[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] As early as 1989, intelligence officers in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recognized China as the next threat, says former DIA officer and physicist Michael Sekora.

“We identified what [China] was doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, and we were on track to containment,” Sekora says.

Back in the 1980s, he led a classified Defense Intelligence Agency program called “Project Socrates” that was created under the Reagan administration to determine the cause of U.S. economic and military decline, find a way to reverse it, and outcompete Moscow. Later they turned their sights to Beijing.

“It was very obvious what was going on: China was executing a national technology strategy, which basically was playing ... a very adroit game of worldwide offensive, defensive, technology exploitation chess,” Sekora says. “What we had in Socrates could have easily contained China.”

The project was defunded by the Bush administration, and the United States went the opposite route, allowing many key technologies to be handed over to Beijing over the course of several decades.

In this episode, he breaks down why he believes the United States has lost its edge in technological innovation and how this can be turned around.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Michael Sekora, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Michael Sekora:

It’s my pleasure and honor.

Mr. Jekielek:

So while you worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], your job was to prevent the flow of technology to the Soviet Union, correct? How is it that we seem to have had the opposite approach to communist China? 

Mr. Sekora:

Well, because everybody thought that if we were nice enough to them and they gave all the signals that they were going to become a democratic country, that if we just supported them, that that’s what would happen. Nobody expected that they were a threat back then and would ever become a threat. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And so when we would literally, your job would have been mothballed, right? Like there was the opposite job that was around. It was like how to get more technology. I remember when I interviewed Michael Pillsbury, he told me there are multiple offices in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, which when we interviewed a few years back, he was saying, there was still, there job was to transfer technology, American technology to China.  

Mr. Sekora:

But in 1989, within the Socrates Project, we identified China as a threat. We identified what they were doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, President Reagan, okay? And we were on track to contain them because what we had in Socrates could have easily contained China. As a result, President Reagan had an executive order drafted to give us the ability to do that by creating a new federal agency. That whole organization was supposed to be put in place before he left office. There wasn’t enough time to get it coordinated. So what happened is it waited for Bush. Bush turned around and abolished the whole thing. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You gave me a lot of information there; we’re going to have to kind of unpack, okay? Let’s stick to the question of China. What was it that in your work, in your direction of the Socrates Project, what was it that you understood that seems like very few other people did?

Mr. Sekora:

America is based upon finance-based planning. How do you juggle the money to maximize profit? The way to generate a true competitive advantage is by exploiting technology. Technology exploitation, technology-based planning is what built the United States. It’s what the Soviets used against the U.S. 

And we saw that that’s what China was doing. Because in the Socrates Project, and it’s the reason I called it Socrates, we were looking at the bottom line truth, removing all bias, politics, and everything else. What’s the bottom line truth of all the countries of the world? Okay. Independent if they are adversaries, allies, or whatever.

Mr. Jekielek:

So bottom line, the truth of their economic development or…

Mr. Sekora:

First of all, just as to what they were doing to be competitive. What were they using? Because what we did in Socrates, because Socrates’ mission was twofold. Number one, determine the true underlying cause of U.S. economic and military decline. When I initiated the program in 1983, it was obvious that we were in a decline. 

So the first part of the mission was to determine why we were in a decline. The second part was to figure out how to reverse the decline that would ensure America’s status as a superpower for a generation. What we needed to do was to get an understanding of competition worldwide that was more holistic and more detailed than anything that had been done before or since. 

Okay, so I’m sitting in DIA. I got DIA, CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency]. We got all the data plus NSF [U. S. National Science Foundation] and everything else. And we put together a picture of competition worldwide: military, commercial, terrorism, counterterrorism, which was bigger and more detailed than anything anybody ever had. 

And once you had that, it was very obvious what was going on. China was executing a national technology strategy, which basically was playing a very adroit game of worldwide offensive and defensive technology exploitation chess. And what were we doing? Putting our blinders on, going after R&D, and then juggling the money to make the numbers. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, just explain to me in the simplest terms possible the distinction between finance-based planning and technology acquisition-base planning. 

Mr. Sekora:

Okay. And I'll also point out that, understanding the difference, as Americans, we are so immersed in finance-based planning that it’s all about the money. Congress is the money. DOD [U. S. Dept. of Defense] is the money. If you look at everything that comes out about how we counter China, it’s just increasing the budget. It always starts with the budget, the budget, the budget. So it’s very difficult. 

And when I talk to people in the industry in technology and finance-based planning, I say it’s sort of like philosophy. If you go to Harvard Business Review, the magazine, they give you little cute tricks to do things. This is like philosophy. One of my degrees is in philosophy. Several of my physics degrees are in philosophy. Philosophy’s objective is to change how you view the world such that you can understand it better. 

So think of it as philosophy. In finance-based planning, the foundation of all—well, let’s start with technology-based planning. In technology-based planning, the foundation of decision-making is a matter of how do I exploit the technology better than the other guy to build a product or provide a service that satisfies the customer’s needs better than the other guy. Simple as that. 

Because if you want somebody to buy a product, you’ve got to satisfy their needs better than the other company’s product or the other country’s product, okay? If you want to win on the battlefield, you’ve got to give the warfighter a better capability than the adversary’s warfighter, okay? That is technology-based planning. Now, as a side note, you have to define technology properly. Very few people do. They think of computers and AI. 

No. Technology is any application of science to accomplish a function. It’s a pencil. High tech, low tech, medium tech. It is something which is earth-shaking like AI, or it can be moving pallets off the loading dock. Those are all technologies. In finance-based planning, the foundation of all decision-making is how do I optimize the utilization of funds. 

That is a dead-end game because when you’re optimizing the funds, I’ve worked with GE, Ford, a lot of corporations, big and small, and if you totally optimize the funds, you get rid of R&D, you get rid of everything that’s not nailed down, and you’re sort of competitive for a while until you can’t make the next generation products. You can’t repair them because no one knows anything about it. They fired all the repair guys. They were technology. And you die.

Mr. Jekielek:

Come to think of it, I think a lot of companies actually did that, what you’re describing. 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes. I worked with Grumman back several years ago, and I was having lunch with the senior vice president. He said McKinsey came in and McKinseyized us, as it was called. They looked at all the numbers and said, well, you’ve got all these guys that are making way too much money. Let’s just retire them all. And they'd look at the numbers and say, look at how much your profits are. And according to Harvard Business Review and according to Fortune Magazine, boy, they’re doing good. Their profits are up. 

But as he said, they fired everybody or retired everybody that had more than five years of experience on how to build a product. And as he said, once our present product is gone, I don’t know what we’re going to do for our next product because we’re basically a brand new company with no experience in technology. And I said, what are you going to do? And he said, I’m retiring because I don’t want to take on that fight. 

But the big thing is why did the U.S. switch? Because before World War II, if you talk to the old guys, like my family that was with General Motors [GM] and Dow Chemical. So I go back to the old days, how they used to do things. But in the old days, the first guys that made the decision were the guys that had to do production and that ran the foundry. What equipment do I need? What material do I need? What guys do I need without skills so I can make the best damn engine block in the world? 

What happened at the end of World War II? Basically, the U.S. was the only country left with the ability to produce the products and the goods the world wanted. So all of a sudden, this idea of it has to make the best damn engine block in the world, like my grandfather was hell-bent on doing, all of a sudden the suits, the finance guys came down and said, look, Andy Sekora, you don’t need to make a good engine block. So what we’re going to do is dictate finance to you. We’re going to tell you you’re going to get $5 instead of $5,000. 

So all of a sudden, it strangled that ability to ensure that it was going to be a good engine block. Before, it was technology-based planning that was the foundation, and asked, how do we make sure we make the best bloody products and services? And then the finances were on top of it. World War II switched upside down. Until finance-based planning, how do I juggle the numbers to make the numbers, became prevalent throughout the corporations. I mean, GM is totally finance-based. In GM, you can get ahead, but you only get to a certain level, and you got to have an MBA because you got to work from the numbers.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, this is incredibly fascinating to me because one of the things I’ve come to realize from doing this show for many years, or one of my beliefs has become that the development of what I always call the financialization economy, which is not exactly what you’re saying, but just the idea of making money through manipulating money.

Mr. Sekora:

And it wasn’t as though it was some magical thing that happened. We can tell you the people’s names that McNamara was part of that. There were what were called the Whiz Kids, I think that was their name, that came out of the Army Air Corps that propagated a lot of this managing by the numbers. It’s a side note, but yes, there were very particular people that came out with this, and then it just, once it came out, it just migrated through the country, and in some ways it makes sense. 

One of the reasons it makes sense is because it’s so easy. It’s very easy to say, okay, gentlemen, if we do this, we‘ll make five dollars. If we do this, we’ll make six dollars. What are we going to do? Six dollars is bigger than five dollars. Let’s go have lunch; $6 is bigger than $5. Let’s go have lunch. 

But to actually sit there and work in the technology and how we are going to exploit technology better than the other guy? That’s a challenge. Because you’re not just talking about the high-tech R&D. You’re talking about that acquisition utilization. You’re talking about high-tech, low-tech, medium-tech, which is what China has done. They have a national technology strategy. 

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the ways that we first started talking to each other is in the context of how to actually counter China most effectively, right? And you’ve given us a bit of support now for your views and how to do that. But just explain to me your vision at this moment.

Mr. Sekora:

The vision also goes back to the Reagan executive order, which never got signed and never got implemented. We saw the cause of the U.S. decline was because we switched from technology-based to finance-based planning. So we knew the only way, it wasn’t better finance planning, because that’s just, you know, running in circles, basically, against the other guy. The only way we could ensure America’s status as a superpower was to transition the entire country back to technology-based planning, okay?

But here’s the rub. When we looked within Socrates, we saw the technology-based planning of the Soviets was more sophisticated than what we did before World War II. If you look at it, the Soviets matched us, and in some cases, surpassed us militarily from an economy that was very, very small relative to the U.S. economy. That’s because their technology-based planning was pretty sophisticated.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, let me just jump in for one sec, okay? Because when you’re talking about technology-based planning, I mean, really you’re talking about a kind of industrial policy, aren’t you? 

Mr. Sekora:

No, not at all. Industrial policy is the government making decisions, okay? We can come back to industrial policy because it supports a form of industrial policy, but not the form that most people think of. One of the problems, and I'll get back to how we counter China. One of the problems with industrial policy discussions up here in D.C. and across the country is when I say industrial policy, they think of Soviet style. The government makes all decisions, picks winners and losers, controls it, either abide by it or we’re going to slap you down. That’s one narrow type of industrial policy. 

And second, industrial policy from the U.S. perspective, and I just read articles about this yesterday, is finance-based. Government makes decisions on winners and losers, determines who gets the money, and tries to starve the other ones. That’s industrial policy. Those are two premises: government-centric, finance-based planning. That’s only one particular type of industrial policy. 

Industrial policy is when decisions are being made, and policies are being put in place, which allow the country to work in a more unified fashion. That can be done from the government or it can be done from the various organizations throughout the competitive ecosystem. And for it to be done most effectively, it’s got to be done from a technology-based planning perspective. One of the documents we wrote for somebody, and it has never been released, is a 500-page document on how to use Socrates for industrial policy because Socrates was designed to do industrial policy the correct way. 

And there was an article that came out, I think it was in the Financial Times years ago that was written by Rana Foroohar. It says, if Reagan was so against industrial policy, why did he support Socrates so much? Because in a way, it did industrial policy. But when we were going to do industrial policy, we envisioned, and it was in the executive order, to produce a U.S. national technology strategy. 

But this national technology strategy was not going to be government. It was going to be the representatives from all of the organizations within the competitive ecosystem of the United States, and it was going to be technology-based, and it did not dictate, but rather it set up, getting a little bit more in detail, virtual symbiotic relationships, which allowed organizations throughout the United States to work together as teams, not because it was dictated, but because they could see how it would be more effective. 

That was part of Socrates, a national technology strategy and individual technology strategies. So how do we address China? So going back to the original Socrates days, we saw that we had to switch the United States back to technology-based planning. The Soviets were doing it more sophisticatedly. Japan was more sophisticated than what we used to do. So if we just moved the U.S. back to technology-based planning, we'd be in the fight, but not guaranteed as a superpower. 

So we took a step back and looked at it, and we saw something really, really interesting. And if we had graphics, I'd show you a really pretty picture. We looked at mankind since the beginning of time, going back millions of years, and we saw that mankind makes major leaps forward every time technology-based planning makes a leap forward, starting with original tools and things like that. The scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, every time those occur, mankind takes a major leap forward, number one, and whoever leads it becomes and remains a superpower for generations. 

We looked at it and we saw the last major leap of technology-based planning, the evolutionary leap, was the industrial revolution. The next evolutionary leap of technology-based planning was the automated innovation revolution. That is where the process for exploiting technology, developing, acquiring, and utilizing it evolved from a trial and error art into a concrete reproducible science. 

If you look at Y Combinator out in Silicon Valley, they’re an organization that supports startups and things like that. The failure rate of those companies is 95 percent. That means 95 percent of their companies trying to use technology to build success fail. And if you go drink beer with them, which I did, they said, well, it’s more like 97 percent. Socrates’ mission was to turn that around. So instead of a 97 percent failure rate, we aimed for a 97 percent success rate. 

So we determined that we needed to enable the United States to generate and lead the automated innovation revolution, such that everybody else’s technology-based planning was trial and error, which China’s is, trial and error, high failure rate, and we could do it as a concrete. Reproducible science with extremely high success and efficiency. That was our mission. We built what we called the first-generation Socrates automated innovation system. We validated it on President Reagan’s highest priority initiatives like Star Wars, stealth, counter-stealth, integrated circuits, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff that we got to work on. 

As a result, President Reagan had an executive order drafted creating a new federal agency with the mission of building what we call the third-generation system, which is much more sophisticated, and then providing access to that system for all private and public organizations of the U.S. competitive ecosystem. Okay, that was that. It was going to do that and allow us to develop a national technology strategy so the country could work in a very coherent fashion with the exploitation of technology and exploit technology with speed, efficiency, and agility that is far beyond anything China can do today or can be doing in the foreseeable future. That’s how we counter China.

Mr. Jekielek:

Now, just I’m trying to imagine, like, physically, what was this initial Socrates implementation? Like, is it a computer? Is it like, what is it, okay?

Mr. Sekora:

There were two things that we discovered in Socrates, okay, that basically allowed it because we’re sitting there figuring out how we were going to transition the entire country to this next evolutionary leap. We found two really, really cool discoveries. Number one, all technology exploitation, high-tech, low-tech, pre-technology, you know, basic research and everything else, occurs in this place that we call four-dimensional technology space. And what four-dimensional technology space is, is if you take the entire pile group of all technologies, both what we have now and what we’re going to have tomorrow and way into the future, all of them have four very significant attributes: its structure, its capability, its flow, and how the other three attributes evolve forward. 

If you take those four attributes of all technology, including things that haven’t even come to fruition yet, years and years out, and you put them together, it gives you four-dimensional technology space. And all competitive advantage is generated or lost by maneuvering in those four dimensions. And it’s just like maneuvering in four-dimensional space. So the heart of the Socrates system was where, and the first generation we did this, and we can go into more detail on that, is we built maps of four-dimensional technology space. That was the first discovery.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you did it manually?

Mr. Sekora:

At that point, it was manual, and we had a lot of analysts pulling the data together to put these maps together. And it was very narrow-focused maps. Now, let me also point out that people say, oh, it’s a model. No, it’s not a model. A model is a simplified version of reality, which basically says it’s so complex that I can just take a couple of factors, which I think are the big ones, pile those together, connect them, and poof, I can sort of figure out what’s going to happen. No, it’s the reality of exploiting technology for a competitive advantage.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re mapping the reality.

Mr. Sekora:

We’re mapping the reality. So there’s not a fifth dimension or a sixth dimension or whatever. And here’s one of the really cool things about it: how effectively you maneuver in those four dimensions to create a competitive advantage fully dictates 100 percent of all the other resources up here— funding, manpower, natural resources—in terms of how much you need of them and how they need to be exploited to generate the competitive advantage. It also allows you to fully optimize them. Okay, so you got that. 

The second thing we determined was that maneuvering in technology space was conceptually the same as maneuvering on the military battlefield. And what’s the oldest science of mankind? Military. So we took the science of military strategy, codified it, and cleaned it up a little bit. We melded it with four-dimensional technology space to come up with what we had: the set of technology strategy elements, which is all the ways you can maneuver in technology space—a closed set of ways of maneuvering in technology space to generate a competitive advantage. 

And it’s independent; it’s the same if we’re talking about military or commercial. It’s the same whether we’re talking about integrated circuits or building a watch. Same set. It’s universal. So what this allows us to do is basically map our technology space and use the elements of the set of technology strategy elements to accomplish four functions.

Number one, we can identify all the threats in there, all the organizations and countries which, if left unchecked in their technology exploitation, will minimize, reduce, or diminish U.S. ability to generate a competitive advantage and the organizations. So you can identify the threats. Number two, you can identify what their technology strategies are. So we can actually look at the map and say China’s going to do a flank attack in the structure dimension on the next stealth fighter. What’s a flank attack? It’s disruptive technology. 

If you take all the little buzzwords they have in business, like disruptive innovation and all the other ones, they mirror directly into all the technology strategy elements. But the difference is they know it anecdotally as a trial-and-error art. All the attributes that dictate the strength of a technology flank attack or a frontal or whatever—guess what? They’re all a closed set in precise and accurate detail in the four-dimensional. technology space. 

So we can identify who the threats are, what their technology strategies are, and all the opportunities and constraints in the technology space. And then we can play the war gaming, where we can sit back and go, oh, China’s going to do this. Here’s their technology strategy. And we’re looking at it going out many, many years. 

What happens if we block a technology that they’re going to need to acquire for their new fighter or whatever? They’re going to need this technology. They need it from the University of Idaho. If we block them, what’s their option? It’s going to give them that technology they need. If they block it, they have to go to the second tier one.

Mr. Jekielek:

But, you know, just going back to how we started the conversation, that’s not what people were thinking. People were thinking, how can we give them technology more effectively?

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, but now we’re trying to say, how do we stop the technology? How do we get a competitive advantage?

Mr. Jekielek:

I just still, I still find that unbelievable. Like even after 1989, right? Where just what people thought there would be no other threat or something? Or like, what is it that people were thinking?

Mr. Sekora:

I'll give you a prime example. I was sitting in the office with the Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology, and we had representatives from the Vice Senior President from Boeing, Grumman, and all the major aerospace industry guys. And I sat in that room and said, China is going to eat your lunch in aerospace. They said, you’re telling me a country that doesn’t have indoor plumbing in 90 percent of the homes is going to eat our lunch in the marketplace? And I said, yes, sir, they are. They said, you’re an idiot. 

Everybody knows by classic MBA that the barriers to entry are too large. What that means in MBA language is the amount of finances required to go into that industry is so large, nobody else can do it. Because the amount of money it takes to build an aerospace industry is massive. Just the facilities are large, the testing, things like that. I said, they’re going to do it. And we basically knew how they were doing it, which looks at a technology strategy. 

From a technology strategy point of view, they don’t go in one day and say, okay, we’re going to build an airplane. They go in and say, you know what? We’re going to come up, we’re going to acquire the technology, and we‘ll come back to the acquirer, which is China, and say, we’re going to build the little wingtips on the wings for the next plane for Boeing. And we’ll go to Boeing and say, we want to build the wingtips. 

And Boeing will say, do you have the technology? And usually, China would say, no, we don’t have it. Could you give it to us? And they'll say, sure. You’ve got cheap labor. We now cut our costs by 0.01 percent. They got the wingtips, and did a great job. They delivered at less cost than they said they would. It’s perfect. Wingtips, Boeing managers looking, going, guess what? We made more money this month. I get a bonus. Can you guys do the struts? Yes, sir. Give us the technology. Here’s the technology. 

Actually, I put together two graphics that showed them doing this with the platforms, the entire plane, and the engines. And we showed, and we had the names of the organizations that were going in and getting that technology and doing this technology. So what they do is they very slowly piecemeal it together. Well, if we can do the wingtips next week, a couple of years later, we‘ll do the entire wing. And we’ll either cut your costs more, but we need the technology. So they systematically maneuver. Again, we said, this is a chess game.

Mr. Jekielek:

So we just got into the mode, because this is absolutely fascinating, I mean, we just got into the mode of giving them the technology for obvious reasons. Why? Because there was a strong profit motive, and we were doing financial-based, you know, the bottom line was our measure of success. 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, and the thing is, I did an interview with, I think it was Newsweek a couple of years ago, and they were talking about the theft of technology. And I said, we’re so stupid; we give it to them. They don’t have to steal it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, I mean, there are some things that we tried to keep away. Then they would go out and steal those, right? 

Mr. Sekora:

Right. If you look at the technology acquisition, this is where it comes to this idea of a holistic hybrid technology strategy. It’s across the board. So if they say acquisition, it can be everything from outright being given to them, to them purchasing it, to gray marketing it, to sending people in there to acquire it, to outright theft. I mean, from their perspective, all of them are fair, but it’s a holistic game, which, you know, Americans are, you try it one way. If it doesn’t work, you say, oh, well, I'll do something else. I’m going to go sell coffee, okay?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, because it’s all part of their industrial policy, going back to that word that we were not allowed to utter for many years.

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, but their industrial policy is the national hybrid technology strategy.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that was very clear to you from your analysis using Socrates back in 1989.

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, it was 1989. And that was very, very obvious. And that’s why, if you look at going a little bit away from China for a moment, when Trump came into office, he had a country which was in an economic decline, and he knew it. So the MAGA program came out. 

Reagan had the same thing, but Reagan had a two-pronged approach. The first was all financial manipulation, just like Trump is doing right now. Art Laffer’s tax policies, all these other ones. He knew that would give the U.S. economy a short-term boost. The second step was Socrates, because he knew that the short-term financial boost was important to get the country back on its feet. But then from there, we had to switch back to technology-based planning at a level beyond China, beyond Russia, beyond Japan, such that it would ensure America’s status as a superpower for a generation. So it’s a two-step approach. 

And things like the CHIPS and Science Act and all the other initiatives that come out of D.C. are not technology-based planning. They’re finance-based planning for technology, which, put in simple terms, the measure of success is how fast can you shovel money out the door to things that evolve with technology. And the thing is, because they’re doing, China’s doing technology-based planning and we’re doing finance-based planning, they can undercut all that we’re doing with the finances. Oh, and you know, this makes such perfect sense, right? Because they don’t really care about finance so much if they know that they’re going to get the upper hand in the technology space. 

But the thing is, if we look at it, again, going back to what I said at one point, how effectively you maneuver in the technology space fully dictates the amount of other resources you need, funds, and how you expend them, and you can optimize them better. So even if you’re doing pure technology-based planning, you actually are economically more viable. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, let me stop you here. This is a disaster for all the grifters, though. 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, that’s the problem, because Socrates comes in there, okay, lays out a map based on the laws of physics with hard data and says this is what they’re doing. This is, you know, the amount of other resources and everything else required. And I remember when we did stealth/counter-stealth, and we had people standing up, generals and admirals, screaming at us because of their careers and some of the politicians and everything else. And we made a logical structure for decision-making that had very, very little wiggle room in it. You couldn’t play politics with it. 

And I remember those days because, you know, the laws of physics say if you have technology A, B, C, and D with these levels, you will produce a product with this capability. And going over for something different or giving this technology away will have this impact. People didn’t want that. And we took a lot of heat for it.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just, your opinion is too informed, or something.

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, and we took a lot of hits for it. But Socrates is what’s required to both counter China and ensure America’s status as a superpower.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, so basically, Socrates is a framework for being able to apply technology-based planning in a highly scientific way.

Mr. Sekora:

Right. And if you look at the three generations, the first generation was hard copy paper. We used to produce maps that were like 30 feet long. We'd find rooms big enough to put them up there. And then we would go with highlighters to start marking who are the competitors, what are their technology strategies, here’s the opportunities, constraints. And then within a couple of hours, see this is, I mean, it was so obvious. 

I used to teach this and I’ve worked with countries all over the world, all ally countries, and we could teach it to people and they'd be doing strategies within two or three days of actually understanding a map. So that was the first gen. The second gen was a little bit of automation. The third gen, which is still being evolved on the interface especially, is where you can do this all in a very highly intuitive visual representation where Monday morning somebody comes in and says, yes, we’ve got to address gas turbine engines, either military or commercial, and you can bring up on the screen and say gas turbine engines, okay, either military or commercial, and you can bring up on the screen and say gas turbine engines, preferably a big screen, and say, who are our threats in there? And it’s going to identify the competitors, but here’s the problem. 

Competitors are a very small number. Adversaries are a very small number. It’s all the threats. What’s the difference? Threats are those organizations and countries which are maneuvering the technology, which is going to hinder our ability to generate the required competitive advantage. So it can be, as I saw when we did work in Socrates for a SecDef’s office, where here’s a technology in a commercial sector which doesn’t even know it has a military application, and it comes to fruition, it negates something on the battlefield. For us, they don’t even know it; the Soviets know it. They pick it up, and boom, they blindside us. 

So we’ve got to be looking not just at who the threats are, and this is one of the reasons that DOD has such a high uncertainty level. They’re looking at China; no, they need to look at all the technology in the world. Why? Because China is pulling from all the technology in the world, so something which is in Outer Mongolia or down in France or wherever could end up in their bailiwick and nail one of our guys on the battlefield, negating the competitive advantage. 

So the third-gen system allows you to pull up the screen, see the adversaries, see what their technology strategies are visually, opportunities and constraints, and then play the what-if game where you can say,  okay, here we see gas turbine engines. Here we see China doing this. What happens if we accelerate the R&D at Los Alamos National Laboratory, GE [General Electric], or whatever? What is that going to do for us? Well, that will bring us to fruition and give a competitive advantage relative to China’s new gas turbine engine for two years.

Now, is that where we stop? No. Okay, now we’ve got the competitive advantage, but again, it’s a chess mess. So now what do we do? Okay, at the same time, if we block this other technology, which they’re going to get from this cool university in Paris, that is also going to block them for six months, which is then going to drain some of their financial resources. And we’re going to do this and this. It’s analogous to the old saying about pool players. And I played pool, not very good at it.

But the old adage is the regular pool player plays the shot: I want to make my shot. The professional plays the table. His objective is to always make sure the balls are placed such that it makes his shots the easiest to make and the other guy’s the hardest. So he’s worrying about always maneuvering the balls.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s basically what you’re doing. How can you be sure that you’ve got all your inputs right? Because it strikes me that’s sort of the constraint, right? If you got that wrong, then you could be making wildly bad predictions. 

Mr. Sekora:

Right. But two things. Number one, we found out in Socrates that when we were first operating, we did some stuff for Star Wars; we found that 97 percent of the data was open source. It’s out there, which totally perturbed the Intel community. They’re spending millions of dollars. That’s another reason they hated us. They’re spending millions of dollars on these high-tech initiatives and collection programs. I just had two guys in an open source center because Socrates had seven open source centers around the country back when open source was not talked about. They were collecting the data left and right for a nickel. 

So will there be data holes? Yes. Will there be bad data? Yes. There are ways to validate the data, and I'll tell you a little bit about it. Once you start building that map, it self-validates the data because there are trends and connections within it that indicate something magically can’t happen. This capability just can’t appear out of nowhere because there are no discontinuities in the technology space.

Mr. Jekielek:

In other words, the system helps you find the bad data. Right. Basically. That’s fascinating.

Mr. Sekora:

Find the bad data, and then you take it into the strategy portion. Okay. If there is a bad piece of data, remember, you’re not relying on what Americans tend to do, which is to look for that magical technology. We’ve run into that many times. What’s that one key technology? What’s that one key piece of data? It doesn’t work that way. 

When you’re playing chess, especially in the technology space, it’s a constant process where, okay, we’ve got our technology strategy. Going back to the example of gas turbine engines, we’re going to block coming out of the University of Idaho with this technology, University of Paris, things like that. And oops, that was a bad decision. We still had to block for two years. That was a bad decision. We lost it. We didn’t gain anything from that. 

So you’re doing multiple applications, number one. And number two, you’re looking out many, many years. So when you’re developing your technology strategy, it’s for near-term, mid-term, and long-term. In order to acquire and maintain, to play the field and the technology space, what you’re doing is looking years and years out in advance for technology exploitation into basic research. We’ve done plenty of that. I'll give you an example in a moment. 

So if something starts getting out of kilter because we had some bad data, we’ve basically got years and years to fix it before it actually hits execution and then into the battlefield or the marketplace. When we did interplanetary space propulsion for United Technologies, we were dealing with chemical rockets, and this was in the commercial sector: chemical rockets, nuclear, and matter-antimatter drives. We saw some of the Japanese companies actually working on matter-antimatter drives looking 25 years into the future as part of their strategy. 

Now, was that research? No. Near-term was all about what was in engineering. What was mid-term were things where research developed, and things like that. What was out here? All theoretical. They were funding things like papers at universities worldwide on generating antimatter, what we call penning traps for containment, reaction chambers, and things like that. Because if you look at the technology space, everything makes this very systematic progression from theory to research to basic research up in there. 

And the thing is, contrary to popular belief,technology evolution goes slowly and systematically. Everybody goes, that can’t be. I just saw something pop up in the Apple store yesterday. It was like magic. No, it’s like looking out a train window. If you look out a train window at the scenery through a little tube, it’s a blur, right? You can’t even identify what went by. I think it was a cow. I think it was a train. No, it was a tree cow. I don’t know what it was. Okay. 

What happens when you stick your head out the window and look at the panoramic view? Hopefully, you don’t get hit with anything, but you look at the panoramic view. You can see this thing over there. It’s an animal. Can’t tell if it’s a goat, a car, a goat, or a horse, or a cow, or whatever. It looks like a horse. Okay, it’s a cow. Ooh, it’s got brown spots. Now, the cow has gone away.

The same thing with the technology space. If all you’re looking at is what hits the marketplace, it’s a blur. It’s magic. Things magically happen, okay? In the technology space, when you’re looking way, way into the future, okay, and it starts coming, it’s very systematic. And like I said, there are no discontinuities in the technology space. It’s like, let’s say tomorrow, General Motors invents self-healing paint on the cars. You can’t get a nick anymore. And everybody goes, it’s magic. No, not really. The biotech industry came up with a gel that was self-healing, okay? And we had the paint. 

I grew up next to a paint plant back in Michigan, okay? They smelled horrible when they were painting. And all of a sudden, there’s this cross-pollination in the structural dimension of technology space and in the flow dimension, okay? And all of a sudden, the guy from here brought the technology over to GM, mixed it with the paint technology, and now we’ve got self-healing paint. But if all you’re looking at is the auto industry, it seems like magic. If you look at everything, it’s all very, very simple flow.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let me pull us back into today, okay? And let me think through, let me sort of try to synthesize a few things that you told me about. The Trump administration is taking steps through tariffs and so forth to counter China. There’s a new national security strategy. So we’re talking about, we’re definitely doing something of industrial policy. We can see that, I mean, in the U.S. 

And so you’re basically saying what we should do is we should do industrial policy that’s not top-down, that’s focused on looking at, instead of finance as the metric, technology exploitation as the metric. And that way, we can achieve, frankly, everything we need, really, right? That’s your contention here. Using a framework that already exists and can be, I guess, in some process of being integrated into existing technology. 

Mr. Sekora:

Right. The Undersecretary of Defense, Bob Costello, saw this as the correct foundation for all DOD decision-making. That’s why he had a DOD directive written transferring it from the intel community over to SecDef’s office in 1990, and Bush fired him for it. Let me give you another example.  

Several years ago, General Jansen, who was tasked, Marine Corps, to revamp the Marine Corps, okay, he was over at the Defense University, National Defense University, he was the dean of the Eisenhower School, came over to headquarters to rebuild, figure out how to restructure the entire Marine Corps. And they contacted us, one of his people, one of his professors that went with him, Dr. Soren, and said, I heard Socrates could help. So we wrote up a paper, and we met with him about basically the DOD planning process being upside down. 

Let me explain what I mean, and this is what we explained to the general. Basically, what happens is they identify the threat. Here’s China, here is Russia, they’re the bad guys. We’re going to come up with a military strategy. Here’s how we’re gonna defeat Russia, here’s how we’re going to defeat China, boiling moats and all this other fun stuff. Then we’re going to come up with our list of technologies. These are the technologies we need to execute these military strategies. And here’s the levels they need to be. 

And then we take those and put them over to the labs and the other eggheads. I say eggheads, I’m a physicist myself. And then they put their blinders on and it’s an R&D foot race to who’s going to get this technology breakthrough first. And if we get it, we know we can counter China. That’s upside down and it fails every time. And it’s going to fail this time too. 

Because we, DOD, have the technology as a rigid requirement up front or at the end to satisfy. China has addressed technology as a dynamic foundation on the front end, which means we come up with a technology strategy first relative to China and what this does is it says, we will continue to outmaneuver China in the technology space to generate a known competitive advantage for the military war fighters. So now we’ve got this technology strategy that says, here’s the competitive advantages we’re going to have over this time because we’re going to outmaneuver China. And then you build your military strategy on top of that. 

Now, things are going to change, so we’re going to have to change our military strategy. But basically, now we are going to ensure a technology, a competitive advantage for the warfighter instead of what they do now, which is rigid requirements. China knows those rigid requirements and outmaneuvers them in the technology space such that now DOD is constantly chasing their tail.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, and this is also particularly relevant in the context that the Chinese military, I believe, is the only military that is designed specifically to deal with the U.S. military. 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, right. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So this takes on a particularly high level of importance based on what you’re telling me here. 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes. And we explained to the general, and he said, that’s exactly what we need. So we continued writing up the documents, and it was going to be implemented for all three services. But then he was retired, and the whole thing was killed. But that was the same thing that Bob Costello, the undersecretary, saw back in 1989. You outmaneuver them in the technology space, so we, again, acquire and maintain the initiative in the technology space to make sure our guys always have the competitive advantage versus just trying to catch up. 

If you look at DOD, their big battle cry now is, we’ve got to do faster, we’ve got to do faster. I mean, the Secretary of War is coming out with these are how we’re going to restructure the acquisition requirements in order to do it faster. We can’t go fast enough. It’s impossible. Why? Because they’re rigid requirements, which we’re going to do faster. 

I'll give you an example of the IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and Senator John McCain. We went to John and said, because they were failing with the IEDs, we were still losing guys with the IEDs and a lot of carnage on that. So we went to him and said, it’s not working, guys. Oh, yes, they were bragging that we can come up with a solution in the lab, get it on a plane, get it out in the field within two weeks, and we’re going to shorten that. It’s not going to work. Because as soon as you do that, guess what? They just switch again, and you’re right back.

Mr. Jekielek:

Which means they have a new, basically a new product that you don’t know how to counter.

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, a new product. It goes out there, and all of a sudden, the guys rush back to the labs and they’re going to counter that, so they’re chasing our tail. So we told them we need to address from a technology strategy point of view how we can make sure that no matter what they do, we either prevent them from having the next capability for triggering or the bomb itself and probably also making sure that if we miss preventing them from getting the next one from a defensive perspective, the next trigger method, that we can actually counter that so fast that when some guy calls from the field and says they just used X to trigger a bomb, we can say, yes, we’re shipping you out the solution, or we’ve already shipped it. It’s out to the troops because we knew they were going to switch it at some point, and we have it out there.

So it’s a matter of acquiring and maintaining the initiative such that, again, they’re having to always react to what we’re doing, and we can stay ahead of them. That’s what Socrates was designed to do in the technology space. That’s what needs to happen with DOD. They can’t outperform time-wise with it. It was the same thing that in the 90s or the 80s, the U.S. companies were saying, we’ve got to go faster because every time we come out with a product, Pan matches it very quickly afterward. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, you know, what does it take today to enact, you know, using this framework to make these sorts of decisions?  Again, is it like you were describing some sort of modern interface that, you know, where you can sort of visualize the maps that this framework creates? We use this framework so you can, you know, basically stay on top of the process. 

Mr. Sekora:

Well, building out the third-gen system is ideal, okay? That’s what really needs to be done, and then it needs to be given access. Now, interestingly enough, legislation was passed in 2010 by Congressman Frank Wolf because he came to us and said we need to reinstitute Socrates. One of the things we worked with his staff on was that the first thing we can do is put what we call the National Technology Strategy Board in place. 

That was the government-defined organization, which took representatives from all sectors of the U.S. ecosystem, brought them together to oversee the utilization of the Socrates system throughout the government and in the private sector. That legislation was passed in 2010. It was funded in 2011. It was assigned to the Secretary of Commerce. And as far as I know, the legislation is still there. They’re still getting $10 million a year to put that board together to oversee Socrates’ execution within there. Now, of course, as usually happens in committee, the word Socrates was pulled out, and they just made it more generic.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so there’s no problem with absolutely anybody having access to it, I mean, including the competitors.

Mr. Sekora:

No, we don’t give competitors access. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, it’s just kind of impossible to stop it, isn’t it?

Mr. Sekora:

Yes and no.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, except for the data set. I suppose the data set is the limiting factor. 

Mr. Sekora:

What it boils down to is you can put all sorts of things in place to prevent somebody, a Russian, from getting access to a Chinese person. Okay. No problem. And we may get it down to just a handful going through. But here’s the key thing that is important: they never access the technology space map. They access a very customized slice. 

So if you say you want to go after eyeglasses, the system is designed to go in there and take that narrow little slice out, give it to you to play with, and build your technology strategy, which we never see. It never goes back into the system. It’s just yours for use. And if that turns out to be a Chinese, well, we’ve lost that. 

But two things: it’s very customized, number one. And number two, its shelf life is only for a certain amount of time. So literally, at a certain point, it needs to be updated, and it’s not going to be updated. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Because the system is dynamic, obviously. You know, this strikes me as something that might be incredibly attractive to the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Sekora:

Yes, it should be. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Like, in a way, it might even be like a place where it could be proof of concept or something like that, right? 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes. I mean, we used to call Socrates the giant killer, leveling the playing field for small companies. Because I’ve worked with a lot of small companies over the years, and they think they can’t compete. You know, a small company can’t compete against a conglomerate like GM or whatever. Oh, yeah. This will allow a small company to basically compete against a major by doing technology isolation maneuvers and things like that. So, yeah, yeah. In some cases, it’s even more. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And I suspect that, you know, given the amount of open-source data which is available today, you know, I’ve been learning a bit about that. You know, you probably, you know, you don’t even need to use any classified data to do this stuff.

Mr. Sekora:

No, and that’s what perturbed a lot of people in the Intel community is we were literally…

Mr. Jekielek:

And because you have more, I’m guessing you have way more data today to be able to, you know, kind of flesh this out open-source available, than even you did then. 

Mr. Sekora:

Yes. And even then, I mean, we were doing particle beam generation and mirrors and things like that for Star Wars. And it was out there, which caused some problems because they said, you can’t do this. There it is, guys. There’s the map. There’s the data. Look at the data points. This is what’s going on.  

When we were in the private sector and we were doing things for Pratt & Whitney, United Technologies, in nuke rockets, people got concerned because there’s not a big difference between a nuke rocket and a nuke weapon. So we’re laying out all this stuff for nukes. And we got some calls from people here in D.C. about, you guys are crossing the line a little bit there. And I said, no, it’s all open source, guys. Look at it. Open source data. We know exactly what’s going on.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Michael, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A final quick thought as we finish?

Mr. Sekora:

We’re running out of time. I mean, one of the things that bothers me to some degree is I’ve been tracing, watching China for, what, since 1990, roughly. Okay, what is that? 34 years. And what I see from looking at their national technology strategy, looking at how they’re progressing, things are a lot worse than when somebody looks at an individual little thing and says, ooh, look at stealth bombers, look at stealth fighters, look at ground, you know, farmland and things like that. Yes, that’s important. 

But when you look at the progression for 30, what’s it? 34 years now, and you look at how it all connects together, the situation looks much more dire than what people in D.C. up on the Hill see, the pundits and everything else, it’s a lot worse. And there’s a real sense of false security with what’s being done on the finance side that it’s somehow in the programs that are being proposed, including the CHIPS Act, that they’re somehow going to do something more than just slightly slow them down a bit.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what’s the bottom line?

Mr. Sekora:

The bottom line is if we’re going to make America great, i.e., ensure America’s status as a superpower for generations, which includes we have to decimate the economic foundation, not the foundation, the competitiveness foundation of China, which means their national technology strategy. We’ve got to reinstate the Socrates Project.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Michael Sekora, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Sekora:

It was my pleasure. Thank you very much.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.