Steve Coonen

CTT Advisor Steve Coonen Calls Out Failing U.S. Control Regime

Posted on by China Tech Threat
CTT Advisor Steve Coonen—who resigned from the Pentagon in 2021 over the U.S. Government’s totally ineffective export control regime—is up with a piece in The Wire China. Although Congress has been warning since 1998 that American technologies are arming China, U.S. export control authorities have done little of consequence to arrest the flow of American know-how to our greatest adversaries. Writes Coonen: From the export of supercomputers to develop China’s nuclear weapons to the nearly undefeatable hypersonic weapons designed to deliver them; from the liberal transfer of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to the sensors in China’s Great Undersea Wall that can detect U.S. submarines in the Taiwan Strait, U.S. technologies have been vital to China’s military advancement. One would think that U.S.… Read More

Deck the Halls with China Tech Threat’s Holiday Reading List

Posted on by China Tech Threat
Coonen: Defense Spending Increases Will Be Irrelevant If We Don’t Curtail China Acquisition Of U.S. Technology. Following his praise of Congress for increasing defense spending and military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), former Defense Technology Security Administration Senior Advisor and CTT Special Advisor Steve Coonen warns that increased spending could be irrelevant without complimentary export control policies to curtail China’s ability to use U.S. technology against us. Citing Russia’s use of Chinese-made DJI drones that contain American cutting-edge technology, Coonen warns: “Far from dissuading diversion, U.S. export control policies are an open invitation for the Chinese Communist Party to send U.S. technology to whichever end user they desire. In this case, U.S. loopholes are… Read More

Caught Red Handed: Applied Materials Allegedly Illegally Exporting Tech to China

Posted on by China Tech Threat
For years China Tech Threat has warned that U.S. export controls have been insufficient to stop the transfer of American technology to the Chinese military. In our August 2023 report, Cash Over County, we explained how American semiconductor equipment manufacturers Applied Materials, KLA, and Lam Research grew their combined revenues from China by 103% between 2018 and 2022—strengthening the Chinese military and intelligence apparatuses in the process. Apparently, the greed infecting at least one of these companies is worse than we thought. Reuters reports that the Justice Department is investigating Applied Materials for allegedly selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to China in violation of U.S. export controls. The alleged infractions took place in 2021 and 2022,… Read More

4 Export Control Fallacies and Their Rebuttals

Posted on by China Tech Threat
By Steve Coonen Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, professors Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman criticize American export control policies as having the potential to create more problems then they solve. Pointing the finger at America as a force for destabilization is divorced from the reality of the global export control landscape. China’s commitment to using American technologies to build up its military has necessitated export controls targeting the country’s chip sector. Here are four fallacies promoted in the article (in italics) and my rebuttals: Fallacy #1: The U.S. is to blame for export control-related global disruptions “A new tit-for-tat is emerging, and as China responds to the turn in American policy, there is a risk that the… Read More

Actions Speak Louder than Words—So Where’s the Action from the Commerce Department?

Posted on by China Tech Threat
“Actions speak louder than words” was the refrain from Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday. Raimondo is referring to what she hopes to see from the Chinese government following her meetings in Beijing last week—not just promises of change, but concrete steps. The world shouldn’t hold its breath waiting for them. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can’t be trusted to uphold its promises—just ask the citizens of Hong Kong, who have seen their autonomy revoked in the last several years. Or maybe President Obama, to whom Xi Jinping made promises in 2015 that the CCP would stop militarizing the South China Sea. Or other nations in Asia, which are recently outraged after China released a… Read More

Actions Speak Louder Than Words – Willful Blindness Series Recap

Posted on by China Tech Threat
With Labor Day around the corner, the unofficial end of summer is almost here. So, here’s our final plug for beach reading from CTT special advisor Steve Coonen. Coonen, who spent more than two decades in uniform as an Army artillery and foreign affairs officer and then nearly 14 years as an analyst at the Defense Technology and Security Administration (DTSA), wrote a nine-part summer series for CTT on America’s broken export control system.  The need to expose the administration’s willful blindless as it relates to export controls could not be more timely. Multiple outlets are reporting that one outcome of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to China is an agreement between the U.S. and China to begin a series… Read More

How BIS Has Accommodated Corporations at The Expense of National Security

Posted on by China Tech Threat
By Steve Coonen Recently I was asked, “On a scale of A to F, how would you grade BIS’s performance over the past 5 years?” My response: “If one removes ‘security’ (the S from BIS), then BIS fully merits an A+.” That’s not a compliment. For years BIS has accommodated corporations and industry groups at the expense of American national security. For starters, the Commerce Department’s core mission of advancing U.S. economic interests has prevented an appropriately rigorous approach to export controls. The Department of Commerce’s self-described mission is to “to create the conditions for economic growth and opportunity for all communities.” Consequently, BIS’s goal of denying the export of U.S. technology which can be used for military purposes is… Read More

Fixing the Failings of the Interagency Export Control Review System

Posted on by China Tech Threat
By Steve Coonen As I established in my paper Willful Blindness released in May, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (the unit within the U.S. government primarily responsible for stopping the Chinese military from obtaining American technologies) has become a rubber stamp for the export of controlled technologies to China. Case in point: In 2022, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) approved over 91% of applications for the export of controlled technologies to China, even greater than 2021’s 88% rate.  Yes, BIS needs to do a better job of denying tech exports to China. But BIS is not entirely at fault—it is just one cog in the broken federal machine tasked with defending U.S.… Read More

The U.S. Cannot Continue to Export Dual-Use Technologies to China

Posted on by China Tech Threat
By Steve Coonen As anyone who has seen the new film Oppenheimer can attest to, the U.S. government has historically gone to great lengths to prevent military tools from falling into the hands of our adversaries. So why is the federal government continuing to rubber stamp the export of dual-use technologies to our greatest adversary? Dual-use technologies are those which can be used for both military and civil purposes. Some items common to both civilian and military hardware, such as nuts, bolts, screws, seals, etc., pose no national security concerns. But others do. For example, the seemingly innocuous carbon fiber filament used to make high-performance brake pads is also the same material used to manufacture nose cones for ballistic missiles.… Read More

CHIPS Act Anniversary: Must Play Offense and Defense

Posted on by China Tech Threat
Today, in honor of the first anniversary of the CHIPS Act, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, “The CHIPS for America program is a historic opportunity to solidify America’s leadership and protect national security.” Yes, the CHIPS Act is an important step in developing our own capabilities, but to be successful, we need to play offense and defense. Former Pentagon Chinese tech advisor Steve Coonen makes this point in the video below. Coonen cautions that we shouldn’t assist adversaries like China by supplying them with the semiconductor manufacturing equipment that they need to boost their own capabilities. For China, the ultimate aim is to dominate the global semiconductor market. We’ve seen this playbook before. China will subsidize and dominate – just… Read More