For much of the last 70 years, the national security of the United States and its allies was in large part due to the technological superiority of their public and private sectors. Today, however, the future of that technological leadership is in doubt as nation-state rivals such as China are pursuing leadership positions in a next generation of technologies likely to redefine the geopolitical power structure.
This is particularly so in cybersecurity, where a newly emergent field called quantum computing threatens to break the world’s leading data encryption standards that currently secure computer files and network communications in both the private and public sectors, including the most sensitive of military secrets.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the ability of free nations to defend their economic and national security interests will be seriously threatened in the event they fall behind in quantum computing. Leadership in signals intelligence—the ability to intercept and decrypt the communications of our adversaries—has literally saved millions of lives by enabling key strategic breakthroughs in past world wars and global conflicts. During World War II, the Allies used signals intelligence to break encrypted Nazi communications, allowing their forces to dodge enemy U-boats and facilitating the preparation and execution of the pivotal D-Day landings at Normandy.
Forty years later, intercepted Soviet military communications provided evidence that the shoot-down of Korean Air Flight 007 was intentional, allowing President Reagan and U.S. allies to hold the Soviets accountable for hostile actions against innocent civilians. In our modern era, the monitoring of key mobile communications led U.S. forces to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden. If the U.S. falls behind its geopolitical rivals in quantum computing, it will lose the leadership in signals intelligence that made such strategic successes possible, which would put global peace and stability at risk for decades to come.
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