Congress must face the greatest ‘risk’ in the chips war head-on

Vladimir Lenin never said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” but the warning is an ancient one. Shakespeare’s turn of phrase was Hamlet’s wish that a rival be “hoist with his own petard,” meaning blown up by his own bomb. 

Americans are right to worry about their own petards. 

The upside of the nation’s technological prowess is evident in the success of its innovations in reshaping the world. Just consider the foreign perspective — seeing company after company coming from the United States: Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Qualcomm, Dell, Tesla. 

The downside is that the technologies invented here will inevitably be weaponized against us, as certainly as the airplane, invented by the Wright brothers, was used against Pearl Harbor.

The concern is widespread, whether the petards are lab-leaked viruses or advanced computer chips using U.S. designs. 

But one of the biggest issues Congress faces is something you may have never heard of. It’s RISC-V, or “risk five,” a chip design technology and a key ingredient in producing advanced chips that power smartphones, artificial intelligence, and of course, weapons systems. 

To be sure, most weapons systems use electricity, harnessed by Ben Franklin, and some analysts are quick to mock the chip wars using that kind of analogy.

RISC-V was created by professors at UC Berkeley precisely because most semiconductors had IP protections. It was seeded with DARPA funding. The professors wanted an open standard as a teaching tool, but RISC-V spread quickly and was adopted by industry as an alternative to expensive, close-source semiconductors that were usually more powerful than needed for smaller machines in a world where the hunger for chips is ubiquitous. 

China is heavily investing in RISC-V, using it in military applications, and making it the central element of its national strategy on chips. As the government in Beijing stated, “The biggest advantage to RISC-V is that it is geopolitically neutral.” This gives Chinese companies a veneer of independence and a potential way to circumvent U.S. export and import controls.

As the United States ponders how to guard and control its technologies, it must remember lessons from history because the race to deter a modern conflict is upon us. 

During the half-century of the Cold War, deterrence was nuclear. The great powers of Moscow and Washington raced to dominate nuclear weaponry in pursuit of a guaranteed second strike as a means of deterring the other side from launching a first strike. 

Having an atom bomb wasn’t enough, so each side built ever-larger thermonuclear bombs, raced to build a fleet of ballistic missiles and ultimately mobilized the attacking forces in the famous “nuclear triad” of land (hardened silos), air (long-range bombers) and sea (submarines). 

The unforgettable lesson etched in the memories of those who fought the Cold War is that redundancy was essential to our success. Of course, victory meant that the weapons were never used and all of the world won.

How should redundancy be deployed in the chip wars?

First, Washington should have a guiding principle to utilize dual sourcing in supply chains for key sectors of the economy. The internet itself was built on a decentralized model. Congress must be on the lookout for excessive centralized reliance in all critical sectors — the electrical grid, power generation, aviation control, banking and more — dominated by one chip, whether proprietary or open, because one type alone will have an exploitable vulnerability. Indeed, it would be wise in this new economy to build redundant, overlapping systems.

Second, Congress should limit but not over-limit trade and information. The RISC-V standard (and other open-source standards) can actually have security advantages to the U.S., but only if American engineers and companies can interact with foreign counterparts. 

It’s one thing to restrict Americans from working for or with Chinese, Russian and Iranian firms, and quite different to prohibit them from working with British, Japanese and French companies, for example. Let’s not shut ourselves out from the fruits of RISC-V.

Third, recognize that semiconductors are the atomics of this century. As the war in Ukraine proves, the battlespace is being determined by drones of all kinds, and drones are entirely reliant on semiconductors. There is no victory in war today without drone dominance, and that will require relentless government support for the U.S. semiconductor industry to push the technology frontier. 

Tim Kane is the president of the American Lyceum and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His most recent book is “The Immigrant Superpower.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.