President Joe Biden’s team regards emerging technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence as “the strategic high ground,” as Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell put it recently. The pressure to outpace China, which is pouring money into a military modernization project powered in part by stolen from Western companies, spurred officials in Washington, London, and Canberra to put a premium on Pillar Two of the deal.

“We need to build an innovation system … across our three countries which stimulates the defense industry base across our three countries,” Marles said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event last week. “Each of us have our own innovation systems which are focused on our own domestic defense industry bases. How we get value add here is by really kind of getting those much more harmonized.”