Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

“Run faster” was an elegant strategy with only a single problem: by some key metrics, the U.S. wasn’t running faster, it was losing ground. Hardly anyone in government bothered to do the analysis, but Andy Grove’s gloomy predictions about the offshoring of expertise were partially coming true. In 2007, the Defense Department commissioned a study from former Pentagon official Richard Van Atta and several colleagues to assess the impact of semiconductor industry “globalization” on the military’s supply chains. Van Atta had worked on defense microelectronics for several decades and had lived through the rise and fall of Japan’s chip industry. He wasn’t prone to overreaction and understood how a multinational supply chain made the industry more efficient. In peacetime, this system worked smoothly. However, the Pentagon had to think about worst-case scenarios. Van Atta reported that the Defense Department’s access to cutting-edge chips would soon depend on foreign countries because so much advanced fabrication was moving abroad. Amid the hubris of America’s unipolar moment, hardly anyone was willing to listen. Most people in Washington simply concluded the U.S. was “running faster” without even glancing at the evidence. However, the history of the semiconductor industry didn’t suggest that U.S. leadership was guaranteed. America hadn’t outrun the Japanese in the 1980s, though it did in the 1990s. GCA hadn’t outrun Nikon or ASML in lithography. Micron was the only DRAM producer ...