A new report from the International Centre for Pension Management explores how the defence sector can be brought into funds’ “investible windows”, a framework that was presented in a previous ICPM Working Group report on how to better align government objectives to investor requirements. The report is co-written by the Working Group leads Sebastien Betermier (ICPM and McGill University, Canada) and Onno Steenbeek (APG Asset Management and Tilburg University, Netherlands).

“We wrote in our 2025 report that institutional capital doesn’t respond to political priority, but rather to structure and incentives. The ‘investible window’ that we presented has proven to be a very effective tool for policymakers to better understand how to provide the right regulatory and legal structures to attract domestic institutional capital,” says Sebastien Betermier, ICPM Executive Director. “Defence is increasingly a topic being discussed in pension fund boardrooms, so we naturally explore how this sector fits into the investible window.”

The report, “Defence Investment Through the Investible Window: Aligning National Security Goals with Institutional Capital Realities” outlines:

• Three developments that explain why defence has moved from the periphery of investment policy to the center of it;

• What makes defence different from other infrastructure investments; and
• Four recent case studies illustrating ways in which defence assets can be successfully brought into the funds’ investible window.

The investible window is not an argument for or against defence investment. It offers a framework for determining when and how institutional capital can participate while preserving the primacy of fiduciary duties.