LONDON (FT) -- The Pentagon’s first chief software officer said he resigned in protest at the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, and because he could not stand to watch China overtake America.
“We have no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years. Right now, it’s already a done deal; it is already over in my opinion,” Nicolas Chaillan told the Financial Times in his first interview since leaving the post at the Department of Defense a week ago, adding there was “good reason to be angry”.
Chaillan, 37, who spent three years on a Pentagon-wide effort to boost cyber security and as first chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, said Beijing is heading for global dominance because of its advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and cyber capabilities.
He argued these emerging technologies were far more critical to America’s future than hardware such as big-budget fifth-generation fighter jets such as the F-35.
“Whether it takes a war or not is kind of anecdotal,” he said, arguing China was set to dominate the future of the world, controlling everything from media narratives to geopolitics. He added U.S. cyber defenses in some government departments were at “kindergarten level”.
Chaillan said he plans to testify to Congress about the Chinese cyber threat to U.S. supremacy, including in classified briefings, over the coming weeks.
He acknowledged the U.S. still outspends China by three times on defense, but said the extra cash was immaterial because U.S. procurement costs were so high and spent in the wrong areas, while bureaucracy and overregulation stood in the way of much-needed change at the Pentagon.
Chaillan’s comments came after a congressionally-mandated U.S. national security commission warned earlier this year that China could surpass the U.S. as the world’s AI superpower within the next decade.
Chaillan announced his resignation in a blistering letter at the start of September, saying military officials were repeatedly put in charge of cyber initiatives for which they lacked experience, decrying Pentagon “laggards” and absence of funding.
“We are setting up critical infrastructure to fail,” he said in his letter, which made only cursory reference to advances by China. “We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful?  . . . While we wasted time in bureaucracy, our adversaries moved further ahead.”
Chaillan said he was a polarizing force at the Department of Defense and that he alarmed some senior officials who thought he should keep his complaints “in the family”.