As the Defense Department reaches out to civilian tech firms in the quest to stay ahead of China, two things are standing in its way, according to an expert.
First, some tech firms may be reticent to help the Pentagon too much, lest they enrage China, with whom they still want to do business. Second, China makes no bones about stealing technology, erasing the advantage of years of hard-earned and expensive research and development.
“For the last generation, the challenge for the United States has been combating failed states rather than powerful ones,” says Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “We’re in a very different strategic environment today, having to think about state competitors in a way that we haven’t in 25 years.”
The issue, Singer suggests, is that America’s adversaries have caught up or even surpassed the country in technological capability. China is the main example, along with Russia.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter acknowledged that dynamic in a September speech, saying it was “evident that nations like Russia and China have been pursuing military modernization programs to close the technology gap with the United States.”
“They’re developing platforms designed to thwart our traditional advantages of power projection and freedom of movement. They’re developing and fielding new and advanced aircraft and ballistic, cruise, anti-ship and anti-air missiles that are longer-range and more accurate,” Carter said, describing the list of concerns.
Lawmakers have voiced concern that the U.S. is not doing enough to close the gap, particularly Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., who complained at a January hearing that the Obama administration’s cybersecurity policies “minimize the role of offensive cyber capabilities” and failed to clarify “policy ambiguities that undermine the credibility of deterrence.”
Singer suggests that America’s pace of development has been more sluggish than that of its adversaries for a few reasons, not least of which is the ability for authoritarian governments to more easily subsume advancements made by the private sector.
And while the Defense Department has launched programs with outside tech firms to help the U.S. modernize, some unusual challenges remain, he said. The first is that China has engaged in a “massive intellectual property theft campaign.” The cardinal example is China’s new Shenyang J-31 fighter jet, which experts generally concede is based off stolen designs for the U.S.-built F-35 joint strike fighter, a project that consumed years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. The two planes bare a striking resemblance to each other.
“It’s hard to win an arms race when you’re paying the R&D costs for the other side,” Singer said.
“Another issue is that China’s creating a lot of cutting-edge technology on its own,” he added. “They’ve got the world’s fastest supercomputer, and they’re about to launch a quantum communications satellite,” a project that will facilitate potentially unhackable communication. “It’s cutting-edge science.”
However, he said, one of the biggest problems may also be one of the most frustrating for U.S. officials. It’s that tech companies are reticent to share all of their developments with the Pentagon for fear of experiencing repercussions or exclusion from the Chinese market. “That applies to everything from cybersecurity to artificial intelligence, robotics and drones,” Singer said.
“There’s this wonderful irony, while the Pentagon’s been talking about [technological advancement], they won’t say it’s specifically about China. In turn, that’s the same for tech companies,” which will not attribute their reticence specifically to a fear of Chinese retaliation. “For major technology companies, if they’re going to make it, doing well in the Chinese market is considered one of the keys. They’ve got such a huge marketplace.”
In spite of the hurdles, officials are certain to continue their outreach efforts in Silicon Valley. That was illustrated this month when Carter again visited the city, the third time since assuming his position a year ago. Yet while tech executives do not object to those visits, they may not change much unless the U.S. is able to incentivize companies in a manner that offsets risk in other areas.
“They’re not saying don’t come here, it’s just not changing the system,” Singer said.
