Sparrow Point Foundation educates and convenes toward one end: a stronger allied industrial base. The companies, the capital, and the public institutions that design, build, and field defense and critical infrastructure capability for the United States and its allies. Our purpose is a stronger industrial base for the United States and its allies and partners, including NATO, AUKUS, Japan, and Taiwan.
Deterrence that holds abroad, and industrial work that pays at home.
Why Now
Dual use collapsed the distance
Dual-use technology has collapsed the distance between commercial markets and national power. AI models, autonomous systems, and advanced sensors ship as products and function as instruments of statecraft at the same time.
The institutions still work one at a time
The institutions that handle technology, capital, industrial capacity, and deterrence still handle them one at a time. Acquisition officials and investors read different documents, attend different conferences, and rarely test their assumptions against each other in a room where either one can be wrong out loud.
Capacity is the piece furthest behind
Industrial capacity is the piece furthest behind. Defense doesn't stall at innovation. It stalls at testing, validation, and full-rate production. A capability with no line and no second source deters nobody, and the distance between a working prototype and a fielded program gets measured in years of qualification, tooling, and capital that most of the ecosystem won't discuss in public.
How we work
Three modes.Convening
Small, curated, off the record. We put practitioners who don't normally share a room into one. Nothing is recorded and nothing is for attribution, which is what makes the honest version of the conversation possible.
Mission-focused work
We source real unclassified problems from operators and infrastructure owners, then put teams of engineers and founders against them with mentorship and expert judging.
Published findings
What comes out of the rooms and the challenges goes back to the field in writing. Where the supply chain is thin. Where requirements and capital fail to meet. What it actually costs to qualify a second source. Free to read, aimed at the people who make the decisions.
Two convenings a year, one on each coast.
Two days each September in Manhattan. Roughly 150 people a day, open application and curated, Chatham House Rule throughout. Day 1 is the demand side: how the government actually buys. Day 2 is the capital side: the economics of building and financing a defense company.
Where mission meets capital.A week each September in Long Beach, with the city as a strategic partner. Three summits anchor it: Global Domain Awareness, Critical Infrastructure, and Industrial Resiliency. Mornings are corridor showcases inside working facilities, the Port, a hangar, a robotics floor. Afternoons are summits capped at 150 to 175 seats, Chatham House Rule, curated rather than ticketed.
Hardware that already works, trying to figure out how to build it at scale.The subject is how capability gets designed, funded, bought, and fielded. That question outlasts any administration, and the work is written to be usable by whoever holds the office.
Support funds the work and never directs it. A sponsor buys a seat in the room. No finding, conclusion, or policy position is for sale.
Nothing in the room is recorded or attributed. Everything the room produces goes out in writing, free to read, at no cost to anyone who needs it. The discretion is the method. The publication is the point.
The industrial base is a national security asset and a payroll at the same time. Every line that opens is a set of households with a shift schedule and health insurance, and every line that closes is a town learning to live on less. Sparrow Point treats those as one fact rather than two.
Good industrial work should be reachable without an inheritance, a four-year degree, or a family already inside the industry.
Two things. Whether allied deterrence is stronger because the people responsible for it understood the problem better. And whether the industrial capacity that comes out of it employs people who weren't born into this industry.
A production line is an economic mobility program with a roof on it.
That's the part of this we care about at home.