An interesting article in China’s Guancha relates a story of former Deputy Secretary of Commerce Alan Estevez, who noted that his role in implementing the semiconductor ban on China was encouraged by former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who urged him to take the job being offered by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondi. Carter, then-president of Harvard’s Belfer Center, died in October 2022 of a heart attack, but the apparatus he created, described as the alliance between the military-industrial complex and Silicon Valley, still lies at the heart of President Trump’s new “Golden Age of American innovation.”
In 2014, the “Third Offset” doctrine emerged in the U.S. military which reoriented defense policy toward “great power rivalry.” “The architects of this initiative, including Carter, clearly realized that this time, defense spending could no longer be the biggest driving force for innovation,” Guancha writes. “Most of today’s technological innovations come from the commercial sector, especially Silicon Valley. Therefore, the key to the success of the third offset strategy lies in cultivating a new integrated ecosystem between the Silicon Valley technology community and the US military.”
In 2014, Carter left the Defense Department and moved his family to Silicon Valley, taking up a professorship at Stanford University, establishing contact with the Silicon Valley tech moguls. In 2015, with the sudden death of Lee Aspin, Carter was appointed Secretary of Defense by President Obama and immediately initiated a policy of bringing the Silicon Valley crowd on board. He visited Silicon Valley as Secretary of Defense and soon established the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIU-X) to help the Pentagon establish its tentacles in Silicon Valley.
