanding of both market risk and mission need.
The same logic should apply directly to qualifying platform companies and infrastructure projects. Businesses building autonomous maritime systems, advanced airframes, resilient logistics platforms, drone manufacturing capacity, shipbuilding technologies, next-generation materials, critical infrastructure tools, and domestic production capabilities should be eligible for special designation if they are strengthening the defense industrial base, expanding U.S. production, modernizing infrastructure, or reducing dependence on adversarial supply chains.
This matters because the future of defense manufacturing and industrial power is changing.
The next phase will not only be about large legacy platforms built through traditional procurement channels. It will also be about faster, lower-cost, more scalable, more autonomous systems that can be produced domestically and integrated across a broader defense technology ecosystem.
In maritime, for example, the future will not only be larger crewed vessels. It will include autonomous naval platforms, distributed maritime nodes, unmanned surface vessels, undersea systems, AI-enabled ISR, electronic warfare, logistics support, secure communications, and integrated sensor networks. The autonomous ship is not just a vessel. It becomes a node in a distributed maritime network.
That same principle applies across the broader industrial base. The future battlefield and the future economy will demand more mass, more resilience, more autonomy, more secure infrastructure, and more ways to complicate an adversary’s targeting problem. The United States cannot afford to rely only on slow, expensive, exquisite systems while adversaries are scaling ships, drones, missiles, cyber tools, industrial capacity, and supply chains at speed.
A Maritime Prosperity Zone, Critical Technology Opportunity Zone, or National Security Investment Zone framework could help solve part of this problem by giving investors, fund sponsors, founders, manufacturers, and infrastructure operators a reason to back the companies, factories, shipyards, platforms, and projects needed to rebuild American industrial strength.
This would likely create some of the same market behavior we saw during the real estate Opportunity Zone boom of the early 2020s. Once the incentive was created, capital moved. Sponsors formed funds. Allocators searched for qualified opportunities. Developers shaped projects around the designation. Billions of dollars followed.
The same could happen in defense technology, critical infrastructure, autonomous systems, maritime manufacturing, space, energy resilience, advanced materials, and critical manufacturing.
That is the power of incentives. Investors are not charities. They respond to opportunity, yield, tax efficiency, liquidity, policy clarity, and the chance for outsized returns. That is not a weakness of capitalism. That is how capital markets work. If policy makers want private capital to help solve national problems, they need to make those problems investable.
Critics will say this gives investors generous tax treatment. That is true. But that is also the point. The government routinely uses the tax code to shape behavior. We incentivize home ownership, retirement savings, energy development, municipal finance, real estate development, and other areas deemed important to the public interest. The question is not whether investors benefit. The question is whether the country benefits enough to justify the incentive.
In this case, the answer should be yes.
A targeted national security investment incentive could drive domestic job growth, create new industries, expand the tax base, strengthen supply chains, rebuild manufacturing capacity, and reduce reliance on government-led solutions. Instead of expecting Washington to fund and manage every critical industrial requirement, the government can use tax policy to unleash private capital and let the private sector help build the capacity the country needs.
That is a better model than simply growing government. Government should identify priorities, set standards, create incentives, and provide clear demand signals. Private capital should help take risk, scale companies, build factories, support founders, finance infrastructure, and commercialize technologies. Done correctly, this becomes a force multiplier. It allows the country to pursue national security and economic security objectives without relying solely on appropriations, grants, subsidies, or bloated federal programs.
It also helps create a broader base of economic growth. A new factory, shipyard, drone production line, secure data center, advanced materials facility, or critical infrastructure project does not just create investor returns. It creates construction jobs, engineering jobs, manufacturing jobs, supplier ecosystems, logistics demand, local tax revenue, and long-term industrial capacity. These are the kinds of investments that can rebuild regional economies while strengthening national resilience.
But there is an important caution.
During the real estate Opportunity Zone boom, disciplined allocators still had to underwrite the real estate first. The asset had to make sense. The location had to make sense. The sponsor had to make sense. The tax advantage was an added benefit, not the entire investment thesis.
The same discipline must apply here.
In the current hype around defense technology and national security investing, not every company with “AI,” “autonomy,” “defense,” “resilience,” or “critical infrastructure” in its pitch deck deserves capital. The manager, deal, technology, platform, or project has to stand on its own. The tax benefit should improve the risk-reward profile, not rescue a weak investment.
Return on mission matters. But it should not replace return on capital. The best version of this policy would align both. Investors get an incentive to take risk in strategically important sectors, while the country gets more domestic production, stronger supply chains, better infrastructure, more jobs, and a deeper industrial base.
The United States does not have a shortage of capital. It has a capital alignment problem. Too much money flows into financial engineering, speculative assets, and incremental technology. Too little flows into the difficult, physical, industrial, and security-related sectors that determine whether the country can compete in a more dangerous world.
Opportunity Zones showed that tax policy can move capital. The next step is to aim that capital at the future of American power.
If we can incentivize capital to rebuild neighborhoods, we can incentivize capital to rebuild shipbuilding, critical infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and the national security industrial base.
The goal is not to give investors a gift. The goal is to give the country a tool.
The next Opportunity Zone should be built around American resilience.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
Discussion about this post