For more than two decades on the Army Staff, part of my job was recommending which nations received American weapons, training and doctrine, and which did not. The choice rarely came down to which weapon system performed best on a range. It came down to alliance.
A country that trained on American equipment, spoke our tactical language and built its systems around our supply chains stayed tied to Washington for a generation. One that turned to Moscow or Beijing drifted into someone elses orbit.
That lesson has stayed with me. Great powers rarely prevail because they possess the single best weapon; they prevail because other nations choose to build their militaries, economies, and, ultimately, their futures around their systems. Washington risks forgetting that lesson in todays race to build the worlds dominant computing platform.
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While Washington argues over which chatbot drafts the sharper essay, Beijing is building something far more ambitious than a single flagship model. That distinction separates todays technology race from tomorrows world order. Consider that Chinas Huawei is preparing to double production of its Ascend processors in 2026, pushing toward 1.6 million chips, and Chinese developers at DeepSeek have already tuned their newest models to run specifically on that Huawei silicon.
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Meanwhile, congressional hearings and cable news segments keep asking which model scores highest on the latest benchmark, an interesting question but not the decisive one.
Historys great wars were won not by the single best weapon, but by nations able to generate energy, build factories and produce the industrial output needed to prevail.
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This technology is no different.
America is treating this contest as a technology race. China is treating it as a civilization-building project.
The mistake Washington keeps making is assuming there is a single technology race. There isnt. There are multiple competitions unfolding simultaneously, each reinforcing the others.
National competitiveness in this contest rests on what I call the AI Power Stack: interdependent layers that together determine technological power. Everything begins with abundant, reliable electricity. The newest data centers can draw more than a gigawatt each, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor, and China now generates more than twice as much electric power as the United States, power its centralized system can direct toward computing clusters far more easily than our fragmented grid allows.
Above energy sits semiconductors, the steel mills of the digital age. Americas effort to rebuild domestic chip manufacturing is genuine progress.
Above the chips sits computing infrastructure: the data centers, networking and cooling that turn processors into usable capability. Only once those foundations exist do the models built atop them become decisive, and models are almost all what Washington debates.
Above the
