It shows how reliant the US has become on a model of innovation that is more fragile than it appears.
Great-power rivalries are technological rivalries: The country that innovates will be well positioned to dominate. “Our safety lies in being farther ahead scientifically and productively than the Russians,” the great nuclear physicist Ernest O. Lawrence said in 1950. Yet America’s innovation ecosystem has changed dramatically since the Cold War.
Back then, most innovation relevant to national security was funded by government and then adapted by the private sector. In 1964, the federal government accounted for two-thirds of US research and …
