Leveraging Superpower Scale to Build a Trusted Technology Stack

The United States is presently engaged in an undeclared cyber war, playing mostly defense against an aggressive People’s Republic of China that is increasingly building a home field advantage leveraged through its aggressive global buildout of technology infrastructure.  The adversary combatants are China’s military and intelligence services and their cyber criminal proxies, as well as those of China’s autocratic supplicants, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.  Among these organizations, tens of thousands of highly sophisticated cyber operators wake up every day and go to work against the United States; it is literally their job to infiltrate, steal from, and conduct “battlefield prep” in U.S. and allied critical infrastructure networks, both government and private sector, which constitute the primary domain of this cyber war.

The United States is free and open, dynamic and innovative – and highly vulnerable.  Over 15 years ago, Admiral (Ret.) Mike McConnell, the former Director of the National Security Agency and the second Director of National Intelligence, testified to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee as follows: “If the nation went to war today in a cyber war, we would lose.  We’re the most connected.  We have the most to lose.”

We now face the bracing reality of McConnell’s prescient admonition from years ago.  China is bringing cyber war to us in a vast and multifaceted set of global operations.  In addition to conducting newly aggressive offensive operations, the United States needs to adopt a new defense posture at every level of our society, from citizens and communities to companies and local, state, and federal governments.  This shift need not and should not be alarmist, but it should meet the urgency of the moment; it must be commensurate with the existential threat that China’s predatory technology oppression poses to our free society.  All of us in our generation remember doing bomb shelter drills in school.  Like in those years of nuclear tension at the height of the Cold War, we should not be paranoid, but we should indeed be prepared. 

In the coming decades, there will be many facets of this new posture: operational and technical, scientific and R&D, workforce training and public awareness, military and intelligence, academic research and commercial development.  All of these various needs will draw on – and require changes in – every sector of our economy and society. 

This paper does not purport to cover all of these considerations.  Instead, it focuses narrowly on one foundational and indispensable element of the domain in which this cyber war is taking place: U.S. communications technology infrastructure, collectively also known as the U.S. “technology stack.”  As of now, the U.S. technology stack is distinctly diverse and dynamic, still the most innovative in the world, even as China’s “national champion” tech behemoths – Huawei and ZTE in telecommunications, Alibaba and Tencent in cloud services, Quectel and Espressif in IoT modules, et cetera throughout the tech ecosystem – gain market share and, in some cases, threaten to take over global markets altogether.  Almost all aspects of daily life in our free society operate on these networks, so China’s technology reach and the coercive power of its espionage and sabotage capabilities constitute an existential threat to our way of life.

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With this threat in mind, this paper presents our take on the steps needed to build a full trusted alternative to China’s comprehensive “national champions” tech stack. 

• Part I illuminates the United States’ dynamic superpower status as compared to China’s predatory and large – but ultimately self-limiting – autocratic mercantilism. 
• Part II explains the critical importance of China-built technology infrastructure to China’s cyber war strategy. 
• Part III reviews an important predicate step to stopping China’s technology threat to the United States: removing Huawei and ZTE equipment and services from U.S. networks.
• Finally, Part IV describes the necessary alternative to the China-built Digital Silk Road of coercive surveillance networks worldwide – a full tech stack established through trusted suppliers operating at scale in U.S. and allied markets – and how to build it.

We argue that this is necessary for the United States’ survival as a free society, and that building and maintaining a trusted stack will require significant investment in scale, infrastructure, and cooperation between government and industry – and between the United States and its allies. 

We call this “superpower scale.”  To achieve this imperative, we recommend three steps:

1. Use the AI Action Plan and American Energy Dominance initiatives as models – and as levers – for constructing the trusted tech stack. 
2. Leverage the enormous scale and technological capacity of the U.S. and allied markets. 
3. Through competition-driven excellence that wins markets through performance, not capture and coddling, deploy the trusted stack throughout our allies, and export it to the markets not yet captured by China.