Steve Blank

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute. 

We just had our third week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).

In class 1, we learned that national power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/intelligence, its military, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. This “whole of government approach” is known by the acronym DIME-FIL. And after two decades focused on counter terrorism the U.S. is engaged in great power competition with both China and Russia.

In class 2, we learned how China is using all elements of national power: diplomacy (soft power, alliances, coercion), information/intelligence (using its economic leverage over Hollywood, controlling the Covid narrative), its military might and economic strength (Belt and Road Initiative,) to exploit Western finance and technology.  This has resulted in Western democracies prioritizing economic cooperation and trade with China above all else.  China’s goal is to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model.

Going forward, coexistence with China will involve competition but also cooperation. But it’s going to take the demonstrated resolve of the U.S. and its allies to continue to uphold a rules-based order where nations share a vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific where the sovereignty of all countries are respected.

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Class 1 and Class 2.

All which leads to today’s topic, the other great power – Russia.

Class 3 Required Readings

Fall of the USSR

• Peter Crowley, “Book Review: Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted” Inquiries Journal, 2010.

Russian Geopolitics & Foreign Policy

• John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” Foreign Affairs, 2014.
• Dmitri Trenin, “A Five-Year Outlook for Russian Foreign Policy: Demands, Drivers, and Influences” Carnegie Moscow Center, 2016.
• Michael McFaul, “How to Contain Putin’s Russia: A Strategy for Countering a Rising Revisionist Power” Foreign Affairs, 2021.
• “Russian Strategic Intentions: A Strategic Multilayer Assessment White Paper” S. Joint Staff, 2019.

Putin & Putinism

• Michael McFaul, “Putin, Putinism, and the Domestic Determinants of Russian Foreign Policy” International Security, Oct 01, 2020.

Russia’s Pivot to Asia & the Chinese-Russian Relationship

• Artyom Lukin, “The Russia-China Entente and its Future” International Politics, 2020.
• Chris Miller, “Will Russia’s Pivot to Asia Last?” Orbis, 2020.

Russian Technology Strategy

• Andrew S. Weiss, “New Tools, Old Tricks: Emerging Technologies and Russia’s Global Tool Kit” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2021.
• Stephen Blank & Edward Levitzky, “Geostrategic Aims of the Russian Arms Trade in East Asia and the Middle East” Defence Studies, 2015.

Reading Assignment Questions:

Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. Please note that this assignment will be graded and count towards course participation.

1. Compare and contrast the viewpoints of John Mearsheimer and Michael McFaul on drivers of Russian foreign policy. Where do they agree? Disagree? Which perspective do you agree with more and why?
2. Evaluate the perspectives of Artyom Lukin and Chris Miller on Russia’s so-called pivot to Asia. Do you agree with one more than the other? Do you believe that the pivot is more a rhetorical or substantive strategic move on the part of Moscow?

Class Discussion Questions:

1. What are Russia’s geopolitical interests, goals, and/or objectives? From Moscow’s perspective, what are the main obstacles standing in the way of achieving its national goals?
2. To what degree is Vladimir Putin a unitary actor? How much is he the system of government versus the product of a system?
3. How does Moscow view the existing, American-led rules-based international order?
4. What role, if any, does ideology play in Moscow’s strategy?
5. In what ways are Moscow’s goals compatible and/or incompatible with U.S. national interests?
6. In what domains does the competition between the United States and the Russian Federation play out? How do these domains interact with one another? Is cooperation between the two possible and beneficial?
7. How would you characterize the Sino-Russian relationship? In what dimensions is the relationship the strongest? Where are its fault lines? Is the relationship enduring or transient?

Class 3: Guest Speaker

Our guest speaker for our third class was Mike McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation and former National Security Council Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs. Mike wrote about his experience as ambassador in From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. At Stanford, Mike is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,Stanford’s research institute for international affairs, and the home for this class and the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

Lecture 3

If you can’t see the slides, click here

Ambassador McFaul pointed out that at times Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel to ideological aims. At times, these objectives complement each other. At other times, they clash. He posited it’s because Russian policy is run by Putin and his political institutions. Slide 7

We then reviewed highlights from the assigned readings. John Mearsheimer’s article took the contrarian position that the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis in Crimea. Slide 8.

Slides 10-12 led the conversation about the end of the Cold War & Collapse of the USSR. George Kennan was the author of the 1946 Long Telegram which set in motion the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union. He lived to see its collapse a half-century later, and wrote, “I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance…of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.”  Stephen Kotkin maintains that if the Soviet elite had so chosen, they could have sustained the Soviet Union decades longer. Perhaps the most enduring quote is from Vladimir Putin himself, “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” as he tries to remake Russia into a great power once again.

Slide 13, Dmitri Trenin from the Carnegie Center points out that the 2014 Ukrainian crisis was the Rubicon. Russia broke a quarter century of cooperative relations among great powers pivoting away from the west, starting a new era of intense competition. Slide 14, Mike McFaul has a more nuanced view. “For a complete understanding of Russian foreign policy.., individuals, ideas, and institutions—President Vladimir Putin, Putinism, and autocracy—must be added to the analysis. (The).. three cases of recent Russian intervention (in Ukraine in 2014, Syria in 2015, and the United States election in 2016) illuminate the causal influence of these domestic determinants in the making of Russian foreign policy.

Slide 15, Russia’s pivot to China.

China-Russian relations are now at their highest point since the mid-1950s, being drawn to each other by the most elementary law of international politics: that of the balance of power. Slide 16 Russia has long struggled to overcome the constraints imposed by the country’s chronic inability to retain talent in support of homegrown innovation and R&D.

North Korea/Iran/Non-Nation States
We also covered the two regional threats to international security – North Korea and Iran – as well as the continued threats of terrorism from non-nation states (Al-Qaeda’s, ISIS).

Slides 20-22. North Korea has robust and expanding nuclear weapons program with 10-40 nuclear weapons. Their ballistic missile program not only threatens their neighbors, but their development of long-range ICBMs puts the entire continental United States in range of their nuclear weapons.

Slides 23-25 the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has actively pursued nuclear weapons and long range ballistic missiles. Under the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCOPA) they had agreed to limit their uranium to 3.67% enrichment. They broke out of the deal in 2019. Today, their uranium enrichment has reached 60% enrichment (90% is weapons grade). Iran has been a major source of regional destabilization, hostage-taking, and sponsorship of terrorism: Ansar Allah (Houthis) in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas/PIJ in Palestine, numerous Shia militias in Iraq (Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al Haq, Badr Organization). Iran’s long-running conflict with Israel is a perennial potential flashpoint for a broader conflict in the region. Iran has been actively using cyber attacks and has attacked and harassed commercial shipping and Freedom of Navigation Operations in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Slides 26-27 Non-nation states haven’t gone away. They are a persistent, survivable threat unconstrained by traditional geopolitical checks (irrational actor). They are capable of regional and international terror attacks. Some are actively pursuing acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, biological). Addressing the problem through counterinsurgency/ counter terrorism operations, runs the risk of long-term engagements that damage other national objectives and, sometimes, the national interest. Yet, if left unaddressed, these insurgencies can spread globally and create second- and third-order challenges (al-Shabab, Boko Haram, Abu Sayyaf).

Slides 28-31 covered the Group Project. The class has formed into 7 teams – slides 32-38. We suggested they get out of the building to first deeply understand the problem they’ve selected.

We offered a series of questions they may want to ask:

Slide 33. Who has this problem? Why does the problem exist? Consequence of the problem? When do they need a solution? How does this get deployed/delivered? How are they solving it today? How do you know you solved the problem?

Slide 34. Next, after they validate the problem: What would a minimum viable product look like? Who would build and deliver the final product/service? How to you create an “Innovation Insurgency” around the idea? Who would have to get excited about the MVP to fund it? Who are the saboteurs?

Next week we start talking about the impact of commercial technology on Great Power Competition. First up – semiconductors.

Lessons Learned

• After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and the Russia Federation had a two-decade long cooperative relationship
• In 2014 with the Russian-Ukrainian war and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and in 2015 with Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, Russia’s interests and the West’s have radically diverged
  • Mike McFaul makes the case that Putin, Putinism, and the Russian autocracy are key determinants of their foreign policy
• This week, student teams will start getting out of the building to build reflexes and skills to deeply understand a problem
  • By gathering first-hand information to validate that the problem they are solving is the real problem, not a symptom of something else
  • Then, students will begin rapidly building minimal viable solutions as a way to test and validate their understanding of both the problem and what it would take to solve it

Filed under: Teaching, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | Leave a comment »

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just had our second week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class and summaries of Classes 1, 3, 4, 5 6, 7 and 8.)

A key focus of the class is the return of Great Power competition. This isn’t an issue of which nation comes in first, it’s about what the world-order will look like for the rest of the century and beyond. Will it be a rules-based order where states cooperate to pursue a shared vision for a free and open region and where the sovereignty of all countries large and small is protected under international law? Or will an alternative vision for an autocratic and dystopian future be coerced and imposed by revisionist powers set on disrupting the U.S. led international order- an order that has brought the world unprecedented peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War?

All of which leads to today’s topic – China.

Class 2 Required Readings

• Matt Pottinger, “Beijing’s American Hustle: How Chinese Grand Strategy Exploits U.S. Power” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2021)
• Daniel Tobin, “How Xi Jinping’s “New Era” Should have Ended the U.S. Debate on Beijing’s Ambitions”Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 2020
• Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Why Are There No Biographies of Xi Jinping?” The Atlantic, January 2021
• Xi Jinping, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” (speech delivered on January 5, 2013, published in Qiushi (“Seeking Truth”), the Central Party School’s main theoretical journal, under Xi’s name on April 1, 2019, and translated in Palladium Magazine in May 2019).
• New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, “Looking for a Jump-Start in China” New York Times, January 5, 2013
  • [Kristof wrote this OpEd on the same day of Xi’s speech (above), which was kept secret by the Chinese Communist Party until it was published in April 2019. Read these two documents side-by-side.]
• Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’s General Office, “Communique on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” (aka ‘Document #9’) ChinaFile, April 22, 2013 (translated by ChinaFile and published November 8, 2013)
• Tanner Greer, “China Does Not Want Your Rules Based Order” The Scholar’s Stage, June 4, 2016.
• Kurt Campbell and Eli Ratner, “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied America’s Expectations”Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018
• John Garnaut and Bill Bishop, Sinocism, “Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China” Sinocism, January 16, 2019
• S. Executive Office of the President, “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China” Trump Administration, May 26, 2020.
• Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), “The China challenge and critical next steps for the United States” Brookings, May 15, 2019
• Rob Atkinson, “Innovation Drag: The Impact of Chinese Economic and Trade Policies on Global Innovation,” ITIF, January 2020.
• “Military and Security Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China 2021” U.S. Department of Defense

Class 2- Reading Assignment Questions

Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings.

• To what degree does the People’s Republic of China have an overarching grand strategy, according to the readings? Do you agree or disagree with the arguments of the readings and why? Even if China does have a grand strategy, is it possible for China to maintain coherent, consistent execution of its strategy? Why or why not?
• What are the CCP’s objectives regarding the international system? What instruments of national power does the CCP employ to achieve which specific impacts in order to achieve its objectives?

Class 2-  Discussion Questions

• What is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) trying to achieve? What are its goals and objectives? What is Xi Jinping trying to achieve? To what extent are Xi’s goals congruent with the broader CCP’s goals?
• How does the CCP and/or Xi view the existing international system?
• From the CCP’s perspective, what are the main obstacles standing in the way of achieving the goal of “National Rejuvenation”?
• What role does ideology play in the CCP’s strategy?
• In what ways are the CCP’s goals compatible and/or incompatible with U.S. national interests?
• In what domains does the competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China play out? How do these domains interact with one another?

Class 2- Guest Speakers

Our speakers for our second class were Matt Pottinger and Matt Turpin.

Matt Pottinger, was a former Deputy National Security Advisor and former National Security Council Senior Director for Asia. As a former Marine, Matt had 3 combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prior to joining the Marine Corps, Matt was a reporter in China, first at Reuters, then at the Wall Street Journal.

Matt Turpin, was a former National Security Council Director for China and the Senior Advisor on China to U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Before entering the White House, Turpin served over 22 years in the U.S. Army. Among other Indo-Pacific focused roles, he served as a China advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and assisted the Deputy Secretary of Defense with the Defense Innovation Initiative, examining the role of innovation in U.S. defense policy.

Lecture 2

If you can’t see the slides click here.

Slides 7-10 are selected quotes from our assigned reading. Our lecture and discussion (slides 11-16) took us through the evolution of the hopes the U.S. had for its four-decade-long strategy of diplomatic and economic engagement with China. The hope was that helping China grow its economy would lead to liberalization of its government and greater freedoms for its people. Deng Xiaoping said China needed to “hide our capabilities, bide our time.” Over time, Xi has moved China to a more overt and aggressive phase, no longer hiding its intention to challenge the West. As we discovered, China’s agenda always had been radically different than ours. The growing realization over the last five years is that our hopes for China to democratize as it developed economically were terribly naïve. What we’ve come to realize is that China has been playing a decades-long game to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model.

Realizing this, four years ago the U.S. reoriented from a focus on counter terrorism to a new emphasis on great power competition with Russia and China. This new effort can be seen in the Interim U.S. National Security Strategy (which outlines the major U.S. national security concerns and how we plan to deal with them) and 2018 National Defense Strategy  (which identifies the priorities and capabilities required by the warfighters to implement the National Security Strategy).

Relevant to this course, China is using all elements of national power: diplomacy (soft power, alliances, coercion), information/intelligence (using its economic leverage over Hollywood, controlling the Covid narrative), its military might and economic strength (Belt and Road Initiative.) China has exploited western finance and technology, and has successfully convinced Western democracies to prioritize economic cooperation and trade with China above all else.

At home, China’s use of digital authoritarianism (facial recognition, biometrics, and social credit) has turned its own country into a surveillance dystopia to ensure that there are no internal challenges to the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP’s oppression of the Uyghurs – a Muslim minority in the western province of Xinjiang – is considered a genocide by many as well as a harbinger of what a Chinese world order will look like.

Going forward, coexistence with China will involve competition but also cooperation. But it’s going to take the demonstrated resolve of the U.S. and its allies to continue to uphold a rules-based order where nations share a vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific where the sovereignty of all countries are respected.

Slides 18-20 dug a bit deeper about why and how of the group project. Students formed teams to work on one of the Great Power Competition issues at the intersection of commercial technologies (AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.) and DIME-FIL (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic, Finance, Intelligence and Law Enforcement.)

Given who our students are, we assume they can all go online and to the library and write a great research paper. As we pointed out to them, while you can be the smartest person in the building, it’s unlikely that 1) that all the facts are in the building, 2) you’re smarter than the collective intelligence sitting outside the building.

Our teaching assistants (who previously took our Hacking for Defense class) shared with the students their own journey of what happens to early assumptions and how solutions evolve when you get out of the building.

If you can’t see the Project Agrippa slides click here.

We want our students to build the reflexes and skills to deeply understand a problem by gathering first-hand information and validate that the problem they are solving is the real problem, not a symptom of something else. Then, students will begin rapidly building minimal viable solutions (policy, software, hardware …) as a way to test and validate their understanding of both the problem and what it would take to solve it.

And they thought we were just going to have great lectures.

Next week – Russia

Lessons Learned

• The U.S. hoped that helping China grow its economy would lead to liberalization of its government and greater freedoms for its people
  • We were terribly naïve
• China has been playing a decades-long game to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model
• Students will collaborate on teams to first understand and then work to solve national security challenges at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technology

Filed under: Teaching, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | 1 Comment »

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just had our first week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).

National power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/intelligence and its military and economic strength. The instruments of national power brought to bear in this “whole of government approach” were long known by the acronym DIME (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic) and in recent years have expanded to include “FIL”- finance, intelligence and law enforcement-or DIME-FIL.

Last year, the class focused exclusively on the impact of new technology on the military. Given the broadened scope this year, we’ve tweaked the course content and title to Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition to better reflect the “whole of government” approach necessary for long-term strategic competition.

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class and summaries of Classes 2, 3, 4, 5 6, 7 and 8.)

The course is cross listed with Stanford’s Masters in International Policy program and the Management Science and Engineering department. The students joining this fight come from a diverse range of disciplines at Stanford including computer science, political science, business, law, public policy, economics, and engineering. If the past is a prologue, they’ll go off to senior roles in defense, foreign policy and to the companies building new disruptive technologies. Our goals are to help them understand the complexity and urgency of the issues, offer them a model to understand the obstacles and path forward, and to inspire them to help lead how the U.S. leverages all instruments of national power to meet 21st century challenges.

In this year’s class, we want to:

1. Help our students understand how each component of our national security and instruments of national power are now inexorably intertwined with commercial technology. We will explore the complexity and urgency of the impact of the 21st century onslaught of commercial technologies (AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.) in all parts of the government — from State to the Department of Defense to Treasury and many more.
2. Give them hands-on experience on how to deeply understand a problem at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technology. First by developing hypotheses about the problem; next by getting out of the classroom and talking to relevant stakeholders across government, industry, and academia to validate their assumptions; and finally taking what they learned to propose and prototype solutions to these problems.

Class 1 – Required Readings

Overview of Great Power Competition

• Thomas F. Lynch III & Frank Hoffman, “Chapter 2 | Past Eras of Great Power Competition: Historical Insights and Implications” Department of Defense: Strategic Assessment 2020.
• Stephen Kotkin, “Realist World: The Players Change, but the Game Remains” Foreign Affairs, 2018
• Nadia Schadlow, “The End of American Illusion. Trump and the World as It Is.” Foreign Affairs Sept/Oct 2020
• Elbridge A. Colby and A. Wess Mitchell, “The Age of Great-Power Competition: How the Trump Administration Refashioned American Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2020
• Great Power Competition Timeline MITRE, 2020
• “Should U.S. Foreign Policy Focus on Great-Power Competition? Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts” Foreign Affairs, Oct. 13, 2020
• Michael J. Mazarr, “This Is Not a Great-Power Competition: Why the Term Doesn’t Capture Today’s Reality”
• Emma Ashford, “Great Power Competition is a Recipe for Disaster” Foreign Policy, April 2021.
• Matthew Kroenig, The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China

U.S. National Security Strategy

• Steven Heffington et al., A National Security Strategy Primer, U.S. National Defense University, 2019
• National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Introduction p. 1-4: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf
• Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States: https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf
• Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Strategy”, Joint Doctrine Note 1-18
• “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance” The White House, March 3, 2021.

Class 1 Discussion Questions

1. Is great power competition an accurate way to describe the U.S. relationship with China? With Russia? Is doing so productive for U.S. interests? Why or why not?
2. What are the risks of casting the US relationship with China and/or Russia as a whole-of-government competition? What are the risks of not viewing these relations as competitive?

Class 1 – Guest Speaker

Our speaker for our first class was former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis who gave an inspiring talk about strategy, the Department of Defense’s pivot to great power competition that he led during his tenure as Secretary, and the importance and rewards of service to the nation. General Mattis joined the Marine Corps in 1969, and he has led Marines and then later joint forces at every level from platoon commander as a Lieutenant all the way up to combatant commander of US Central Command as a four-star general. He recently led our entire US Defense Department as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense. We’re fortunate to now have him back here at Stanford at the Hoover Institution.

Lecture 1

If you can’t see the slides click here.

After introducing the teaching team and class logistics (slides 1-13) we briefly overviewed the quarter (slide 17)

We set up the class with a discussion of the return of great power competition. This isn’t an issue of which nation comes in first, it’s about what the world-order will look like for the rest of the century and beyond. Will it be a rules-based order where states cooperate to pursue a shared vision for a free and open region and where the sovereignty of all countries large and small is protected under international law? Or will an alternative vision for an autocratic and dystopian future be coerced and imposed by revisionist powers set on disrupting the U.S. led international order – an order that has brought the world unprecedented peace and prosperity since the end of the Second World War? Slide 19.

And then we discussed the pivot in the U.S. National Security Strategy (which outlines the major national security concerns of the United States and how the U.S. plans to deal with them) and 2018 National Defense Strategy (which identifies the priorities and capabilities required by the warfighters to implement the National Security Strategy.)

These documents reoriented the U.S. from its focus on counter terrorism to great power competition with Russia and China (Slides 23-27). Slides 34-38 expanded on the three lines of effort in the National Defense Strategy: 1) Build a Lethal Force, 2) Strengthen Alliances and Build New Partnerships, 3) Reform the Defense Department. Slides 41-42 summarized the competing visions of the U.S. and China. The Biden Administration’s Interim National Security Guidance was introduced which emphasizes continuity in its assessment of the challenges posed by China and Russia and the anticipated enduring era of great power competition. (the White House is now referring to the approach toward China as “strategic competition” rather than Great Power Competition. (The White House is now referring to the approach toward China as “strategic competition” rather than Great Power Competition.)

Slides 45-55 introduced seven instruments of national power and the concept of DIME-FIL. We discussed that the national power of a country (its influence and footprint on the world stage) is more than just its military strength. It’s the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances,) information, and its military, economic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement strength. (This concept is known by its acronym, DIME-FIL.) We pointed out that in many of these areas we’re no longer the leader (the DoD has a polite euphemism for this – “we’re overmatched” – meaning second place.)

Slides 57 and 58 reminded the students that this class is not just about the reading and lectures. 50% of their grade is a group project at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technologies (AI/ML, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, cyber, biotech, et al.)

Next week – China, China, China

Lessons Learned

• The U.S. is engaged in a Great Power Competition – and in many areas we’re not winning
• Multiple components, not just military strength make up a nation’s power
  • Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, Law
  • Acronym is DIME-FIL
• Dual-use technology, that is technology that has both commercial and military use, has changed the calculus for national power
  • AI/ML, autonomy, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, cyber, biotech, et al
  • Advances in these technologies are no longer driven by government directives but by consumer demand.
• Students will work on team national security projects, challenges at the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use technology
• We’re educating the next generation of leaders who will not just discuss policy but will create solutions

Filed under: Teaching, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | Leave a comment »

For 25 years as the sole Superpower, the U.S. neglected strategic threats from China and a rearmed Russia. The country, our elected officials, and our military committed to a decades-long battle to ensure that terrorists like those that executed the 9/11 attacks are not able to attack us on that scale again.  Meanwhile, our country’s legacy weapons systems have too many entrenched and interlocking interests (Congress, lobbyists, DOD/contractor revolving door, service promotion of executors versus innovators) that inhibit radical change. Our economic and foreign policy officials didn’t notice the four-alarm fire as we first gutted our manufacturing infrastructure and sent it to China (profits are better when you outsource); then passively stood by as our intellectual property was being siphoned off; and had no answer to China’s web of trade deals (China’s Belt and Road). The 2018 National Defense Strategy became a wakeup call for our nation.

National power is ephemeral. Nations decline when they lose allies, decline in economic power (the UK in the 20th Century); they lose interest in global affairs (China in the 15th Century); internal/civil conflicts (Russia in the 20th Century); a nations military can miss disruptive technology transitions and new operational concepts. One can make the case that all of these have/or are happening to the United States.

Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I are about to start our second year of teaching what was our Technology, Innovation and Modern War class. (See all the class sessions here.) The goal of last year’s class was to explain how new emerging technologies have radically changed how countries fight and deter threats across air, land, sea, space, and cyber. And to point out that winning future conflicts requires more than just adopting new technology; it requires a revolution in thinking about how this technology can be acquired and integrated into new weapons systems to drive new operational and organizational concepts that change the way we fight.

This year we’ve expanded the scope of the class to look beyond just the effect of new technology on weapons and operational concepts. We’re now covering how technology will shape all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage). National power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy (soft power and alliances), information/ intelligence and its military and economic strength. The instruments of national power brought to bear in this  “whole of government approach” were long  known by the acronym, DIME (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic) and in recent years have expanded to include “FIL”- finance, intelligence and law enforcement-or DIME-FIL. Given the broadened scope of the class, we’ve tweaked the course title to Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition.

Our goals in this year’s class are to:

1. Help our students understand how each component of our national security and instruments of national power are now inexorably intertwined with commercial technology. We will explore the complexity and urgency of the impact of the 21^st century onslaught of commercial technologies (AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.) in all parts of the government — State, climate change, Department of Defense, economic policy, et al.
2. Give them hands-on experience to propose and prototype solutions to these problems.

Much like last year’s class, this one has three parts – teaching team lectures, guest speakers, and most importantly team projects. We’ll be using the concept of commercial technologies’ impact on DIME as the connective element between each week’s class.

In addition to the teaching team lectures and assigned readings, last year we had 20+ guest speakers including two Secretaries of Defense, a Secretary of State, members of Congress, Generals, Admirals and policy makers. We hope to enrich the student experience with similar expertise and experience this year.

Last year, team projects started with a mid-term paper and finished with what was supposed be a final paper project. However, one team took their project, got out of the building, and interviewed and presented a radically new operational concept for the South China Sea. It’s an idea that has caught fire. So this year we’re going to build on that success. Teams will form on week 1, pick an area of interest across DIME and spend the quarter interviewing key stakeholders, beneficiaries, policy makers, etc. while testing proposed solutions.

If the past is a prologue, our students, a mix between international policy and engineering, will be the ones in this fight. They’ll go off to senior roles in State, Defense, policy and to the companies building new disruptive technologies.

This is the first in a series of classes from the new Stanford Gordian Knot Center for National Security. (More on this in later post.) Catch up with the class by reading summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6, 7 and 8.)

Lessons Learned

• Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition will focus on how our national security and national power is intertwined with commercial technology. We will explore:
  • AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, commercial access to space, et al.
  • In all parts of the government; State, climate change, Department of Defense, economic policy, et al.
• Give our students hands-on experience to propose and prototype solutions to these problems

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