The Department of Defense, other U.S. government agencies, and a bipartisan consensus in Congress all agree that China is using diplomacy, information and intelligence, its military might and economic strength, and all other instruments of its national power to redefine the future world order.
We should expect continuity in this assessment in the coming decades, given China's stated goals and objectives.
The U.S.'s responses to China's aggressive whole-of-government efforts to dominate have been piecemeal and ineffectual. The systems that we have in place were designed to manage 30-year DOTMLPF processes.
We need the opposite to compete with our strategic rival. Most of the advanced tech that is relevant to the Department of Defense is being driven by a commercial technology ecosystem that is not designed to effectively tap into.
We must more aggressively and deliberately harness the vast untapped potential of our world-renowned institutions of higher learning, namely the brilliant, innovative and creative students and faculty that flock to America’s flagship universities.
Many senior military and civilian leaders understand this and have established innovation initiatives. When key leaders end their tenures, the funding and efficacy of such initiatives are at risk.
The result is that we can scale to meet the challenge of China and other potential rivals. Our adversaries are doing things faster than our traditional systems can do.
Many have written about reform of existing DoD systems, such as fixing the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process, scale DoD accelerators and the Defense Innovation Unit, better utilizing existing acquisition authorities, etc.
The DoD has not engaged with the commercial industry at scale, which is a core problem. The key to prevailing in this strategic competition is to harness the extraordinary potential of the U.S. private sector and bring its vastly superior resources to bear more effectively.
After World War II, Silicon Valley built chips and systems for the intelligence community. After World War II, funding for innovation in Silicon Valley came from the Office of Naval Research, as well as follow-on contracts from all the services.
The first major contract for the fledging Semiconductor companies was for the guidance systems for the Minuteman II intercontinental missile. Silicon Valley's largest employer during the Cold War was Lockheed, which built three generations of submarine launch missiles. The ability to mobilize the resources of Silicon Valley was critical to the U.S. winning the Cold War.
In this century's strategic competition, we will need to bring similar resources and talent to bear. Silicon Valley is at the center of a technology industry that dwarfs the Department of Defense, its prime contractors and federal labs. When incentivized, this ecosystems can bring capital and people at an enormous scale to solve the toughest problems.
The Department of Defense is reluctant to acknowledge that this is a resource that can be tapped at scale and speed. If you could marshal those resources, what would you do?
It hasn't thought about what types of incentives could move the more than $300 billion per year in VC investments. Think massive tax incentives.
The answer to problem sets like threats to sovereignty and international law can be found in the adage "to a hammer everything looks like a nail". Most thinking has been restricted to having better versions of existing weapon systems, rather than alternate operational concepts and weapons that can be quickly deployed to deter or win a war in the South China Sea or in the Baltics.
It seems that conversations about new systems and concepts built around small, cheap, attributable, autonomously, lethal, mass, distributed, short-lifecycle projects from new vendors are not allowed. These are the solutions that an innovation ecosystems would rally around. Imagine if you will 50 equivalents helping to build a 21st-century DoD.
The private sector and Silicon Valley in particular, with its unparalleled innovation and extraordinary capital investment potential, can reverse the U.S. slide in capabilities relative to China.
The brilliant, innovative, and creative students and faculty that flock to America's flagship universities must be harnessed more aggressively and deliberately.
We have succeeded at this before. During the Cold War, almost every other major U.S. research university was involved in military innovation. In Silicon Valley, professors and graduate students were encouraged by the engineering department to start military electronics companies, taking the best people and commercializing the technology to help win the race against the Soviet Union.
The Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation was established to harness Silicon Valley's technology, talent, capital, speed, and passion for tough problems and help the United States prevail in this new era of strategic competition.
Efforts to coordinate resources across Silicon Valley must be further advanced. At our top universities, we need to scale national security innovation education, train national security innovators, offer insight, integration, and policy outreach, and provide a continual output of minimal viable products that can act as catalysts for solutions to the toughest problems.
The stakes are too high not to bring all our resources to the table.
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