RELIANCE ON DUAL-USE TECHNOLOGY IS A TRAP
JAKE CHAPMANSEPTEMBER 8, 2022
As currently executed, the U.S. military’s embrace of dual-use technology will not repel the Russians from Ukraine and it will not deter China from invading Taiwan. Instead, it risks ceding America’s technological advantage to its adversaries.
I have been working at the nexus of national security and technology for many years. Initially, I served as a venture capitalist backing frontier technology companies doing security-relevant work. I then acted as managing director of the Army Venture Capital Corporation, a non-profit organization created by Congress to serve the needs of the Department of Defense. Now I am at a new defense-focused firm. In all these roles, I have repeatedly seen portfolio companies encouraged to build their technologies for the commercial market first and only then slap some green paint on them so that they can begin exploring the U.S. defense market.
This approach is what I call the dual-use hack. It is the idea that the way emerging technology companies should work with the Department of Defense is to build commercial applications first and only then move into defense. Incorporating dual-use technology certainly has its place in constructing the defense ecosystem. Among other things, it helps to mitigate some of the Department of Defense’s first-order challenges in technology adoption, particularly with regard to commercial off-the-shelf technologies. But an overreliance on the commercial-first dual-use hack has generally failed to live up to the hopes laid out almost 30 years ago in the 1995 Dual Use Strategy: A Defense Strategy for Affordable, Leading Edge Technology. This strategy was supposed to ensure that the Defense Department could keep costs low, speed up innovation cycle times, and ensure that America’s industrial base did not atrophy in an environment of falling defense budgets. It has failed at all three of these goals. Costs have skyrocketed, new platform generations take literal generations to release, and America’s defense industrial base has been dangerously eroded in many different sectors.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/reliance-on-dual-use-technology-is-a-trap/
