Summary

U.S. leadership in technology innovation is central to the nation’s interests, including its security, economic prosperity, and quality of life. The United States has enjoyed enormous benefits from its global technology leadership in the form of enhanced national security, economic growth, and a high standard of living and well-being for its citizens. Beginning in the aftermath of World War II, the United States built and maintained an innovation system comprising research, development, commercialization, and production of technology-based goods and services, and it has enjoyed a position of global dominance over its competitors. The clear benefits of this leadership for the nation, which many argue was a major factor in determining the outcome of the Cold War, have long attracted the attention of competitors and adversaries alike while motivating U.S. efforts to protect its technological advantage.

The approach to risk and protection of technology advantage taken by the United States has been predicated on an assumption of economic and technological dominance in many aspects of the nation’s research and development (R&D) system. U.S. research laboratories and universities have been regarded as global leaders in advancing the scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs that have led to the emergence of new and advanced technologies. Top science and engineering talent from around the world has considered the United States the default “go-to” destination because of the ability to innovate, collaborate, and discover in an open, welcoming, and first-rate research environment. The U.S. government or U.S.-based companies have often been the first to develop new technologies and deploy them in the market. In doing so, they have been able to shape market conditions, build the user base for new technologies, and create regulatory frameworks to support those technologies.

The U.S. approach to risk and protection of its technological advantage has also rested on an assumption that the set of technologies driving military competitiveness, such as those employed in spy satellites, remains relatively distinct from the set driving commercial products and markets, allowing the nation’s strategically sensitive technologies to be protected through limits or controls on information about them and on their production or use. In other words,

protecting U.S. advantages in technology has been primarily an exercise in protecting the technology outputs of the nation’s innovation enterprise.

In today’s rapidly changing landscapes of technology and competition, however, the assumption that the United States will continue to hold a dominant competitive position by depending primarily on its historical approach of identifying specific and narrow technology areas requiring controls or restrictions is not valid. Further challenging that approach is the proliferation of highly integrated and globally shared platforms that power and enable most modern technology applications. Accordingly, this report offers a number of recommendations designed to help ensure that in this new environment, the United States will continue to enjoy its fundamental advantages in technological leadership.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION AND THE RISE OF PLATFORMS

Science, technology, and innovation are much more multidisciplinary, interdependent, and multinational today than in the past, a shift that complicates efforts to protect individual technologies from competitors in either the military or commercial realm. Technology products used to be largely discrete, with well-defined purposes. In contrast, many of today’s technologies are multipurpose; have diffuse origins; and are highly dependent on other technologies with owners, users, and stakeholders from multiple countries. As a result, the R&D process that creates new technologies has become much more collaborative and internationally distributed.

Over the past few decades, moreover, military technologies have become increasingly dependent on technology development conducted in the commercial sector. In many strategically important technology fields, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and microelectronics, the pathway from basic research to application starts with private-sector investments aimed at addressing commercial markets. Thus while in the past, technology tended to emerge from the military to find commercial application, commercial R&D has now become the driver of much military technology.

Finally, many new technologies are developed, commercialized, and produced using systems of enabling technologies. These “platforms”—sets of integrated technologies, with associated institutional and human infrastructure, that serve as an essential foundation for the design, development, production, or use of specific technology applications—are typically multiuse, multipurpose, and multinational systems with many potential applications, often at a global scale. They can be rapidly scaled and stacked upon each other or interconnected, thereby multiplying their effects. Examples of such platforms include operating systems, telecommunications networks (such as 5G), the internet, genome editing, and microelectronics fabrication technologies. Platforms enable rapid, massive-scale, and lower-cost development by incorporating shareable technology elements into new technology applications. They are often developed and

operated by the private sector and have become an essential part of the technology ecosystem.

As suggested above, the growth of systems-based technologies and platforms is disrupting traditional approaches to technology protection. Because they are shared, such platforms cannot be protected using the historical approach of restricting knowledge or use without causing widespread problems with other technologies that share those same platforms, including applications that benefit and support U.S. national security and economic competitiveness. This issue can impact all phases of the technology life cycle, from development, to production, to use.

THE CHANGING INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT

Today, the United States is facing a competitive international environment that is markedly different from the environment that played a large role in shaping the nation’s post–World War II competitive and research paradigms, policies, and procedures.

Other countries have been actively challenging the nation’s longstanding leadership in fundamental research and technology innovation, most often by emulating the approach taken successfully by the United States: creating world-class R&D environments, developing and attracting talent, and investing in and supporting technology development. Given the strong R&D ecosystems of other countries, it is likely infeasible to prevent competitors from developing many technologies similar to those developed in the United States by restricting access to or the use of those technologies.

As flows of information and people across borders have increased, industrial research and production have become globalized, either because firms have become multinational enterprises with affiliates and customers in many countries or because firms have been increasing offshore research and production. In addition, the United States is no longer one of a small number of countries that produce the highly educated individuals who can drive innovation in emerging technologies. Today, other countries produce more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates than does the United States, and have been attracting individuals who were educated and trained in other countries, including the United States, to return to apply their knowledge and skills.

Finally, the United States now faces an adversarial near-peer competitor—China—that over the past two decades has systematically pursued strategies for dominating technology development in key areas. China has been making massive investments in R&D—greater, in some areas, than those of the United States; has a well-educated labor force that is three times larger than that of the United States; and has sought to attract talent from other countries. China also does not play by the same rules as the United States, and makes decisions based on a worldview quite different from that of the United States and its allies. The Chinese government is deeply involved in commercial technology development; research outputs and data from competitors are subject to diversion

or theft; foreign participation in the Chinese economy is limited and monitored; technology standards and regulations are managed to advantage domestic technologies; and markets are distorted to advantage domestic companies. China is willing to obtain technology through the acquisition of companies, through foreign-talent programs, and through the theft of intellectual property, and has learned that the United States will often react to such actions by instituting bureaucracies that impede the United States’ own capacity to innovate.

The historical approach to protecting technologies in the United States has generally consisted of unilateral reactions to external threats posed by adversaries. Risks in the new global R&D ecosystem cannot be managed effectively in this manner without posing a new risk—that of inadvertently slowing the development and application of technologies and limiting competitive advantage. The U.S. research community has seen an extraordinary increase in the number and complexity of policies, processes, procedures, and requirements governing the conduct of science and technology R&D. That expansion, combined with the increasing array of government stakeholders exercising authority in this realm, has created a set of complex rules that differ markedly across federal agencies with respect to requirements, adoption, and implementation. These rules limit the exchange of ideas, participation by others, and international collaboration, slowing the pace of research and making research environments less attractive to talented people.

PROTECTING OPENNESS WHILE DIFFERENTIATING AMONG RESEARCH ENVIRONMENTS

Limiting the adverse consequences of restrictions on R&D requires defining and maintaining a variety of research environments in which the restrictions being applied are matched to the risks posed by a technology’s dissemination. The United States should strive to maximize the amount of work that can be appropriately performed in an open research environment, an approach that will promote U.S. leadership in science and engineering, attract top talent, and enhance discoveries that lead to new technologies. At the same time, this approach recognizes that not all research-related work is appropriate for an open environment. For certain applications, research, development, production, and related activities need to be confined to restricted environments that limit participation, collaboration, the sharing of information, and the dissemination of results to ensure that the knowledge, know-how, production, and use of a technology are limited to those entrusted to use the knowledge and information properly.

Research, training, and teaching conducted in an open environment benefit the United States because they attract research talent, foster creative and innovative conditions for discovery, and speed the development of new ideas and technologies. At the same time, conducting this work in an open environment poses a risk that knowledge, know-how, or results may flow to adversaries as a result of the movement of either information or people. But for an innovation

leader, the benefits of openness outweigh the risks for most R&D efforts because the risk of information loss is mitigated by the ability to innovate even newer technologies.

Just as the United States needs to carefully define criteria and protections for restricted research environments, so, too, must it protect the essential parameters of its open research environments. Once the criteria that characterize an open research environment have been defined, they can be maintained so that any restrictions adopted in the future do not have the effect of slowing R&D. Work that needs to be restricted, whether for commercial or defense reasons, can be performed in other types of environments, such as near-campus federally funded R&D centers or restricted government laboratories, or in collaborative efforts between universities and companies, with the minimum restrictions necessary for protection. If research environments at universities or national laboratories are designated as open, funding agencies can decide a priori what work is to be carried out in those environments as opposed to work that requires a risk acceptance decision.

DEVELOPING AND ATTRACTING TALENT

The strength of the U.S. R&D enterprise is dependent on access to sufficient amounts of high-level talent, both domestic and foreign. Talented scientists, engineers, and innovators are attracted to open and risk-embracing environments where they can pursue promising ideas and be rewarded for their achievements. They may choose to work in environments where technologies are proprietary or classified, but those environments still need to be attractive to smart and ambitious people.

To maintain its leadership in science and technology, the United States will need to continue developing its domestic talent. Yet the United States lags

behind other countries in preparing its citizens for participation in technology-intensive areas. Remedying this deficiency remains an urgent public policy objective.

At the same time, however, if the United States is to continue generating more than 20 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) with only about 4 percent of the world’s population, it will have to continue relying on talent from other countries. The nation can no longer be complacent in assuming that the United States is the “default” choice for top global science and engineering talent. Other countries are aggressively competing for top students and STEM professionals, often by emulating the approaches that led to U.S. success in the past. Even in areas in which the United States still enjoys strong advantages, such as attracting top talent for U.S. graduate and postdoctoral training, it lacks coordinated efforts to ensure that those individuals can remain and work in the United States. Imposing excessive restrictions on research environments dissuades talented people from coming to the United States, leading them to find other places to live and work.

IDENTIFICATION OF STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGIES AND COORDINATED RISK MANAGEMENT

U.S. policy should shift from an approach based on listing “critical” technologies, with associated restrictions, to one based on coordinated risk management. A number of factors—including the rise of platforms; the more diverse set of users and uses of technology (often via platforms); the more diverse set of developers (including commercial and non-U.S. actors); and the more intertwined nature of technologies, markets, and applications—complicate the designation of particular technologies as requiring protection.

The modern features of technology make clear the need for a comprehensive approach to managing the risks associated with strategically important classes of technology development or use. Meeting this need will require developing a risk management approach that begins with identifying which actors using what means are attempting to use a particular technology against U.S. interests or technology leadership, and then defining strategies for addressing the resultant risks. That effort will in turn require expertise that goes beyond the nature of the technology to encompass the plans, actions, capabilities, and intentions of U.S. adversaries and other bad actors, thus involving experts from the intelligence, law enforcement, and national defense communities in addition to agency experts in the technology. This risk management thereby matches particular threats with appropriate strategies for managing them. For a very limited set of technologies, such as those used primarily for national security purposes, risk management may involve routine forms of protection currently employed by federal agencies or commercial enterprises.

• proactive, in that they define technology-related threats with national or economic security implications as early in the research and development process as possible;
• strategic, in that they are based on global realities, including the plans, actions, intentions, and capabilities of adversaries, and on reasoned risk acceptance decisions about which technologies must, should, or cannot be protected;
• timely, in that they are based on current understanding of the associated threats and vulnerabilities and are adjusted as required;
• integrated, so that different mechanisms for technology protection, such as export controls, information classification, or decisions by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, are directed and coordinated in such a manner as to effectively reduce or mitigate the risk;

• adaptive, with mechanisms for subjecting identified technology areas to regular reviews by integrated expertise in science, technology, and national security;
• dynamic/repeating, with a scheduled review to ensure that there have been no changes to the technology, the environment, or the actor(s) that would warrant a change in the threat status; and
• assessed for adverse effects, to ensure that they do not result in unnecessary and unintended barriers to U.S. innovation leadership.

This recommendation is not intended to replace the mission agencies’ role of identifying risks—or areas of opportunity—to the nation’s economic or security interests in accordance with their areas of mission responsibility. Instead, the goal is to provide an effective whole-of-government framework for managing these risks in a coordinated and effective manner.

TAILORED APPROACHES TO THE UNIQUE VULNERABILITIES RESULTING FROM SHARED PLATFORMS

The changing technological landscape has introduced new challenges to management of the risks posed by shared platforms and their supporting ecosystems. Current approaches to risk management assume that each technology is essentially independent of other technologies (regardless of whether they are in fact discrete or separable) and has a single purpose or small set of defined purposes. But approaches to protecting diffuse multipurpose platforms differ from those applicable to discrete, defined-purpose technologies. All countries sharing common platforms also share associated vulnerabilities and risks that affect their national interests. Protecting these national interests typically requires governmental technology policies, such as government involvement in setting standards, regulations, and trade policies.

The committee does not believe that at present, responsibility for identifying and managing the unique risks posed by these shared and powerful platforms is clearly established within the U.S. federal government, at either the federal agency level or the interagency level of the White House. Certain components of risk management suitable for application to platforms do exist in various agencies, but no agency has overall responsibility for coordination of these efforts: Accordingly, the committee believes that the appropriate first steps in identifying strategically important platforms; defining the roles and responsibilities of federal agencies that pertain to those platforms; and developing coordinated risk management strategies covering their development, control, and use should be taken as part of a cabinet-level interagency process.

PROTECTING THE ABILITY TO COMPETE

The openness of the R&D enterprise in the United States has fostered innovation, risk taking, and the incorporation of new ideas into new technologies. It also has attracted the world’s best scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, whether born and educated in this or other countries, to U.S. universities, companies, and government research organizations.

In today’s interdependent, global innovation system, the greatest threat is that the United States will inadvertently weaken its innovation ecosystem while other countries continue to emulate the actions that have historically yielded U.S. advantages in technology development and commercialization. To counter this threat, the United States needs to protect and extend its ability to develop new technologies and apply those technologies to problems in both the military and commercial spheres. Protecting and strengthening this ability is vitally more important than protecting specific technologies.

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