Defend the choice.
Expose the conditions.
The objective is enduring U.S. competitive advantage relative to the PRC/CCP. The method must remain capable of rejecting an attractive U.S. policy when the evidence does not support it.
Open the decision brief →Three questions, not one score.
Strategic importance: what capability or freedom of action would be lost? Action priority: what feasible U.S. choice changes that outcome? Research priority: what unresolved uncertainty could reverse the choice?
A strategically important dependency does not automatically justify a particular intervention. A weakly evidenced recommendation may warrant research before spending or institutional commitment.
State the competitive objective.
Name the U.S. capability, latent resource, or future option to sustain or advance. Specify the PRC comparison, affected users, time horizon, and conditions. An absolute U.S. gain is not necessarily a relative gain; a relative gain need not require an absolute PRC loss.
Establish the baseline honestly.
Keep usable capability, latent potential, and future leverage separate. Count partner capacity only with relevant permission and delivery evidence. Compare the same stage of the capability chain on both sides. Distinguish PRC state capacity, CCP direction, firms, and independent actors where attribution matters.
Find the binding constraint.
Trace resources → qualified output → usable capability → outcome. Identify the stage that actually limits the objective. Do not add national totals across stages or treat nominal capacity as qualified, available output.
Compare feasible actions.
Compare doing less or nothing, preserving existing strengths, removing constraints, and developing alternatives. Record the implementation owner or responsible institution when established, authority, partner consent, resource demands, substitutes, opportunity costs, time-to-effect, and reversibility. Unknown values stay unknown.
Use conditional precedence, not false precision.
Prefer an enabling action before a dependent action only when the dependency is evidenced. Compare urgency against the deadline for useful delivery. If neither action clearly dominates on the stated objective and constraints, leave them tied or incomparable. The brief's display order and filters are not a national ranking.
Test whether the gain endures.
Consider PRC adaptation, substitution, imitation, third-country choices, and U.S. implementation failure. Ask whether the action weakens the talent, trust, openness, investment, or coalition relationships that generate the advantage. Preserve options to adjust as evidence changes.
Show what changes the decision.
Every pathway states a progress measure, a switching condition, and a decision-relevant research gap. A change in a baseline indicator does not by itself establish policy success. Outcomes require a time-bounded expectation and a credible comparison with what would otherwise have happened.
What this release does—and does not—establish.
The twelve pathways are a qualitative U.S. decision synthesis. They do not have comparable cost estimates, estimated returns, calibrated success probabilities, a national aggregate score, or a modeled optimal portfolio. Comparing two cards makes assumptions inspectable; it does not run a simulation or produce a winner.
These proposals draw on the published comparative record through August 14, 2026. The decision synthesis is dated September 6, with selective NSF innovation and GAO shipbuilding source checks. That date does not refresh every underlying claim. Baseline confidence is not confidence in a proposed intervention or the probability of a future event.
The next analytical step is to choose a specific objective and deadline, collect comparable implementation data, and test competing sequences against the same constraints. Dated prospective expectations and later outcomes should be recorded before any claim of predictive performance.
Underlying comparative method · Complete evidence library · Decision records JSON