Steve Bryen's New Book on Technology, Security and Strategy Is Must Reading

Among other things, he reminds us that once upon a time, America had real leadership. The technological achievements of the United States during the Reagan years were the wonder of the world. They won the Cold War and made the United States the world’s only superpower–a status that neglect, complacency and corruption have whittled away during the intervening three decades. This didn’t happen by accident. As Steve reports, the Pentagon has gone back to Reagan-era proposals to put thousands of missiles into space, poised to destroy enemy missiles in their launch phase. Our existing missile defenses are no match for the new Russian and Chinese hypervelocity weapons, and the Reagan vision of space-based defense has returned to the Agenda.

America’s technological leaps, Bryen reports, didn’t occur at random. We had the world’s best scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler. Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb, began campaigning for missile defense during the 1960s; during one of his lectures in 1967, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan was in the audience. Teller was the head of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories when our system of national labs bristled with talent and invention, at a time when the top U.S. corporations maintained their own labs with tens of thousands of scientists, and the Pentagon subsidized basic research with the equivalent of $300 billion a year in today’s dollars.

Another essay in this volume exposes the insecurity of military electronics. To save money, the Defense Department went from bespoke systems to “commercial off the shelf” systems. That includes computer chips manufactured in China or Taiwan, where China has extensive influence, as well as antiquated easy-to-hack Windows XP operating systems on our Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines. China, Russia and Iran probably have hacked our drones already.

The long-term solution, Bryen argues, is to ditch Chinese (and other suspect) parts and manufacture all of our key defense goods in the U.S. He’s absolutely right, and I’ve made similar arguments myself. There’s a lot of brave talk about “decoupling” the U.S. economy from China. We should start with chip foundries, display manufacturers and other critical defense goods. That won’t be easy. Taiwan is now the best chip fabricator in the world, and its production engineers are the world’s best. To restore chip production to the U.S. would require not just an investment of perhaps $100 billion but the training of thousands of high-qualified engineers. But without doing this, an adversary might have the capability to shut down our defense systems at the push of a button.

Bryen’s expertise extends to active defenses for tanks, stealth aviation, drone warfare and a dozen other subjects of critical importance to U.S. national security. I can’t think of a better use of time during quarantine than a tour d’horizon of our national security needs with Steve Bryen. I’m proud to be his colleague at Asia Times.