The Ronald Reagan Institute has produced a landmark, and worrisome, report revealing what America must do to prevent China and Russia from taking the lead in technologies that can threaten U.S. national security and the economy. It outlines the dire challenges in applying key technology. The New York Analysis of Policy and Government provides key excerpts.
The United States has entered an era of long-term competition with revisionist powers. A key aspect of this competition will revolve around a contest for technological superiority waged between the national innovation bases of the respective competitors. The outcome of this competition will determine not just American national security but also how the nations of the world interact—and whether a free and open political and economic system will remain the foundation of those interactions.
After a long post-Cold War focus on rogue regional powers and nearly two decades of continuous warfare in the Middle East and a focus on rogue regional powers, the United States now faces a new defining national security challenge: a long-term strategic competition with a resurgent Russia and a rising China.
Russia seeks to reestablish itself as a global power. While Russia is able to compete with the United States militarily in certain domains, its economic outlook and long-term demographic prospects are grim. Accordingly, it is unlikely to develop and nurture a true national innovation ecosystem. Given these disadvantages, Russia is limited to acting as a geostrategic spoiler seeking to undermine and weaken the United States, its alliances, and its global interests.
China, on the other hand, is already challenging the United States economically, militarily, and politically. China’s economy has surpassed that of the United States in terms of purchasing power parity and could, under some scenarios, pass the U.S. GDP in absolute terms in the mid- to late 2020s. Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, China defines its vital national interests in ways that are irreconcilable with both the interests of the United States and the values of self-determination and individual freedom to which we and our allies are committed. China’s global expansion, from both a trade and military perspective, is challenging the United States in virtually every region of the world.
In pursuit of its goal of reshaping the world order, China aims to supplant the United States as the world’s leading technological power by 2030. China has articulated a distinct strategy of state driven innovation, defined by its concept of “military–civil fusion,” to lead the world in cutting-edge technologies that might allow it to leapfrog the United States both economically and militarily.
That strategy presents a two-fold challenge for the United States. Economically, the challenge is to sustain American prosperity and access to markets on equal terms with other nations against China’s ambition to control the economic sectors that will determine national primacy in the decades ahead.
Militarily, the fundamental mission of the U.S. government (USG) is to deter a great-power war and, if deterrence fails, to prevent escalation of the conflict and end the war on terms favorable to the United States and its allies. An important key to this mission is achieving and maintaining military–technical superiority. However, over the last several decades, China—and, to a lesser extent, Russia—has invested heavily in advanced military capabilities specifically aimed at overcoming the technological lead of America’s armed forces.
As a result, the conventional overmatch that the United States has relied upon to undergird its deterrence Most cialis cheap of these issues relate to their sexual health. Smoking can not only damage your http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/nv.schoolboards.2011.pdf generico viagra on line lungs and heart but it can also ruin your looks. Many ladies think that such sildamax would burn out their purse, but they are wrong. viagra 25 mg As per this law, you need to follow a good diet schedule to reduce this health risk. viagra online in canada posture since the end of the Cold War is eroding. The balance of power in East Asia has already shifted substantially in China’s direction. If this trend continues, effective deterrence in that region will likely fail, leaving the United States to face the unattractive alternatives of accepting aggression against its interests or its allies or triggering armed conflict with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with all the attendant risks of escalation.
The National Security Strategy recognized the importance of technological innovation to every domain of the competition with China. Consistent with that, a key theme of the 2018 National Defense Strategy is that the U.S. military must move rapidly to arrest further erosion of its technical advantage and then restore and maintain a comfortable conventional overmatch.
Unfortunately, the technological development relevant to national security is no longer exclusively or even primarily in the control of the Department of Defense (DOD) and its prime contractors.
In the past, cutting-edge technology was usually developed by the government sector for military use and then migrated into the civilian sector. Today, the direction of innovation has reversed. Many of the technologies most important to national security are being developed and produced for civilian purposes by civilian actors who have no history with or connection to the national security community. China is aware of this new reality. Its policy of military–civil fusion seeks to better exploit dual-use technologies originating from the commercial sector. To avoid a crippling competitive disadvantage, the United States must adopt means to accomplish the same end.
Accordingly, the most important question [The Reagan Institute] Task Force grappled with was the following: How do we transform, organize, sustain, and leverage our national security technology and innovation community to prevail in a long-term competition against an authoritarian regime that has centralized, long-range national plans to dominate the critical dual-use technologies central to future economic and military competitiveness?
America’s ability to prevail in a long-term strategic competition with China depends on a strong and growing [National Security Industrial Base] NSIB. That in turn depends on more effectively aligning government policy and resources and public–private partnerships to strengthen U.S. national security and its strategic position with respect to China.
An ascendant, technologically advanced China poses a threat not just to U.S. security but also to the values of freedom and democracy that have shaped the world for more than a half century.
The contest for innovation between the United States and China will turn largely on which system innovates more effectively over time. If it is the Chinese system, then China may unseat America as the primary global power, supplant the technological dominance of the United States and its allies, and reshape the world in its authoritarian image. That need not and should not be the result—but preventing it will require swift and decisive action to strengthen the National Security Innovation Base.
Rolling back Chinese high-tech authoritarian ambitions will require a strong, dynamic, cohesive, and secure NSIB. Though the American private sector has delivered transformational technologies in the past, today’s NSIB will be incapable, in its current state, of producing the national security innovations needed for the United States to outcompete China. To respond to China’s technological challenge, enhance the American way of life, and protect the national security, the NSIB ecosystem must produce cutting-edge technologies more often and more reliably than China’s centralized, government-led innovation system.
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