Thu, Sep 19, 2019

The U.S. Needs a New National Security Innovation Strategy, Warns the CFR's Task Force

The Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, which includes Kroll's Nicole Y. Lamb-Hale, aims to assess issues of critical importance to U.S. foreign policy.

It argues the U.S. needs to respond urgently and comprehensively over the next five years with a national security innovation strategy to ensure it is the predominant power in a range of emerging technologies such as AI and data science, advanced battery storage, advanced semiconductor technologies, genomics and synthetic biology, fifth-generation cellular networks (5G), quantum information systems and robotics.

In its report, Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge, the Task Force proposes four pillars of policy recommendations for the U.S. government, the private sector, and academia:

  • Restore federal funding for research and development and announce moonshot approaches to society-wide national security problems such as threat detection networks and carbon-capture technologies;
  • Expand the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) pipeline and attract, retain and educate a world-class science and technology workforce;
  • Support the acquisition and adoption of technology in the defense sector by shifting a portion of budget to the rapid integration of commercial technology and by the appointment of specialists to fast-track technologies; and
  • Create a technology alliance with partners to develop common policies for emerging technologies and to collaborate on science projects.

Read the full report here.