How America Lost its Global Connectivity Lead and Why the Future Depends on Getting it Back
It could be a boat anchor that kicks off the invasion of Taiwan, not a bullet. The thousands of miles of sub-sea cables are what make everything function — not just in Taiwan — and it’s clear to any invading force that owning this is key to winning any proposed invasion. That prospect has never been easier. Having something banal like a “fisherman” turn off the connection for a second is all it takes to launch an attack. That’s because the global telecommunications network is increasingly owned and maintained by entities that can be manipulated against the United States. And America and its allies have dropped their deserved lead as innovators in this industry. For the United States, regaining a technological and strategic lead in telecommunications is an urgent necessity for national security. That’s what I will try to convince you of here: The United States used to dominate in this sector. It does not anymore. It is critical that American industry focuses on the next deep horizon, specifically in optimization, private networks, and free space optics, with a lot of help from the U.S. Department of Defense. It’s also a great opportunity for investment. Both public and private sector players can work now to meet this challenge and should, before it’s too late to re-establish dominance.
When Things Go Wrong Internationally, America Has Had No Answers
America’s lack of sophistication here is already being revealed by its two biggest global competitors, China and Russia. In February of 2023, Chinese maritime vessels disabled internet access to Taiwan’s Matsu Island, effectively cutting off the internet to the archipelago’s 13,000 residents. The activity was allegedly caused by Chinese fishing and shipping vessels within six days of each other. As a part of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s first move was to shut off the country’s internet service. Six months after the incident in Matsu Island, a Ukrainian counterattack against Russian submarines was thwarted when their single point of communication was suddenly cut off in the middle of the mission. Without any redundancy, the fighting forces on the ground were forced to retreat and the mission was scrapped. The message was clear: If this war is to be fought, it must be fought on a single telecommunications provider’s terms. These activities have been referred to as “invisible blockades.” The United States and its allies would be foolish to treat these incidents as anything less than a tactical rehearsal for a larger war.
It’s amazing America ended up here. American innovation made the industry. But as it has become more commoditized, the United States has fallen way behind in the race to the bottom and is increasingly dependent on a variety of unaligned actors to make sure things work as they should. That’s why the free world needs the U.S. Department of Defense to do what it does best for industry: de-risk the short-term barriers to entry for the next great technologies to emerge and ensure they run uninterrupted and uncorrupted globally. My bias here is clear: I am a venture capitalist, running a firm — J2 Ventures — focused on, among many things, global telecommunications, so I want to invest in these technologies too. But for a space that is so large and so important, it is much harder than it used to be to find innovators among the United States and her allies doing good work here. Moreover, I often find myself in very small company when the deals finally materialize. For the future of the free world, which has to be able to communicate unencumbered, I’d like this to stop.
America and its Allies Made this Industry What It Is
American naval dominance after World War II paved the way for the telecommunications industry the world has now. Thanks to the miracle of almost 500 undersea fiber optic cables that span nearly 750,000 miles, paired with a domestic broadband cable network that can go across the United States over 22 times in its current form, you are reading this online now. You even likely carry a supercomputer in your pocket connected to 142,100 cell towers and 452,200 small cell nodes, as of 2022, in the U.S. alone. The statistics in developing countries are harder to count but easier to appreciate as you need only look up to see the thousands of wires connecting everything.
That’s because knowledge is power and knowledge is transmitted, so it serves to reason the U.S. military would be interested in its transmission after taking the stage as the dominant power after World War II. The father of this industry is well known, Alexander Graham Bell, who would create the first telephone, the first big telephone company (AT&T), and then make the first transcontinental phone call from New York to San Francisco. But this industry would not hyperscale until it collided with venture capital and entwined with the U.S. military in the 1950s in the form of Bell lab’s influenced Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was funded by significant government research and development dollars and made commercially relevant by a B-70 Bomber guidance deal supercharged by the need for Minuteman Nuclear Ballistic Missile guidance chips. Now you can scroll on Instagram from your couch. The importance of this technology is existential, and it is why everyone in the world cares about the potential future of Taiwan today.
A Losing Race to the Bottom
The problem is that over time good enough became good enough, and it was then about how to scale the most cheaply with all other metrics being measured linearly not exponentially. Shareholders like cheap because in a world measured in quarterly time increments that means more profits. Where America sees profits, its despotic rivals, who measure influence in lifetimes, see opportunities. America is great at a lot of things. Patience and being the lowest-cost provider are rarely those things.
It’s hard to overstate how bad this problem is for the future of telecom in its current state. Most of the global traffic for the internet happens through seabed cables, most of which are the size of a garden hose and can be as fragile as one, which is a dually bad problem. Breaks are serviced by obscure maintenance companies of which Chinese companies are, by far, one of the most active.
So, America has given both the technology and the maintenance over to those without motivation or responsibility to uphold the U.S. conception of global security. Why else would the dynamic cabling off the coast of Taiwan suspiciously seem to be some of the most prone to breaking? According to a report from ABC, the cabling that connects Taiwan to the rest of the world has seen 27 breaks over the last five years – a number categorized by the same report as “a lot” (I concur). It should not come as a surprise that direct cable servicing rival, HMN Tech, formerly known as “Huawei Marine Networks”, based in Tianjin, China, is the fastest-growing company in the cable fixing space.
America’s cures are proving to be as bad as the disease. The United States (including the public and private sectors) is seeking to build thicker cables, have them built by our corporations (sometimes specifically for their use), and route these cables by different countries that are not as geopolitically targeted. Moreover, common opinion views satellites as a panacea without appreciating that the satellites themselves are just the conduit to what the United States should be focusing on. My view is that low earth orbit-based beaming technology will liberate us, but at best it degrades precipitously with each incremental user (there is a reason satellites never replaced cable internet and for a long time will not), and at worst, the state’s “diplomatic relations’’ reliance on just a few companies put them in a very bad position militaristically, see: Ukraine Counteroffensive.
Don’t worry, it gets worse. With an increasing percentage of telecommunications giants being Chinese or beholden to Chinese regulations, a growing share of the global information and computer technology market is going to the preferred providers of equipment of these companies, of which, the Chinese have by far had the best growth in developing economies. You do not have to look far to see this. The Atlantic Council’s African Center elucidated this in 2021 (and since then, I bet it’s gotten worse) that 50 percent of the continent’s 3G networks and 70 percent of its 4G networks are built by Huawei alone (yes, the same company that also services the cables). As recently as 2019, you could get Huawei pucks (little Wi-Fi hotspots to connect your phone and call home, check email, etc.) on American military bases in Afghanistan (I was offered a hand-me-down in-country in 2017). It would be another two years before the U.S. government realized what was happening and banned a company that was obviously bad for the country. If you think connecting to cell towers is the way to a spy-free and efficient future, think again, as the list of Chinese dependencies in this industry would go beyond the word limit of this article.
In Search of Solutions
America lost the old tech to its rivals, and it’s not getting it back. The innovation community alongside the incredible power of the Defense Department’s research and development needs to double down on the next generation of this industry and do so with purpose-built mission aligned partners. America will only return to a good place if it makes the old ways look like the Pony Express (which I’m sure at one point was dominantly best-in-class). Here are a few good ways to get started:
Do Better with the Pipes that Already Exist
The first is to make more effective use of the existing pipes. All of these cellular towers, wires, and infrastructure are actually still good for a lot of things even though the hardware itself is never going to be cost-competitive with China. But America has not done enough to build and optimize them when they’re needed, nor protect them while they’re transmitting. That’s because rather than embrace continually evolving and emerging digital modulation techniques and wireless standards, older systems are kept decades longer than necessary. This is low-hanging fruit that is moving forward slowly but not fast enough.
Make More Private Networks
Taking this a step further, many are even setting up completely digital networks and private 5G for the larger enterprises that are much more secure, and faster than their traditional carrier or Wi-Fi alternatives. In 2025, the Defense Department has allocated over $200 million (the cost of two F-35s) to efforts in this domain, including $80 million for the person who figures out “Dual Use 5G use cases” to help the efforts cross over into the civilian world. Open Radio Access Networks have become an increasingly important part of Defense Department life, with installations adopting private 5G to power everything from computers to warehouses on base, and we still have no preferred carrier. The spending so far has been small, but these innovations will proliferate in a big way to the private sector as the right solutions are allowed to mature- and I’d be surprised if the private sector did not see the Department of Defense take its rightful place as the industry’s rocket fuel in the future. This applies to any large campus that needs to be secure such as a hospital system.
Lasers, Baby
But the space where the military is really going to change the world and should focus its efforts is in the transmission technology itself, namely coherent light. People smarter than me call this “the phenomenon of all photons in a beam acting together in perfect lockstep,” but if you have ever been 10 years old and seen a laser pointer, you get the visual. Unlike cables, it does not degrade, cannot be cut, and is not limited by the physical volume of the cable (light can become bigger, plastic tubes cannot). In fact, you can dynamically mount the lasers and transmit the internet anywhere and anytime — not just from space, but ground to ground and ground to air. Unlike non-coherent light, it retains its strength over long distances and usage. The best part is the U.S. government is already the world leader in this research, and it can continue to lead. The foundations of the technology functionally came from Albert Einstein working with the U.S. government in New York during World War II, some of its first iterations came from the University of Michigan in 1963, and some of the best scientists and technologies in the world are currently in the Defense Department-funded Lawrence Livermore Labs in California. America can transform a 750,000-mile vulnerability into a laser wall that cannot be intercepted.
Conclusion
This is America’s moment and the greatest and most enduring use of the Pentagon’s pivotal project to enhance further (or bring back) U.S. global reach. This vision – termed Joint All Domain Command and Control — cannot come soon enough, but the ambition of the effort belies the country’s current situation. Bold leaps in adoption are the only way America is going to win against a near peer, and the Pentagon should feel empowered to lean heavily into experimentation. Failure is not silly- competing the way the Department of Defense has and optimizing for stagnation is. The optimization path leads to cost-cutting, which leads to commoditization where countries who do not value human life or profits in exchange for their goals will always win. The Department of Defense has more than enough money to do this, it just needs to agree it’s a priority- and I think they will soon. The criticality of this extends to everything. Whether you have an AI-enhanced whatever does not matter when the enemy can read your emails or, better yet, block them from being sent. America can do better, and as the parents of this industry and its rightful stewards, she should. Winning the next war depends on it.
Alexander Harstrick is a managing partner and co-founder of J2 Ventures, a fund that specializes in early-stage companies that are looking to partner with the U.S. government. J2 is one of the most active investors in the dual-use space, focusing on companies leading AI, machine learning, biomedical engineering, cybersecurity, and infrastructure innovation.
