Advanced Manufacturing: May 30, 2023

Advanced Manufacturing: A Possible Asymmetric Advantage to Ensure Security, Prosperity, and Values

Despite growing tension over threats to the current world order, the U.S. and like-minded partners maintain the power, tools, and competitive advantage to continue leading the pursuit of economic prosperity, preservation of peace, and defense of sovereignty for all nations. Advanced manufacturing is one such tool that, if developed and employed appropriately, offers the opportunity to further the concept of global prosperity and thwart revisionist ambitions. Analyzing advanced manufacturing is complicated because it is not an industry but a system of technological processes and products that are rapidly evolving. Reinforcing domestic manufacturing by progressing and integrating advanced technologies can help restore U.S. manufacturing capacity, maintain its leadership on the world stage, and usher in the next era of economic prosperity.

Aircraft (formerly Air Domain): May 30, 2023

Air Dominance in Strategic Competition: Expanding Uncrewed Systems

The aviation industry provides the bedrock of military power and has for over a hundred years. In the 21st century, technological advances in international weapons systems challenge the survivability of traditionally crewed aircraft. China’s meteoric rise in military power and intent to rebalance the rules-based international order for its benefit necessitates an elevated U.S. emphasis on improving its aircraft capabilities and quantities. The capabilities of currently fielded Chinese and Russian surface-to-air and air-to-air weapons systems necessitate a recognition that crewed U.S. systems will be at significant risk in a peer-to-peer engagement and losses of platforms will be high. The U.S. must look to uncrewed aircraft systems to both increase the number of aircraft in the U.S. arsenal and reduce risk to crewed platforms.

Artificial Intelligence (formerly Emerging Technologies): May 30, 2023

Riding the Wave: Maximizing the Opportunities and Mitigating the Risks of Artificial Intelligence Disruption

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is disrupting the world. New capabilities demonstrate AI’s immense opportunities, but they also bring great risks: unsustainable power demand, worker displacement, and new ethical dilemmas that challenge global stability. As the People’s Republic of China pursues its goal to become the global AI superpower by 2030, the U.S. must act quickly and iteratively in collaboration with allies, partners, and industry to channel the disruption toward positive outcomes in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Biotechnology: May 30, 2023

Biotechnology: How the United States Can Mitigate Risks and Increase Opportunities for the Next Industrial Revolution

Like the previous industrial revolutions in chemistry and engineering, the era of biotechnology is swiftly altering human progress and the global landscape. The biotech industry is rapidly changing how humans create food, acquire resources, and approach healthcare – it has the potential to impact every facet of human life. Biotechnology provides tools through which humanity can effectively tackle the adverse consequences of human development, encompassing environmental degradation, climate change, and the inequitable distribution of food supplies. Biotechnology is also presenting society with new challenges, compelling people to confront ethical dilemmas, security threats, and divisions regarding the acceptance or rejection of this rapidly expanding industry.

C4ISR: May 30, 2023

A View of the C4ISR Industry in the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) Environment

The 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) illuminates China’s economic rise and newfound global influence, underpinning the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ambitions of challenging the free and open international rules-based system. After decades of studying the United States, the CCP has undergone a sustained effort to bolster its military to disrupt the U.S. ability to project power. Simultaneously, the CCP is pursuing a concept called “informatized” war to replicate the U.S. approach to network warfare. Both nations rely on their defense industries to outpace their adversaries in this pivotal aspect of great power competition.

Cyber (formerly Information and Communications Technology): May 30, 2023

Safeguarding Cyberspace: The Imperative for Reform and Rebalance

The United States (US) will most likely continue to suffer unacceptable losses in strategic competition with autocracies in cyberspace until it shapes the cyberspace domain by improving cyberspace attention, leadership, and governance, fostering a more collaborative relationship with private industry to advance digital literacy and cybersecurity, and involving more offensive cyberspace operations through integrated deterrence via defend forward and persistent engagement strategies. Allies and partners should be engaged to ensure synchronous policies. The 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS), though appropriately advancing cybersecurity, will unlikely bend the positive slope of Intellectual Property (IP) theft, ransomware loss, malign cyber information operations (CIO), and ongoing cyberspace threats to US critical infrastructure by Russia and China. The US remains largely timid in cyberspace, especially in punishing malign actors, fearing escalation to kinetic conflict, and limits itself to cybersecurity. To date, US operations involving denial capabilities have not resulted in escalation to military conflict.

Electromagnetic Warfare: May 30, 2023

Electromagnetic Warfare Roadblocks: Stifling Innovation and Operational Effectiveness

The United States must innovate and operationalize electromagnetic warfare (EW) capability across the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) or U.S. national security will be at risk. Superiority in the EMS maneuver space is a fundamental precursor that enables the Department of Defense (DoD) to successfully operate in all domains and achieve the goals of the National Defense Strategy. The ability to operate freely within the EMS – at the time, place, and parameters of the nation’s choosing – is no longer guaranteed within today’s geopolitical environment. While acute threats like Russia pose significant EMS threats, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) presents the United States with its most significant pacing challenge. China fuses innovation across civil and military spheres, which enables it to make technological advances quickly. To maintain EMS superiority, the United States must remove roadblocks and impediments that slow EW innovation and prevent EW operational effectiveness.

Energy: May 30, 2023

Maximizing the First 5% of GDP: An Optimistic Assessment of the United States Energy Sector and Policy Recommendations for the Future

Currently, there is considerable pessimism in the United States. Inflation, political polarization, debt brinksmanship, and protracted conflict dominate headlines. However, the mood is noticeably different in the energy sector. Energy is one of America’s greatest strengths, and after decades of languish and underinvestment (in certain parts of the industry), the sector may now be positioned to lead a new era of American leadership and growth. For the first time in decades, there is significant investment from the federal government, and the private sector and academia are eager to accept the challenges the administration has articulated.

Environment: May 30, 2023

Environment and Climate Industry Study 2023

The Environment and Climate Industry Study has sought to assess U.S. and international competitiveness in the environment/climate sector(s) of business, within the context of national security, broadly defined. The Environment/Climate industry is – as its label suggests, but also as a function of the numerous constituent industries that comprise it – essentially an industry of industries. Considering its long-standing presence and the many corporate mergers and acquisitions that have basically run their course, it is a mature industry. And, by virtue of its global reach; its contributions to national interests, aims, and priorities; and its measurable impact on the economy, it is truly a strategic industry. Although U.S. firms are at the forefront of the environmental sector, the United States is, at best, a mid-tier player compared to other countries in terms of overall national environmental performance. As such, this study concludes that for the United States to prevail strategically and keep healthy competition from devolving into unhealthy conflict, public- and private-sector decisionmakers alike must undertake a number of potentially transformative policy reforms.

Finance (formerly Financial Services): May 30, 2023

Limitations of the U.S. Finance Industry in an Increasingly Multipolar World

The United States’ (U.S.) finance industry is a mosaic of highly regulated entities that generate trillions in revenue. Those revenues ripple across the U.S. and the global economies and become the foundation for capital investments into infrastructure, education, social welfare, and national defense. The United States occupies a unique position in the world order due, in large measure, to its robust financial markets and the singular attributes of the U.S. dollar. U.S. financial strength enables the pursuit of domestic and global objectives by leveraging the four primary instruments of power – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.