On December 8, 2025, Wall Street’s quiet pivot into national security and defense came into sharp focus as JPMorgan Chase confirmed it is hiring Berkshire Hathaway investment manager and GEICO CEO Todd Combs to lead a new $10 billion Strategic Investment Group inside its vast $1.5 trillion “Security and Resiliency Initiative.” [1]
The move doesn’t just reshuffle the leadership decks at Warren Buffett’s conglomerate. It signals how deeply global finance – from U.S. megabanks to new European defense lenders – is now entwined with arms production, critical minerals, and the broader security-industrial base.
Breaking Today: Berkshire’s Todd Combs Jumps to JPMorgan
JPMorgan Chase announced today that Todd Combs – a longtime investment lieutenant to Warren Buffett and CEO of Berkshire-owned GEICO – will leave Berkshire to head a new Strategic Investment Group within the bank’s Security and Resiliency Initiative (SRI). [2]
According to JPMorgan’s press release:
- Combs will lead a $10 billion Strategic Investment Group, charged with making direct equity investments as part of the bank’s broader $1.5 trillion SRI program. [3]
- He will report directly to CEO Jamie Dimon, work alongside the Commercial & Investment Bank and Asset & Wealth Management divisions, and focus on companies in defense, aerospace, healthcare and energy, especially in the U.S. [4]
- Combs will also serve as a special adviser to Dimon and JPMorgan’s operating committee on strategic issues. [5]
Reuters reports that Combs will join JPMorgan in January 2026, stepping down from his role on JPMorgan’s own board in order to take the executive job. [6]
Business Insider describes Combs as one of Buffett’s “top lieutenants,” underscoring how unusual it is for a senior Berkshire insider to decamp to a Wall Street bank rather than the other way around. [7]
A Parallel Shake-Up Inside Berkshire
The news lands on a day of broader succession moves at Berkshire:
- Marc Hamburg, Berkshire’s long‑serving chief financial officer, will retire in 2027, with Charles Chang named as his successor.
- Nancy Pierce has been appointed CEO of GEICO, replacing Combs at the insurer. [8]
Combs himself has been central to Berkshire’s future narrative. He joined as an investment manager in 2010, became CEO of GEICO in 2020, and has frequently been mentioned as a potential long‑term successor on the investing side of the house. [9] His departure, alongside Hamburg’s planned retirement and the already‑announced transition from Warren Buffett to Greg Abel as CEO, accelerates a generational leadership turnover at the Omaha conglomerate. [10]
Inside JPMorgan’s $1.5 Trillion “Security and Resiliency Initiative”
Combs is not joining a standard bank unit. He is stepping into the cockpit of a national‑security‑themed industrial investment program on a scale rarely seen from a private financial institution.
In October, JPMorgan unveiled the Security and Resiliency Initiative, a $1.5 trillion, 10‑year plan to finance, facilitate and directly invest in industries deemed critical to U.S. economic and national security. [11]
According to the bank’s own description, SRI will:
- Deploy up to $10 billion of JPMorgan’s own capital through direct equity and venture investments. [12]
- Support roughly $1.5 trillion in financing and advisory activity over the decade, up from about $1 trillion previously planned for these sectors. [13]
- Focus on four main pillars:
- Supply chain and advanced manufacturing (including critical minerals and robotics)
- Defense and aerospace (from autonomous systems to secure communications)
- Energy independence and resilience (grid, storage, distributed energy)
- Frontier and strategic technologies (AI, cybersecurity, quantum) [14]
JPMorgan says it has broken those pillars into 27 specific sub‑areas, covering everything from shipbuilding and nuclear energy to advanced materials and critical defense components. [15]
In announcing the initiative, Dimon argued that the U.S. has become “too reliant” on unreliable sources for critical minerals, products and manufacturing, warning that this dependence is now a national security risk. [16]
Dimon Goes on Air
On December 7, Dimon took that message to Fox Business, appearing on Sunday Morning Futures to promote the “trillion‑dollar initiative to bring critical industry back to America,” while also weighing in on tensions with China and the U.S. budget standoff. [17]
The timing is deliberate: Dimon is positioning JPMorgan not just as a lender, but as a strategic capital provider to the U.S. security apparatus and its industrial base.
“Wall Street Dives Into Defense”: Private Capital Enters the Arsenal
The Politico Global Security newsletter recently framed this shift bluntly: “Wall Street dives into defense.” Although the newsletter itself sits behind a paywall, a widely‑shared summary of its themes describes SRI as one of the most ambitious efforts ever by a major financial institution to plug private capital directly into U.S. defense production. [18]
A LinkedIn breakdown of the Politico piece highlights several key points that are now visible across the ecosystem: [19]
- SRI is explicitly aimed at shoring up the weakest, slowest links of the defense industrial base – the small and mid‑sized suppliers and shipyards that struggle to scale under the Pentagon’s annual budget cycle.
- Defense officials increasingly see private capital markets as a necessary accelerant, after years of munitions shortfalls, shipbuilding delays and brittle supply chains.
- Investors, for their part, are starting to view defense not as a cyclical sector but as a long‑duration growth story, driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s military buildup, and NATO’s rearmament pledges.
JPMorgan: Nuclear Submarines, Munitions and Defense Startups
A detailed Q&A with JPMorgan executives in Breaking Defense gives a more granular view of how SRI will operate in the defense space: [20]
- The bank plans to invest across both defense startups and long‑established suppliers, not just flashy venture‑backed firms.
- One declared top priority: the nuclear submarine industrial base, which the Pentagon wants to ramp from two to three boats per year but currently lacks the physical infrastructure and skilled workforce to support.
- JPMorgan sees opportunity in hundreds of smaller subcontractors that supply parts and systems to prime contractors but lack the capital to expand capacity quickly.
- Executives also pointed to concerns that the U.S. could run low on critical munitions within days in a high‑end conflict, signaling that SRI will look for ways to finance expanded production lines across the munitions supply chain.
The conclusion from the bank’s own team is clear: defense is no longer a niche coverage area – it is a core strategic vertical where JPMorgan intends to commit both balance sheet and advisory muscle.
Beyond the U.S.: New European Defense Banks and NATO’s Capital Needs
The “Wall Street into defense” story is not purely American.
In Europe, the battle over how to fund rearmament is increasingly being fought in boardrooms rather than parliaments:
- The proposed Defense, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) – backed by a group of commercial lenders including JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and ING – aims to raise around £100 billion to support defense suppliers, especially in countries with higher borrowing costs. [21]
- In parallel, the European Rearmament Bank (ERB), a state‑backed concept focused on European NATO members, wants to leverage about €10 billion of paid‑in capital into €250 billion of lending for defense procurement. [22]
On December 3, Reuters reported that ERB’s founders have formally proposed merging with the DSRB, arguing it is counterproductive to have two rival multilateral lenders chasing the same mission. [23] The DSRB’s backers have so far declined to comment publicly on the merger idea.
In the meantime, NATO allies are lining up additional funding vehicles:
- Canada has just agreed to join the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative – a €150 billion rearmament fund designed to get Europe ready to defend itself by 2030 – giving Canadian defense firms greater access to EU demand and capital. [24]
Taken together, these efforts mirror the logic of JPMorgan’s SRI: use AAA‑rated, large‑scale financial platforms to pull huge volumes of private and quasi‑public capital into defense supply chains that have struggled to keep up with geopolitical shocks.
Why Todd Combs Matters in This Landscape
Against that backdrop, the appointment of Todd Combs is about more than one executive changing jobs.
At Berkshire Hathaway, Combs has spent more than a decade managing a slice of the company’s massive equity portfolio and, since 2020, running GEICO – one of the conglomerate’s most important insurance subsidiaries. He has been frequently cited as a potential future chief investment officer once Warren Buffett fully steps back. [25]
By recruiting Combs to run SRI’s Strategic Investment Group and sit on a high‑powered external advisory council – a body that also includes Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, former NSA director Paul Nakasone and General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic – JPMorgan is effectively importing Berkshire‑style long‑term investing into a national‑security context. [26]
For Berkshire:
- Combs’ exit removes one of the company’s best‑known younger investors from its internal bench.
- However, the firm has long signaled Greg Abel as Buffett’s overall successor and is putting in place new leaders at GEICO and in the finance function, suggesting a managed, multi‑year transition rather than a crisis. [27]
For JPMorgan:
- The hire gives SRI instant credibility with both public‑market investors and private companies looking for a capital partner that understands long‑term value rather than short‑term trading.
- It also tightens the personal link between Wall Street mega‑banks and the defense‑industrial ecosystem, at a time when regulators, civil society and some shareholders are likely to scrutinize those ties more closely.
What This Means for Investors and the Broader Economy
From an investor’s perspective, several themes emerge from today’s developments and the surrounding news flow:
- Defense and “strategic industries” are being reframed as structural growth stories.
NATO rearmament, heightened tensions with Russia and China, and pressure on supply chains are prompting governments to lock in higher spending baselines for defense, munitions, energy resilience and critical technologies. JPMorgan’s SRI, Europe’s SAFE fund and the ERB/DSRB proposals all assume decades‑long capital needs, not one‑off surges. [28] - Private capital is now a formal partner in national security.
Defense ministries that once relied almost exclusively on budget appropriations are now actively courting banks, private equity and venture capital to expand production capacity and underwrite risk in emerging technologies such as AI, autonomy and hypersonics. [29] - Banks are seeking new “mission‑driven” growth narratives.
For JPMorgan, SRI is not just about patriotism; it’s a way to deploy balance sheet, win investment banking mandates, and build durable client relationships in sectors likely to remain politically favored for years. - Reputational and ESG tensions will intensify.
Financial institutions positioning themselves as engines of climate transition and social progress now also want to be champions of rearmament and arms‑adjacent industries. That dual identity – green transition partner and defense financier – will be a live debate for shareholders and policymakers. - Berkshire’s quiet transition continues.
With a new CFO named, a new GEICO CEO in place, and Combs heading to Wall Street, Berkshire is evolving toward its post‑Buffett configuration in real time. Investors will be watching how its investment process and capital allocation philosophy adapt in the coming years. [30]
What to Watch After December 8, 2025
Over the coming months, key storylines to monitor include:
- How quickly SRI deploys its first wave of capital under Combs – and in which specific defense, energy and tech sub‑sectors.
- Whether the European Rearmament Bank and DSRB converge into a single multilateral defense lender, and how strongly governments back them. [31]
- How SAFE and similar funds reshape transatlantic supply chains, especially for munitions, naval platforms and critical components. [32]
- How Berkshire reallocates responsibilities among its remaining investing leaders, and how markets interpret those moves.
- The broader political and regulatory reaction to Wall Street’s deepening role in war‑related industries, especially if conflicts escalate or public opinion shifts.
What is clear after today is that December 8, 2025 will be remembered as more than the day a star stock picker changed jobs. It marks a visible turning point in the financialization of national security – and in the emergence of a new, tightly linked ecosystem of banks, defense ministries and strategic industries on both sides of the Atlantic.
References
1. www.jpmorganchase.com, 2. www.jpmorganchase.com, 3. www.jpmorganchase.com, 4. www.jpmorganchase.com, 5. www.jpmorganchase.com, 6. www.reuters.com, 7. www.businessinsider.com, 8. seekingalpha.com, 9. en.wikipedia.org, 10. seekingalpha.com, 11. www.jpmorganchase.com, 12. www.jpmorganchase.com, 13. www.jpmorganchase.com, 14. www.jpmorganchase.com, 15. www.jpmorganchase.com, 16. www.jpmorganchase.com, 17. www.foxbusiness.com, 18. www.linkedin.com, 19. www.linkedin.com, 20. breakingdefense.com, 21. www.reuters.com, 22. www.reuters.com, 23. www.reuters.com, 24. www.reuters.com, 25. en.wikipedia.org, 26. www.jpmorganchase.com, 27. seekingalpha.com, 28. www.jpmorganchase.com, 29. breakingdefense.com, 30. seekingalpha.com, 31. www.reuters.com, 32. www.reuters.com
