Grand Strategy, Innovation and Technology-Power
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Grand Strategy, Innovation and Technology-Power: Free Trade with Free People
The pace of technological innovation has accelerated dramatically over the past couple of hundred years, and there is no end in sight. Technical innovations generally take one of three forms: Cost reductions for existing products and services, functionality improvements (including fundamentally new kinds of functionality), and changes in the form in which a given kind of functionality can be delivered - for instance, making the same functionality available in a smaller or lighter form.
Dramatic technological innovations, when followed through with implementation at scale, have the power to make prior technologies obsolete very rapidly. As the world has become more networked, the potential has grown for new technologies to disrupt the balance of military power rapidly and comprehensively. It is frequently the case that highly innovative new technology can, at very low cost, make enormous investments in prior technologies both obsolete and irrelevant. If we look at the race toward ever more effective technologies as a component of warfare, then these opportunities to spend modest sums to develop highly disruptive technologies are a form of asymmetric warfare.
In short, technology-power consists of:
- The ability to develop and deploy new technologies at scale faster and more effectively than a nation’s adversaries;
- The ability to thwart or disrupt economic activity and technological development within the sovereign ambit of adversary regimes, by withdrawing either key goods or key technologies; and
- The perception by adversaries of dependence on technologies and high-technology goods that may (or may not) in fact be compromised.
A grand strategy for the United States that recognizes the fundamental importance of technology-power should seek, first, to recognize the differences among key goods, commodities, and strategic goods; second, to advance not only innovation but also implementations; and, third, to export dependency on the United States and its allies for trailing edge innovations while withholding cutting edge goods and technical processes from adversaries.
This paper concludes with an overview of how the United States should enhance some of its institutional and cultural advantages in the arena of tech-power.
Michael Hochberg earned his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech and is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University. He is the President of Periplous LLC, which provides advisory services on strategy, technology, and organization design. He co-founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world's first silicon photonics foundry service. He co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Gatestone, Fast Company, and Naval War College Review. Michael's writing can be found at longwalls.substack.com, and his Twitter is @TheHochberg.
Leonard Hochberg taught at Stanford University (among other institutions), was appointed a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founded Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (i.e., STRATFOR). He has published work in Social Science History, Historical Methods, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Orbis, National Review, Gatestone, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Cartographica, and Naval War College Review. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves as the Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum-U.S. (www.mackinderforum.org). Len earned his PhD in political theory and European history from the Department of Government, Cornell University.
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