Leadership Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Bass’s sentence reads like congressional prose, but it’s engineered as a warning flare. The key move is attribution: “In its report, the Cox Committee concludes…” shifts the claim from partisan attack to institutional finding. He’s not merely alleging; he’s laundering urgency through an official document, borrowing the committee’s authority to make a national-security argument sound settled and actionable.

The verb choice does the heavy lifting. “Using stolen U.S. design information” is sharper than “espionage” because it personalizes the loss: not just secrets, but American know-how, American advantage, converted into someone else’s arsenal. Then comes the real punchline: speed. “To speed up its deployment” frames China’s gains as a time theft, collapsing the comfortable assumption that technological superiority buys the United States breathing room. The dread isn’t only that China modernizes; it’s that the timeline is no longer ours to control.

Context matters. The Cox Committee (late 1990s) landed in a moment when U.S.-China economic engagement was accelerating even as Washington was newly anxious about post-Cold War threats and the porousness of high-tech supply chains. Bass taps that tension: trade and tech openness become strategic vulnerability. Subtextually, the sentence argues for policy consequences without naming them - tighter export controls, more aggressive counterintelligence, skepticism of scientific collaboration, and a tougher posture toward Beijing. It’s a compact political instrument: cite the report, define the harm, compress the future, and make restraint feel irresponsible.