“I felt like I was watching a car crash in slow motion”: Former DOD Official Exposes Broken U.S. Export Control System Strengthening the Chinese Military
For more than two decades, Steve Coonen served as a U.S. Army artillery officer and foreign affairs officer. After his active duty service, he helped lead the Pentagon’s unit charged with keeping sensitive American technologies away from our adversaries. As the Defense Technology Security Administration’s Senior Foreign Affairs Advisor for China, Steve won top performance awards, including the Award for Excellence from the Office of the Secretary of Defense in July 2020.
Then, in November 2021, he resigned from his post.
At the core of his decision to step away was principle: the U.S. government’s export control regime is marked by ineffectiveness and a willful blindness to how China is legally capturing controlled American technologies. Under the Chinese Communist Party’s… Read More