Essays and op-eds on national security, technology, and the policies that will shape America's future.
Cybersecurity
The Quantum Clock Is Ticking
Texas — October 2026
There is a quiet crisis building inside America's most sensitive networks, and most boardrooms have never heard of it. It is called "harvest now, decrypt later," and it works like this: adversaries are stealing encrypted data today — diplomatic cables, weapons designs, health records, financial systems — and storing it until quantum computers can break the encryption protecting it.
This is not science fiction. The National Security Agency saw it coming years ago. Its Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0, known as CNSA 2.0, sets hard deadlines: national security systems must begin transitioning to quantum-resistant encryption now, with key milestones in 2027 and full transition by the early 2030s. The timelines are aggressive because the threat is real.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The 2027 and 2030 deadlines apply to national security systems, but the commercial world — banks, hospitals, pipelines, power grids — runs on the same vulnerable cryptography. Adversaries do not distinguish between a .mil network and a .com network when they are harvesting data. If your data is worth stealing today, it is worth decrypting tomorrow.
I advise a quantum-security company, so I see this transition up close. The good news is that the math exists: new post-quantum algorithms, standardized after years of global competition, are ready to deploy. The bad news is that migration is a massive engineering project. You cannot rip out the cryptography underneath the global financial system over a weekend. Inventories must be built, priorities must be set, and the longest-lead-time systems must move first.
Three things every leader should do now. First, find your cryptography: you cannot protect what you have not inventoried. Second, prioritize your crown jewels — the data that must stay secret for ten or twenty years is already at risk. Third, build crypto-agility into every new system you buy, so the next transition does not require another forklift upgrade.
In the Marine Corps, we planned for the enemy's capabilities, not his intentions. Quantum computing is a capability problem with a known timeline. America should act like it.
This month I returned to the Warsaw Security Forum, this time as a mentor in the New Security Leaders program organized by the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. Our discussion group took up a large question: transatlanticism, and how to make it work in the 21st century.
The room was full of young professionals from across the alliance — foreign ministries, parliaments, defense institutions, and policy shops. These are the people who will carry the transatlantic relationship through the next thirty years. I came away impressed by their seriousness, and I told them so.
I also told them three things I have learned the hard way.
First, alliances are not self-sustaining. They are choices, renewed daily by people willing to do the unglamorous work of coordination, burden-sharing, and honest disagreement behind closed doors. The alliance survives because people show up, not because communiqués say it will.
Second, credibility is earned in the small moments. Deterrence is not a slogan. It is the accumulated record of promises kept, red lines honored, and partners defended when it costs something. Young leaders should understand that every cable they draft, every negotiation they staff, and every briefing they give either builds that record or spends it down.
Third, talk plainly. The security world rewards jargon and hedged language. Resist it. Say what you mean, admit what you do not know, and never confuse activity with progress. The Marines taught me that a clear, honest brief beats a polished, vague one every time.
Poland understands all of this instinctively. Sitting a short drive from the Kaliningrad border, in a country that has rebuilt its defenses with urgency and seriousness, the abstract debates of Washington and Brussels feel very concrete. That clarity is worth bottling.
The next generation of transatlantic leaders is ready. Our job is to give them institutions worth inheriting — and the honest counsel to lead them.
When Tehran stumbles, Washington cheers — and Beijing should worry. Iran's recent setbacks are not just a Middle East story. They are bad news for China, and American policymakers should say so plainly.
Start with energy. China is the largest buyer of Iranian oil, much of it flowing through shadow networks designed to evade sanctions. A weakened, isolated Iran is a less reliable supplier, and every barrel Beijing must source elsewhere is a barrel bought at greater cost and greater risk.
Then consider the proxy network. For years, Iran's constellation of militias and proxies — from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq — has kept American power tied down and regional rivals off balance. That arrangement served Beijing's interests: while Washington managed crises in the Middle East, China built its position in the Indo-Pacific unopposed. As Iran's proxies degrade, that comfortable division of labor breaks down.
There is a larger point about the so-called axis of authoritarians. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are often described as a bloc, but it is a bloc of convenience, not conviction. Each member is using the others, and each is discovering the limits of the partnership. Iran's weakness exposes the hollowness at the arrangement's core: when one partner falters, the others do not rush to help — they recalculate.
None of this means the danger has passed. A wounded regime can be a desperate one, and Iran retains real capacity for mischief, from terrorism to nuclear brinkmanship. But American strategy should recognize the opportunity: press the advantage, deepen the dilemmas for Beijing, and remind our partners that American power — applied with patience and resolve — still shapes outcomes.
The bad news for China from Iran is good news for everyone betting on American leadership. Let us not waste it.
Artificial intelligence runs on electricity — staggering amounts of it. A single large data center can consume as much power as a mid-size city, and the AI buildout now underway will demand more new generation than Texas has added in decades. The question is not whether this demand arrives. It is whether Texas is ready.
Texas should be. We have the land, the sun, the wind, the gas, and the most market-driven grid in America. ERCOT's energy-only market has a record of building generation fast when price signals are clear. But markets need rules that reward reliability, not just megawatts, and policymakers need to move at the speed of the load growth they are courting.
Three principles should guide us. First, build all of the above: natural gas for firm, dispatchable power; nuclear — including advanced and small modular designs — for clean baseload; and wind, solar, and storage where they are economic. Ideology got us into energy shortages before. Pragmatism will keep the lights on.
Second, make large loads pay their way. Data centers should fund the transmission and generation their demand requires, through firm contracts and cost allocation that protects households and small businesses. Texans should benefit from the AI boom, not subsidize it through higher bills.
Third, permit faster. The gap between a data center's construction timeline and a transmission line's permitting timeline is where projects go to die. Texas can lead the nation in sane, swift permitting without sacrificing safety or property rights — rights I fought for in the Legislature and still believe in deeply.
Get this right, and Texas does not just host the AI century — it powers it, on American energy, under American rules. That is a prize worth building for.
Despite being the world’s only superpower, the U.S. has the most dysfunctional budgeting system on earth. That we ever chose to implement it—and that it remains in place today—is fiscally and politically indefensible.
The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 didn’t streamline our finances; it buried them. It layered a more complex process atop a labyrinth of separate appropriations and authorizations. The results are a matter of record: Since 1976, Congress has managed to pass only four balanced budgets and four timely ones. In the past 24 years, it hasn’t achieved either. No other government uses this system—no locality, no state, no country. Based on its utter failure, no one would pick this system.
Before 1974, the “single bill” system worked. Under that model, the U.S. faced no shutdowns, budgets arrived on time, and the federal debt stood below $500 billion. Today, that debt has ballooned to $38 trillion.
When I entered Congress in 2019, I was immediately confronted by a “historic” government shutdown. When I spoke to experienced colleagues, they had many stories of past shutdowns. Since 1976, America suffered 20 funding gaps and 10 full or partial shutdowns.
Perhaps most alarming, “automatic”—meaning mandatory—spending exploded. In the 1930s, this category didn’t exist; today, it accounts for 60% of all federal outlays. Mandatory spending requires no annual votes and can go decades without meaningful reviews.
I saw the consequences of this “autopilot” spending firsthand in 2015 as a Texas state senator. Changes to Medicaid eligibility verification under the Affordable Care Act strained the Texas budget. I approached a senior Republican congressman and explained that returning to semiannual verification—or tying eligibility to Internal Revenue Service employment data—would reduce fraud and save Texas billions and the federal government more than $100 billion annually. To my shock, the congressman knew nothing about the issue, even though it was the largest fiscal challenge in Austin. Automatic spending doesn’t only waste money; it hides dangerous trends from the people elected to monitor them.
The 1974 system went off the rails almost immediately. Since then, Congress tried to “patch” the problem with the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (1985), the Budget Enforcement Act (1990), and the Budget Control Act (2011). Each failed to restore timely balanced budgets or end shutdowns.
This isn’t a failure of leadership; it is a failure of architecture. More than two-thirds of members of Congress previously served in state or local offices where they regularly passed balanced budgets. We don’t have the wrong people; we have the wrong system. The 1974 law hands lawmakers a hammer to drill a hole.
During my four years in federal office, I often told voters back home something they found hard to believe: I never once voted on a single actual budget. In Washington, the culture of failure runs so deep that the media stopped reporting this glaring dereliction of duty.
That stands in stark contrast to my experience in Austin. Texas lawmakers take pride in passing a budget; almost all of us saw it as a top priority every legislative session. For generations, Texas legislators passed a timely balanced budget.
The secret: Most governments and businesses use a single-bill budget system. It creates “maximum pressure.” In Texas, the thought of no law enforcement or of five million students losing school funding creates a political urgency that drives compromise. At the federal level, the single-bill system once worked because it forced constituencies—from veterans to Social Security recipients—to demand that their representatives finish the job.
We must end the failed experiment of 1974. If we don’t shut down this destructive system, it will eventually shut down America.
