Leapfrogs and Shortcuts

Rachel L. Reynolds

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Introduction

Research Question

The United States’ technology development strategy is a system that can be mapped to an evolutionary landscape—a theoretical construct to describe the performance of complex systems based on inputs and interactions, originating from the field of evolutionary biology and since adapted by a myriad of social science studies. This evolutionary landscape framework helps conceptualize constraints on the routes to peak system performance (called available paths). Evolutionary landscapes are much like topographical maps where high points of elevation represent high fitness or performance in an environment. The mathematical function that describes the surface of the landscape represents all the possible combinations of inputs or traits that result in a given level of fitness or performance. In any environment, a system can only opt to follow the terrain described by the evolutionary landscape’s surface—that is, a system must follow available paths to performance. In technology development, inputs such as amount of money, time, or personnel resources spent result in a particular level of technological performance.

Other countries, especially China, engage in theft of militarily critical technologies, a phenomenon termed technology transfer. Notionally, their achievement of higher performance (or fitness peaks) through theft represents a contradiction of path availability in an evolutionary landscape. A contradiction in this sense means not following the contours of the landscape’s surface terrain upon which a route from one point to another is “available.” Such a contradictory path can be thought of as “leapfrogging” or “shortcutting” from a relatively low performance peak to a relatively high one via a route that does not follow the landscape’s topology.

This paper examines alternate paths to the acquisition of militarily critical technology and addresses the problem of whether the theft of such technology represents a viable path to strategic advantage. I approach this problem through the lens of evolutionary landscapes applied to cases of illegal Chinese technology transfer from the past 30 years. More specifically, the paper seeks to answer the following question: How does Chinese technology transfer deviate from the evolutionary landscape paths traversed by US technology development?

Ultimately, this paper speaks to how nations build capacity for war; it considers strategic tradeoffs the US and its adversaries make to achieve domain superiority.1 While the development and security of militarily critical technologies are in and of themselves of strategic importance, I believe the element of this paper that is of greatest strategic relevance is the conceptualization of what it takes to achieve performance. Understanding the different paths we and our adversaries take to maintain a technological advantage is central to properly assessing and successfully opposing near-peer competitors

Background and Significance

The United States operates under long-standing paradigms about technology development. It relies on values and mindsets many consider the fabric of the American way of life: hard work, personal investment, and playing by the rules. This certainly is not the only way of doing things—some of the US’s competitors, such as China and Russia, take approaches that rely instead on rule breaking or rule bending. Assuming that the US’s methodology has, in fact, placed it ahead of its competitors in technological development (although the United States enjoys an empirically demonstrable lead in areas like aviation and naval technologies, this advantage is neither necessarily nor solely due to US technology development regimes), will that method enable us to maintain our advantage? What if we reevaluated the paradigms that drive technological development in the United States today—what might we gain? What might we lose? A number of key ideas from evolutionary biology can help us think outside the proverbial box of existing paradigms and expose some potential challenges and advantages of a different approach.

Background

Evolutionary landscapes. The field of evolutionary biology offers excellent models for competitive environments. Evolutionary landscapes (or adaptive fitness landscapes) are conceptual tools that enable biologists to visualize how organisms achieve higher or lower fitness relative to their competitors. Landscape thinking abstracts the combinations of traits that lead to fitness and places them on a topographic map. If the United States were to map its trek toward peak technological development performance, what terrain would it cover? How does a competitor like China visualize its peaks and valleys? Whether taken metaphorically or empirically, as a mathematical model, landscape thinking enables a robust comparison of competing strategies.

Technology transfer. At the National Intelligence University in Bethesda, Maryland, where members of the intelligence community (IC) study science and technology and strategic intelligence, Dr. Peter Leitner teaches a course on technology transfer. A former senior strategic trade advisor for the Defense Department, Leitner has written and published extensively on the topic and was a frequent witness at congressional hearings on technology transfer and dual-use technologies throughout the 1990s. “Technology transfer,” as he and other national security experts use the term (and as I intend it here), refers to the illegal movement of militarily critical technologies from the United States to adversarial or otherwise competitive nations (a more precise definition is provided later in this section). What technology transfer represents in a national security sense is the narrowing of the gap between US capabilities and those of other nations.

The difference between adversaries’ advancement due to their own research and design (R&D) versus that due to technology transfer, as national security experts see it, is that in the former case, the adversary bears the cost of their own improvement; in the latter case, the US unwittingly “pays for” the technological development of its adversaries. That is, the costs of R&D, raw materials, education, manufacturing processes, and so forth are paid by the United States during development, and through technology transfer, adversarial nations illegally obtain the benefit of the US “hard work” without having traveled the hard work path themselves.

A puzzle. Thinking of technology transfer within the context of evolutionary landscapes presents a puzzle.

1. If evolutionary landscapes map a combination of factors and interactions to produce a given fitness (performance) level,

2. if paths to fitness peaks are constrained by the available paths of the landscape’s topology,

3. and if the United States has achieved its current technological performance elevation because of the combination of technology development inputs (e.g., R&D, raw materials, education, manufacturing processes, economic investment),

4. then, contradictorily, technology transfer allows foreign states/actors to reach performance peaks without traveling an available path on the technology development landscape.

Considered this way, technology transfer is a “shortcut” to a fitness peak that, in terms of the evolutionary landscape model, should not exist. This contradiction raises multiple questions.

Questions. Similar to complex adaptive thinking or systems thinking, landscape thinking leads scholars and strategists to novel questions about the systems they study. Applying landscape thinking to the problem of technology transfer suggests insightful questions such as:

• Does technology transfer amount to a viable alternative path on the existing landscape?
• Does technology transfer defy the US’s conceptualization of its technology transfer landscape?
• Do states employing illegal technology transfer attain performance by an unforeseen combination of input factors?
• Can alternate landscapes be mapped that account for the inputs required for technology transfer?
• Does mapping “theft” by visualizing it on an evolutionary landscape enable us to target key inputs and ultimately prevent the theft?
• Does the performance obtained by “shortcutting” match the performance obtained by the “hard work” path?
• Does the “shortcutting” party have a vested interest in the performance of the “hard working” party?

The answers to these questions will not only enrich the academic understanding of technology transfer but will also inform policymakers as they seek strategic technological advantages.

Possible explanations. Some potential explanations for the apparent contradiction posed by technology transfer include the possibility that there is, indeed, a contravention of the evolutionary landscape of technology performance as the US knows it. In this explanation, the landscape modeling rules themselves must be wrong since shortcut paths are not known to exist on evolutionary landscapes. Other possible explanations solve the contradiction differently: by asserting that technology transfer represents a valid but different path to the same performance peak by traveling a separate topology than the United States followed (i.e., by using a different set of input variables than just R&D, raw materials, education, manufacturing processes, economic investment, and the like). In this explanation, some other inputs must be found to account for a topology that takes the technology transfer-dependent state to the same performance peak as the US. Finally, still another explanation is that the technology transfer recipient state does not achieve the same performance as the transfer donor. This may occur whether or not the state travels the same landscape as the US. This explanation tries to establish whether or not “leapfrogging” or “shortcutting” is as valuable as “hard work” in the development of technology.

Path to a solution. One path to solving the puzzle of technology transfer and evolutionary landscapes is to compare cases of technology development with and without technology transfer. Such a solution would begin with developing the specific evolutionary landscape of technology development for the US—one with inputs like those suggested above (R&D, raw materials, education, manufacturing processes, economic investment, and so forth) and suggested by literature about innovation and development in the United States. Next, this route would assess examples of technology transfer. Such an assessment would examine the inputs required for the transfer-dependent state to accomplish the transfer (inputs might include factors for secrecy, risk, or reverse engineering). The solution would furthermore evaluate the end product of the technology development versus the technology transfer—how successful at achieving performance was the transfer-dependent state? A comparison and synthesis of the two notional landscapes and the relative fitness the states’ paths led to would enable an analysis of the relative cost and benefit to each state for having pursued their chosen strategy. This paper takes the first steps on the path to just such a solution—it assesses the inputs required for China to pursue illegal technology transfer in three cases over the last 30 years.