There you have it. Five years ago I resigned from the Pentagon and wrote that we were losing the …
August 24, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
China Threat Defense Cybersecurity Workforce
There you have it. Five years ago I resigned from the Pentagon and wrote that we were losing the AI and cyber race to China. Some people called it dramatic.
I'd give anything to have been wrong.
Read the letter again today and nothing has aged: https://lnkd.in/dUC3CyqV
China is still closing the AI gap — best estimate now, about three months behind us. We're still sitting on roughly half a million unfilled cyber jobs. Programs still take a decade-plus to field software an enemy iterates on in a weekend.
We got breached again this year. Same story, bigger door.
The joint warfighting network everyone promised? Still no real framework. The mass-drone answer to China? Missed its own target. We wrote strategies. They shipped systems.
Here's the honest part. Few things worked — the DevSecOps platform we built to get software to the field in days instead of years is still running, still delivering. Proof it was never about the talent or the tech. It was about whether anyone would actually let it work.
I didn't leave because I lost an argument. I left because I ran out of ways to win one that shouldn't have needed winning.
Five years. Same warnings. Same excuses.
Time to wake up.
I'd give anything to have been wrong.
Read the letter again today and nothing has aged: https://lnkd.in/dUC3CyqV
China is still closing the AI gap — best estimate now, about three months behind us. We're still sitting on roughly half a million unfilled cyber jobs. Programs still take a decade-plus to field software an enemy iterates on in a weekend.
We got breached again this year. Same story, bigger door.
The joint warfighting network everyone promised? Still no real framework. The mass-drone answer to China? Missed its own target. We wrote strategies. They shipped systems.
Here's the honest part. Few things worked — the DevSecOps platform we built to get software to the field in days instead of years is still running, still delivering. Proof it was never about the talent or the tech. It was about whether anyone would actually let it work.
I didn't leave because I lost an argument. I left because I ran out of ways to win one that shouldn't have needed winning.
Five years. Same warnings. Same excuses.
Time to wake up.