Private jets are a common enough sight over Driggs, Idaho, a hamlet 30 miles west of the exclusive resort town of Jackson Hole, Wyo. But one weekend a few months ago, so many chartered flights and luxury SUVs arrived in the small town that the mayor began to receive calls from residents asking what was going on.

The commotion, as it turned out, came from dozens of corporate executives and tech investors and a bipartisan collection of U.S. government officials arriving to hike, hunt and discuss the future of national security while staying at a remote lodge owned by billionaire Thomas Tull, who has purchased thousands of acres in the conifer-filled Teton Valley.

Tull is one of the most active investors in defense tech and weapons startups, and has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the sector since 2022. He has invested in companies like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril and Shield AI, which makes autonomous-drone software that the U.S. and Israel armed forces have used. And he has done so with a deliberate stealthiness that has let him avoid the spotlight on other investors in the sector, such as Google billionaire Eric Schmidt and Andreessen Horowitz, which has labeled defense tech “American dynamism.” In all, nearly $30 billion flowed into the industry just last year alone, and the stakes behind the emergence of Tull and his fellow investors couldn’t be higher. For them, a more militarized, more weaponized America is good business.