Articles

#1 - Unfinished Legacy: President Reagan's Answer to Today's China Threat

President Reagan left us his legacy of wisdom in ordering the Socrates Project. He knew that containing the China threat decades ago was the surest way to ensure that the U.S. would not suffer the economic losses our country has seen since Bush arrogantly and shortsightedly killed Socrates. This overview describes the Socrates Project, a joint Reagan White House/U.S. intelligence community initiative tasked with ensuring U.S. superpower status for generations and how Socrates was on track to contain the China threat before President Bush abolished it.

#2 - U.S. Efforts to Thwart China's Espionage is Just and Endless Game of "Whack-a-Mole"

This piece addresses what has enabled China to now have a mosaic of direct and indirect redundant paths throughout the U.S. and its organizations to acquire U.S. technology and other data. China's national technology strategy dictates China’s acquisitions and enables them to adroitly maneuver within the mosaic of paths to consistently bypass U.S. efforts to thwart China's acquisitions. The only way for the U.S. to effectively counter China's acquisitions is to directly counter what dictates the acquisitions – China's national technology strategy -- with a more effective technology strategy. The Socrates Automated Innovation System can provide the U.S. with the technology strategy required to fully counter China's national technology strategy, thereby China's acquisition efforts. The Socrates Innovation System allows us to “build the better mousetrap.”

#3 - To Counter China, We Must Reestablish President Reagan's Socrates Project

To counter China, and not just "kick the can down the road" with military deterrence strategies until we run out of “road," the U.S. must acquire and maintain the initiative against China and its voluntary and involuntary allies. That is what Reagan's Socrates Project was designed to and can do. China's President, Xi Jinping openly and correctly states that technology exploitation is the foundation of a country's and its organizations' strength and growth.

While the U.S. is optimizing the funds to generate artificial competitive advantages to meet various metrics of U.S. national economic health on a quarterly basis (e.g., unemployment rate, GDP, GNP, etc.), China's national technology strategy is enabling China to outmaneuver the U.S. in its exploitation of technology to generate a true competitive advantage that dictates China’s as well as America's economic health. The Socrates Automated Innovation System will enable the U.S. to execute a national technology strategy that exploits technology with unprecedented speed, efficiency, and agility for an unmatchable competitive advantage. With this advantage, the U.S. will be in position to turn the tables on China as we dictate their economic health as well as our own.

#4 - While China Plays the Long Game, We Don't Even Know How to Find the Field

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been infiltrating/exploiting the U.S. for decades, while their efforts and the results they have achieved have consistently and significantly increased over time. Their objective is to dominate the U.S., and from there the world, without firing a single shot. From the rising "wokeness," to the flood of fentanyl, to the acquisition of U.S. farmland, China’s national technology strategy has driven them all in a coherent orchestrated manner. In this way, China is playing the “long game,” while the U.S. is still looking for the field.

#5 - The Endless Debate on U.S. Industrial Policy

The debate on U.S.’s executing an industrial policy has been going on for decades and continues to be at an impasse – a no-win situation. The present debate is as follows: “To beat China, our new peer adversary, we must have an industrial policy that enables us to exploit U.S. resources in a highly coherent manner (just like China), but the U.S. can’t have such a policy because it violates America’s founding democratic principles like self-initiative and reward.” The reason that we are at an impasse originates from two foundational misunderstandings of industrial policy: a) who executes the industrial policy and b) what the policy optimizes. When the U.S. rectifies these misunderstandings, we shall see that the U.S. can have industrial policy that both enables the U.S. to fully counter China while staying true to America’s founding democratic principles.

#6 - U.S. Innovation Programs Falter Because they Address the Environment of Innovation, While China Addresses the Innovation Directly

At best, U.S. programs designed to increase the effectiveness of U.S innovation provide only minimal improvements relative to Chinese innovation because of a major foundational difference. The U.S. programs address only the environment in which the technology exploitation execution takes place, while the Chinese address the technology exploitation directly. U.S. programs address the psychological, social, and financial aspects of the environment. Chinese programs address the exploitation of the technology as the laws of physics dictate. As a result, China’s national technology strategy dictates the effectiveness of both the Chinese and the U.S. environments for each country's respective exploitation of technology.

The result is that no matter how much the U.S. attempts to improve the environment of its technology exploitation, including significant funding increases (e.g., the CHIPS Act), China will continue outmaneuver the U.S. in the actual technology exploitation to consistently increase its competitive advantage in an increasing number of areas.

#7 - Is the U.S. Ready for a Hot War with China?

China has been systematically expanding unrestricted warfare against the U.S. for decades.

China's unrestricted warfare consists of addressing all natural and social spaces of a country's competitiveness ecosystem in a coherent, unified manner. As stated in Unrestricted Warfare, a book by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, two colonels in China's People's Liberation Army, detailing the next evolutionary leap of military strategy. "Spaces in nature including the ground, seas, air, and outer space are battlefields, but social spaces such as military, politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields. Technological space linking these two great spaces is even more so the battlefield..."

Two of the eight essential principles of China's unrestricted warfare the book addresses are:

Omnidirectionality, which is "360°-observation and design, combined use of all related factors," and
synchrony, which is "conducting actions in different spaces within the same period of time."

These are also the eight essential principles of China's national technology strategy. China's employing these eight principles as the bedrock of its military strategy has enabled China to transform itself into a world superpower faster than any country of the history of the world.

One major foundational flaw exists in China’s learned ability to exploit technology. China executes its national technology strategy as a trial-and-error art. This guarantees low efficiency and very high uncertainty.

In contrast, exploiting technology as a high efficiency and certainty science is the foundation upon which we based the Socrates Automated Innovation System. The System can produce technology strategies at the national and organizational levels that exploit the eight essential principles of unrestricted warfare as a concrete science and not as a trial-and-error art as what China now executes.

For example, synchrony entails conducting actions in different spaces within the same period of time. But as correctly stated in Unrestricted Warfare, technologyspace links (i.e., is the underpinning) of all the natural and social spaces.

As Figure #1 displays and Figure #2 synopsizes, the process of executing synchrony starts with having the Time to Fruition of the actions within Technologyspace (i.e., an action to exploit technology) executed in a manner that results in the actions generating the required Competitive Advantages at the same time. The Competitive Advantage in Technologyspace, in turn, enables achievement of a particular Objective in a particular space (i.e., GNP in economic space) at that same time. Lastly, achieving Objectives at the same time in the various Spaces results in simultaneous execution of all the Interspace Impacts.

Figure #1
Execution of Synchrony

But, because China executes its technology exploitation as a trial-and-error art, China can only know the connection between the actions in the exploitation of technology and the resulting competitive advantage(s) in very vague terms. As a result, China's national technology strategy has a high degree of uncertainty and variance that includes the execution of the eight essential principles including synchrony.

The high level of uncertainty and variance is present for China in each of the three steps within the chain of results required for the synchrony aspect of China national technology strategy.

Figure #2
Synopsis of Synchrony

When China executes an action in the exploitation of technology, China has only a vague idea of if the action will even generate a competitive advantage and if it does generate a competitive advantage what its attributes (e.g., magnitude, duration) will be, including Time to Fruition - the time between initiation of the action and the generation of a competitive advantage. Why? To large extent, China has identified only a small percentage of the factors that dictate the competitive advantage and its attributes, and China has only addressed these factors in anecdotal terms. The same is the case with China's understanding the connection between the generation of a Competitive Advantage in a particular space (e.g., Ground), the objective it will enable China to achieve, and the way China will achieve it, and the connection between achieving an objective and the resulting impact on other states. In each case, the low level of certainty includes the timing at each step.

Additionally, (See Figure #3.), the level of uncertainty and variance because of China's executing technology exploitation as a trial-and-error art accumulates, therefore increases with each step in the process for achieving synchrony in China's national technology strategy. The time of the impacts in each of the spaces has both a high degree of uncertainty and variance. As a result, China is unable to achieve both a high level of alignment in time between the "actions" in different spaces for synchrony within China's national technology strategy and to know with any precision or accuracy on what that alignment will be before it occurs.

In contrast, the Socrates Automated Innovation System executes technology exploitation as a concrete science. As a concrete science, the connection between an action in the exploitation of technology and the resulting competitive advantage is known in precise and accurate concrete detail.

Because China executes technology exploitation as a trial-and-error art, China bases its understanding of the connection between an action in the exploitation of technology and the resulting competitive advantage upon anecdotal insights they acquired from a small set of scenarios.

Executing the technology exploitation as a science, as it is in the System, means that the complete set of pre-identified factors for the connection between the action and the competitive environment and the predetermined concrete rules are in place for the factors that are invariant in terms of competitive environment, domain, competitor, scale, time, etc.

Figure #3
Variance Increases at Each Step of China's Synchrony

As a result, the Socrates System enables development of technology strategies that exploit the principles of unrestricted warfare to a level that is far beyond what China can achieve today or in the foreseeable future.

Because the basis of the System is knowing the connection between an action in the exploitation of the technology and the resulting competitive advantage in precise and accurate, concrete terms, each of the steps of the process of synchrony (See Figure #2.) is known and executable with a high degree of certainty such that the level of variance of each step is also extremely low for a very low level of variance for the time of interspace impact for the full range of spaces (e.g., ground, seas, military, political).

Results are that the U.S. can both achieve a high level of alignment in time between the "actions" in different spaces for synchrony within its technology strategy and know with a high level of precision and accuracy on what that alignment will be before it occurs.

The U.S. technology strategy will enable the U.S. to acquire and maintain the initiative relative to China in terms of all eight essential principles of unrestricted warfare.