U.S. technology companies like Intel, Google, Apple, Amazon, Boeing, Lockheed and many, many others all benefited enormously from U.S. government industrial policies. Everything Apple sells came out the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). There would be no Internet had there not first been ARPANET or DARPANET. i could go on, but it is important to understand that U.S. tech and industrial leadership has been significantly driven by U.S. industrial policy. Sometimes we call it defense or national security policy but it is in fact industrial policy.

At this moment, the U.S. is losing in danger of falling behind in the tech race with China. Washington is cobbling together some industrial policies to respond, but it must do much more and do it much more intelligently.