“This was an incredible opportunity to engage with policymakers and innovators outside of the D.C. bubble. We've worked hard to build the Institute into a place where leaders from different backgrounds and sectors can come together to share new insights, and it’s been gratifying to see the fruits of that labor this week.”
- Phil Potter, Executive Director, NSDPI
The University of Virginia’s National Security Data and Policy Institute (NSDPI) welcomed military leaders, academic scholars, and industry innovators to the Boar’s Head Resort in Charlottesville last week for its inaugural annual conference. Held from March 18th to March 20th in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the gathering's keynote addresses and cross-sector panel discussions featured more than twenty speakers, all of whom shared their expertise and insights on how massive data, emerging technology, and increasing competition are currently impacting the national security landscape.
Established in 2024, the NSDPI works to harness government, academia, and industry to tackle the most urgent national security challenges using cutting-edge technology. Its researchers develop AI algorithms and other advanced tools to make sense of massive data for analysts and decision makers. Distilling vast troves of information, the Institute connects disparate dots and pieces together possible threats that might escape more traditional, time-consuming analysis.
“What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” That fundamental question lives at the heart of the Institute’s research and work, and was posed by General (Ret) Robert Neller in Thursday morning’s keynote address. The 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps struck a clear chord with his remarks that reverberated through the conference’s subsequent sessions. “It used to be just air, land, and sea” he continued. “Now we have six or seven domains to worry about, and the most important to me are space and cyber... They used to say that war eventually came down to just two people struggling in a room. They’d say that that will never change. I don’t think so. I think the character of war is going to change. The more I read about Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT—it’s terrifying and exciting at the same time.”
Resilient Supply Chains and the Defense Industrial Base
That sophisticated AI technology is dependent, however, on complex trade networks riddled with bottlenecks and dependencies. NSDPI Senior Researcher Margaret Foster has been conducting in-depth research in this field, and moderated a Thursday panel discussion on resilient supply chains and the defense industrial base that included major industry leaders. “We must think in a cooperative way,” said Nat Puffer, a partner at IQT, a not-for-profit global investment platform that accelerates the introduction of groundbreaking technologies for national security. He pointed to lithium as a key example of how China manipulates prices to suggest dependence. “Our system is a closed spaceship rather than a free range... we have limited air, and what one astronaut breaths another cannot.” Citing new advancements in the last decade that have allowed companies to have more visibility into trade flows, Puffer emphasized the importance of using these tools to better manage risk.
However, while awareness of supply chain risks is important, panelists agreed that clear action toward alternatives is another matter entirely. In some cases, the costs of investing to maintain access in some relatively small mineral industries can outweigh their value, despite their criticality in the supply chain. David Thompson, Altana’s vice president of public sector customer success, agreed with fellow panelists that industry optimization and regulatory environments will be key for businesses to overcome these hurdles, and emphasized that the focus should be the total value of the derivative goods downstream in the supply chain. He cited the recent example of a medical gel refinery, where a shock to a polymer input valued at thousands of dollars impacted billions of dollars' worth of medical products months after the fact. “What are we trying to accomplish?” asked Lieutenant General (Ret.) Brian Cavanaugh, CEO of VigilanteX, a firm that relies on autonomous surveillance technology to ensure the security of job sites. “The size is irrelevant; if we need it, we need it.”
AI and Intelligence
Demand for critical minerals and other inputs is fueled in no small part by rapidly advancing AI tools that require these inputs to function. AI is rapidly impacting all sectors of society, but leaders in the intelligence community in particular find themselves grappling with the ever-evolving question of how to safely reap its benefits for their own work. In its second panel session, the conference shifted gears to talk about the key tradecraft implications of this new technological era, with NSDPI Senior Fellow Brian Lessenberry leading the discussion. A former senior intelligence executive who has held leadership roles at ODNI, DOS, and NGA, Lessenberry began by soliciting some broad perspectives from his panel of academic, government, and industry experts.
Amy McAuliffe, a distinguished visiting professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame, shared that the analytic lessons the IC learned from Iraq were highly relevant here; factoring in confidence levels, acknowledging gaps in intelligence, and incorporating individual analysis into mainline analysis and predictions are all important. “We do not want rapidity and recency bias” she cautioned, “which AI models are dominated by.” Former IC Senior Executive Wayne McCool acknowledged these concerns but added a note of optimism, saying that AI will help with confidence levels and other important considerations if experts know how to properly integrate it into analysis. McCool shared that much of the IC has been using AI for years, bringing it into workflows related to automated tasks such as map-making and helping analysts digest overwhelming amounts of data.
As conversation shifted to the topic of model design, Rhombus Power Vice President of Intelligence Bruce Frost offered a unique perspective, informed by his current work in private industry and his over thirty years of federal service. “Are you trying to convert a model made for a commercial purpose to serve an intelligence purpose? Or are you building a model from scratch? It’s usually better to build from scratch” he explained. Just as analysts can carry biases they must interrogate, machine learning models can be biased as well. Frost emphasized that companies providing intelligence have major responsibilities as AI continues to reduce data processing timelines and the IC moves more rapidly toward private-public partnerships to reap the productivity benefits.
While these central questions around the safe and efficient incorporation of AI tools into tradecraft are crucial to consider, the perspective of intelligence end consumers should not be forgotten. “I don’t think a lot of policymakers understand or care about the operations of tradecraft,” Rebecca Hersman, a senior research scholar at the Centre for the Governance of AI, reminded the rest of the panel. She explained that many leaders are skeptical following the intelligence failure in Iraq, and when decision makers find themselves frustrated by the opacity of the sources and methods behind IC conclusions, they may turn to their own LLMs as trusted advisors.
As the conference’s AI and Intelligence session wound down, panelists shared some key conclusions about the promise and perils of machine learning models. Hersman highlighted AI’s problematic reluctance to reveal that it doesn’t know an answer in the interest of being helpful, pointing out the danger of losing touch of our unknown unknowns as we assess our confidence in our conclusions. McAuliffe cautioned that, while AI’s ability to explain its decisions and reasoning are crucial to that confidence, that capability does not yet exist in the public or private sector. And finally, McCool emphasized that AI cannot provide values-based judgements, and should not be a part of targeting decisions or party to justification of force questions. Acknowledging these considerations, Frost stressed that keeping humans in the loop and synchronizing all data sources into high quality intelligence products is crucial, and that targeted AI models can be incredibly helpful in this process.
PRC Competition in Data and Emerging Technology
Recorded Live for the Strength in Numbers podcast, a NSDPI and Foreign Policy Studios production
The Intelligence Community’s concerns about AI and tradecraft do not exist in a vacuum. The People’s Republic of China has emerged as a major peer competitor in the AI and emerging technology race, threatening the United States’ status as a global leader in development and implementation. Over the course of the six weeks leading up to its annual conference, the NSDPI released episodes of its flagship podcast Strength in Numbers, which explores how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are reshaping national security. For the conference’s third panel session, Institute Executive Director Phil Potter joined Strength in Numbers host Jennifer Strong, National Security PRC Strategist Lukas Filler, and former National Intelligence Council Chairman Neil Wiley for an illuminating discussion on the United States’ ongoing competition with China. Recorded live in front of an audience, their full conversation is slated for release in the weeks following the conference as episodes seven and eight of the podcast.
The panelists began by outlining the stakes of this technology race. “China’s population size, production and manufacturing capacity, and higher comparative GDP growth make it a worthy adversary and rival to the United States” explained Potter. “In international politics, size matters.” Wiley later elaborated on this point, emphasizing that the conversation is no longer about containing China. “China is here, and containment is not possible. The discussion now is what the world will look like as multiple large global powers rotate around each other. The U.S. must figure out what it wants in this emerging system.”
The question of how the United States approaches this new geopolitical problem is thorny, and requires an understanding of key differences between the two nations. Where U.S. value systems are based on individual freedoms, explained Filler, China’s central ideology was formed by Confucian influences based on communal relationships. This in turn is shaping the PRC’s technological development; where other nations may try to change ideology to fit modernity, China is tying new technology to their existing ideology, focusing their tech goals around the “common good,” i.e. the good of the CCP. In addition to these cultural distinctions, the Intelligence Community is working to fully understand how the roles, desires, and motivations at play today differ from those of the United States’ historical adversaries. While it’s tempting to think of this moment as the “New Cold War,” Wiley stressed that the comparison is not accurate, and the PRC’s broader technological and economic reach make it a much different opponent than the USSR.
So, what is the United States’ whole of government strategy to combat the new threat China poses? While there are pieces of a plan spread across multiple documents, Wiley said Thursday that there is no concrete, unified strategy. But Potter emphasized that while the U.S. perceives Chinese long-term planning as successful, that approach is useless in a democracy with major leadership shifts every four to eight years, and we should instead focus on prioritizing key aspects of national security. In other words: “We should not try to out-PRC the PRC.”
At the time of the recording (March 19, 2026) ongoing military action in the Middle East was also top of mind, and panelists took time to evaluate the PRC’s perception of the U.S.-Iran conflict. Potter pointed out that for China, current operations are highlighting U.S. vulnerabilities including equipment maintenance cycles, magazine depth, and production and replacement issues. Wiley agreed, noting that Xi Jinping has had the rare opportunity to observe many modern conflicts from afar, and is learning from vast amounts of data as a result. Filler also drew attention to partner responses to U.S. decisions; as many regional players hosting U.S. bases now find themselves subject to attack, the CCP sees an opening to use the strikes as ideological leverage, understanding the importance of targeting constituents rather than decision makers to influence global public opinion. There was agreement, however, that China does not see this moment as an opportunity to move on Taiwan. The CCP’s conservative leadership believes that long-term time horizons are in their favor, and would rather wait for greater advantage.
