For today's military, semiconductors are as essential as ball bearings during World War II - critical to every aspect of the U.S. military effort, as well as to the civilian economy.
"Semiconductors are at the core of everything we do in the economy and for national security," said Sarah Kreps, the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, and professor in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. "Because they are so important, that also makes them a vulnerability and a target."
In late 2024, the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute (BTPI), of which Kreps is founding director, began a congressionally authorized assessment of risks in the semiconductor supply chain and how to mitigate them.
Congress appropriated $3 million in startup funding for the bipartisan, multiyear initiative, which BTPI was implementing under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
Army Lt. Col. Brett Reichert, left, interim director of the Semiconductor Supply Chain Security Hub, and Nicolò Boschetti, a doctoral candidate in the field of aerospace engineering, work with semiconductors in their offices in Martha Van Rensselaer Hall.
Kreps, an Air Force veteran, and Army Lt. Col. Brett Reichert, a doctoral student who is interim director of BTPI's Semiconductor Research Hub, led the work and felt a personal connection to it.
"I know what it's like to be on the front lines and not have the technology you need," Kreps said.
Their interdisciplinary research team commissioned a new cyber test range; initiated industry partnerships; and developed case studies about cyberattacks that have infiltrated chip supply chains (CrowdStrike, Stuxnet and Operation Grim Beeper are a few well-known examples).
But in April, a stop-work order from the DOD put on hold the team's plans to map and stress-test semiconductor supply chains, seeking to expose and then patch vulnerabilities. Newly hired staff were laid off, including veterans, and the cyber test range is dormant. Previously, Kreps said, government officials working with BTPI had expressed enthusiasm about the project.
"They told us on a nearly daily basis that they need this assessment, and they need it now," she said. "They have been relieved that there's a project like this."
The reason, Kreps said, is that unlike ball bearings, the semiconductor supply chain is global and complex. Tiers of geographically distributed suppliers often don't know each other, obscuring potential weaknesses.
"Adversaries like Russia and China are trying to target those supply chains and the cyber vulnerabilities within them," Kreps said. "No one has figured out exactly what that supply chain looks like, and yet that network is only as strong as the weakest link."
"It's almost a ticking bomb kind of scenario where these risks exist," she added, "and every day that goes by without understanding where those nodes and vulnerabilities are mean that national security and battlefield security are in jeopardy."
Beyond immediate threats, semiconductors' reliability and secure supply chains will be vital to a proposed U.S. missile-defense shield modeled after Israel's Iron Dome.
"The proposed system is an enormously complex technological challenge that has, of course, chips at the core," Kreps said. "That can only work if we understand where vulnerabilities lie so that we can guard against them, and that's what we're trying to achieve with this project."
