Maritime (Formerly Shipbuilding and Maritime Domain) Oct. 28, 2025

All Ahead Full: Revitalizing the U.S. Maritime Industrial Base

2025 Antonelli Award Winner-The United States has long depended on maritime power to safeguard national interests, drive economic growth, and maintain global influence. Central to this capability is the Maritime Industrial Base, a complex ecosystem of domestic and international shipbuilders supporting both U.S. commercial and defense needs. Today, the United States faces a critical choice regarding the future of its Maritime Industrial Base: whether to actively revitalize it or let market forces determine its future. The People’s Republic of China, the U.S.’s primary strategic competitor, has rapidly emerged as the world’s leading maritime power, producing over half of global commercial vessels and fielding a naval fleet larger than America’s. This underscores the urgent need to revitalize a U.S. Maritime Industrial Base weakened by decades of underinvestment and wavering national focus, undermining the nation’s ability to respond to emerging threats, build and sustain its fleet, and advance broader economic and national security objectives.

Nuclear Triad May 31, 2024

America Can Afford Survival A Capable U.S. Nuclear Security Enterprise is Critical Part of Deterrence

2024 Antonelli Award Winner: Great Power Competition (GPC) with two nuclear peers/near-peers is driving the United States to confront the realities of an aging nuclear weapons stockpile and production infrastructure, shrinking manufacturing base, and a nuclear enterprise strategy that has been focused for a generation on maintenance and caretaking rather than investment and recapitalization. China’s rapid ascent to near-peer nuclear power status, Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling in its war against Ukraine, and the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear threat in the Pacific that could conceivably strike the U.S. have all focused U.S. national security leaders across current and recent administrations on the critical importance of the U.S. Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE). While focus and rhetoric are important, overcoming the significant challenges to reinvigorating the U.S. NSE will require fortitude, a whole-of-government approach, and enduring political will.

Space May 30, 2023

Transforming the Defense Space Architecture with the Tools of the U.S. Federal Government

2023 Antonelli Award Winner: The asymmetric advantage the United States has long enjoyed in space diminishes as adversaries threaten the space system architecture underlying that advantage. The U.S. space system architecture depends on large, exquisite capabilities and a ground segment to manage and link those capabilities. It was leveraged to devastating effect during warfighting in the nineties and proved that space capabilities could transform air, ground, and naval power. It also spurred steep growth in the U.S. space industry, which had both first-mover advantage and generous government contracts to grow its knowledge base. In subsequent years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia have sought to neutralize the advantage by developing strike and counterstrike capabilities of U.S. systems through kinetic, non-kinetic, electronic, and cyber-attacks. They have also sought to develop their own industrial base to compete with U.S. industry.

Advanced Manufacturing May 30, 2022

Better, Faster, Stronger: Building National Competitiveness Through Advanced Manufacturing

2022 Antonelli Award Winner -- For decades, globalization has facilitated positive economic ties and development. It also made the US economy vulnerable to disruptions, material shortages, and international competition. As the Biden Administration observed, domestic manufacturing capacity is essential to the reliable availability of the goods, components, and equipment on which America's security, economic prosperity, and international influence rely. Fortunately, Industry 4.0 and Advanced Manufacturing offer opportunities to improve domestic manufacturing capacity. Industry 4.0 is a vision for combining the power of people, machinery, and technology for more efficient production of goods and services that fuel the global economy. Advanced Manufacturing combines data, technical inputs, and process changes necessary to realize that vision.

Strategic Materials May 31, 2021

Securing Minerals Critical to National Security

2021 Antonelli Award Winner: The fragility of today’s critical minerals global value chain poses an untenable risk to the national security and economic prosperity of the United States. With domestic supply lagging after decades of underinvestment and inattention, the United States relies heavily upon foreign sources for dozens of mineral products that form the fabric of the U.S. economy and defense industrial base. While some of these foreign sources are steadfast U.S. allies, other less dependable foreign suppliers like China or politically unstable states represent serious supply vulnerabilities and risks. Exacerbating the situation, global trends in manufacturing and green technology portend higher future demand and heated competition for these vital materials. On its current path, the United States is not well-positioned to compete successfully for these essential components.

Space May 31, 2020

The United States Space Force: From Science Fiction to Science Fact

2020 Antonelli Award: Since 1957, the space domain has transitioned from a protected domain for peaceful exploration to the ultimate high ground for great power competition. While the U.S. is the world’s most capable space-faring nation, it is also the most dependent on space, especially for national security purposes. Recent nefarious actions of great power competitors reveal that U.S. assets in space are increasingly vulnerable as the space domain becomes more contested. The U.S.’s freedom to operate in space is a key element of national power. As such, the United States Space Force (USSF) was created in December 2019, to guarantee domain superiority in the event warfighting extends to the space domain, and to secure United States (U.S.) interests in space in the face of rising great power competition.

Artificial Intelligence (Formerly Emerging Technology) May 31, 2019

Emerging Technology Industry Study

2019 Antonelli Award Winner: This paper provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities that emerging technology has for the United States (U.S.) National Security and for national competitive advantage. Emerging technology comes from innovation and research in universities, government research labs, and private industry. New technology has always been central to the Department of Defense (DoD), and, traditionally, much of the new technology was developed throughout the government, giving the DoD early and direct access to the most cutting-edge technological advances. What has changed recently is that emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), is now being developed and adopted first by private companies for the commercial market. Meanwhile, as the DoD struggles to identify, adopt, and field emerging technology to warfighters, China’s civil-military fusion policies provide its military direct access to new technology. This paper examines the implications of the U.S.’s and China’s contrasting approaches to innovation. To innovate while proactively protecting and preserving the existing system, the U.S. should work with allies and partners to invest in education and vocational training; promote policies to encourage technology clusters; promote business-friendly regulations; and use national security requirements to encourage innovation for defense applications. Simply put, it is imperative that the U.S. establishes and maintains an AI advantage in order to ensure favorable and sustainable conditions for technological innovation.

May 31, 2018

Energy

2018 Antonelli Award Winner: On a Monday morning, just as the country is waking up to a new workweek, a team of terrorists attacks, boards, and explodes an outbound Liquefied Petroleum Gas tanker, sinking it in the Houston Ship Channel and thereby blocking the channel. The Kinder Morgan Pasadena refined products terminal fuel transfer facility located along the channel is shut down, and the connection to the Colonial Pipeline, which supplies the East Coast, is physically destroyed (see Figures 1 and 2). That evening, while many in the country are still processing the morning’s events, cyberterrorist actors attack Houston’s electrical grid, leading to blackouts along the shipping channel and leaving much of the country’s oil, gas, and chemical infrastructure cold and dark. Through these attacks, roughly 30-60 percent of America’s daily refined oil products are cut off, the nation’s largest petrochemical complex is isolated, and America’s most critical energy node is physically and electronically isolated—and will be for weeks. Even as federal and state officials rush to mitigate the attack's impact and to neutralize the threat, they recognize that the country will take years to register the full economic and social impact of the day’s events.

Electronics: Dec. 30, 2017

Electronics

2017 Antonelli Award Winner: While currently assessed as mature and healthy, the global semiconductor industry is facing a strategic inflection point. This inflection will shape a future for the industry that is significantly different than the past. Although outlook for that future remains favorable, numerous challenges place that future at risk. Challenges found in Chinese competition, skilled workforce shortages, commercial semiconductor market shifts, unique DoD electronics needs, and ongoing requirements for rapid innovation threaten the stability of the market, the U.S. competitive advantage, and U.S. economic and national security. Future success in the industry hinges upon policies which address these challenges and enable U.S. companies to embrace future opportunities.