LONDON - China’s recent announcement it has created one of the largest programmable quantum computers - claimed to be 1 million times more powerful than Alphabet/Google’s Sycamore machine - has raised agonizing questions on the other side of the Pacific - is the United States able to keep up with the growing technological progress China is racking up?

These claims also opened the door for a presentation of the newest US capabilities - this time aligned very closely with its other project - the ‘Machine-Assisted Analytic Rapid-Repository System’ (MARS), which was the subject of a previous article of mine.

Hard on the heels of China’s bombshell, IBM unveiled its ‘Eagle,’ a 127-qubit quantum processor in a push beyond the 100-qubit barrier. A few days later Boston-based QuEra Computing, a dark horse startup, unveiled its programmable 256-qubit quantum simulator. A trend here is clearly visible: the US aims to show off its tremendous advantage in new emerging technologies, but new technologies without use cases are just interesting news items. Examples appear below of new technologies and their applications within emerging cyber warfare - the more flexible, information driven, and AI-controlled battlefield of the future.

“Just the nature of the AI that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games,” Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk told The New York Times in a June 2019 interview. “I mean, it’s basically the plotline in War Games.” 

New artificial intelligence (AI) technologies developed in the US in organizations like the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) are indeed noteworthy - not only in terms of their fields, but also approved use cases for these systems. 

Both NORAD and NORTHCOM conducted a third series of tests souped up with AI in July