Name: The Reagan-Era Strategy That Could Reignite America’s Technological Power | Michael Sekora
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T19:02:52.000Z
Description: 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.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[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 “<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/americans-should-play-game-of-chess-not-game-of-money-in-competition-with-china-reagan-admin-official-4565266">Project Socrates</a>” 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 NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

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

It’s my pleasure and honor.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

And you did it manually?

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.

You’re mapping the reality.

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

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