How the United States Abandoned Its Critical Tradition of Industry-Government Defense Technology Communication

Summary

The article examines what the author calls the "transmission function" — a historically vital but informal practice in which senior technology industry executives candidly inform the U.S. government about the strategic capabilities and risks of their products, enabling effective export control policy. This tradition was exemplified by J. Fred Bucy of Texas Instruments, whose 1976 Defense Science Board report reshaped American export controls by focusing on militarily critical technologies rather than end-products, a framework that still underpins today's China chip-control regime. The catastrophic consequences of this function breaking down were illustrated by the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal of the 1980s, in which allied executives sold sophisticated milling equipment to the Soviet Union, costing the U.S. Navy an estimated $30 billion to restore its acoustic submarine advantage. The article uses a revealing interview between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and podcaster Dwarkesh Patel to demonstrate how this tradition is visibly failing today, as Huang deflected pointed questions about the strategic risks of selling American AI compute to adversaries. The author contrasts this evasiveness with the approaches of other AI companies like Anthropic, arguing that without a formal institutional mechanism — similar to Cold War-era Defense Science Board task forces — to structure honest industry-government dialogue, the United States risks losing strategic control over the most consequential technology of the current era.