By Judith Bergman
Last July, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Burns, saidthat China is “the single biggest geopolitical challenge that the United States faces far out into the 21st century” and that “the main arena for competition and rivalry with China” is technology.
The Pentagon has been facing massive criticism for being unable properly, if at all, to meet that very technological challenge. “The U.S. government is not prepared to defend the United States in the coming artificial intelligence (AI) era,” the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence warned in March 2021, while also saying that China was on its way to become the world’s top AI superpower.
In October 2021, a senior cybersecurity official at the Pentagon, Nicolas Chaillan, who was the first Chief Software Officer for the Air Force, resigned in protest over the Pentagon’s slow pace of technological development. “We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion” Chaillan said, citing China’s fast advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and general capabilities in cybersecurity. “Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal.”
“I realized pretty quickly, we’re very behind in cyber, to a point that it was very scary when it comes to critical infrastructure and the lack of security,” Chaillan said in August 2021. “And we see it every day, more and more, and I still don’t believe we have any kind of handle on what’s going on.”
In April, another senior official, Preston Dunlap, the Pentagon’s first Chief Architect Officer, responsible for promoting technological innovation at the Pentagon, also resigned. In a nine-page resignation statement, Dunlap made it clear that the Pentagon, which Dunlap labeled “the world’s largest bureaucracy”, was far behind the American domestic commercial sector in data, distributed computer processing, software, AI and cybersecurity and that it badly needed “structural change.”
Read the entire article here: The Gatestone Institute
