This Fox News opinion piece, written by a former Army Staff strategist, argues that the United States is misreading its technological competition with China by treating the development of artificial intelligence as a narrow contest over which model performs best on benchmarks. Drawing on the author's experience advising on foreign arms sales, the article contends that great powers prevail not by owning the single best weapon but by persuading other nations to build their militaries, economies and futures around their systems. The author warns that Washington risks losing sight of this lesson in the race to establish the world's dominant computing platform.

The piece points to China's broader, industrial approach as evidence: Huawei is reportedly preparing to double production of its Ascend processors in 2026, aiming for around 1.6 million chips, while developers at DeepSeek have tuned their latest models to run specifically on that Huawei hardware. The author frames this as China treating AI as a "civilization-building project" rather than a mere technology race, drawing parallels to how historical wars were won through energy, factories and industrial output. The article concludes that there is not a single AI race but multiple, mutually reinforcing competitions unfolding at once, which Washington keeps mistakenly reducing to one.