Summer Myatt
With competition between the world’s great powers on the rise, United States leaders are working to identify areas in which the country must advance — and rapidly. The next three to five years will be pivotal in the global competition, making our next moves absolutely critical.
John Heller, CEO of Amentum and seven-time Wash100 Award winner, said that the United States’ focus should certainly be on China, our top pacing threat, but the aperture through which U.S. leaders are viewing the problem may need to be readjusted.
“It’s not even the China of today that I think our focus is on and needs to be on. It’s the China of five, ten, 15 years from now, as their economy continues to grow. They have great education focus and great technology development as they continue to mature in the marketplace and make investments. We have to stay far ahead of that,” Heller said in an exclusive video interview with Executive Mosaic.
One area Heller suggested we need continued investments in is our critical infrastructure — things like energy infrastructure, data infrastructure, banking systems and social media — to combat constant and increasing attacks from adversaries who are growing more sophisticated.
“In these areas of infrastructure, we need investment, we need attention to these, we need new technologies to counter the cyber threats in these areas,” Heller urged.
“Bad actors are going to continue to try to attack all of that infrastructure that we have in the U.S. and try to steal it — try to steal the data, try to steal our technology, try to cause incidents here in the U.S. Some of those adversaries are only going to get exponentially stronger over the next 10 to 20 years,” he warned.
Hear more of Heller’s thoughts and insights on the peer and near-peer competition, Amentum’s new strategy and more by watching his full video interview here.
