This Taiwan-Born Tech Whiz Is Helping US Counter China’s Military Advances

For decades, the United States and China have been locked in a high-stakes arms innovation race.

Despite Beijing’s relentless efforts, Washington has consistently maintained the upper hand.

At the heart of America’s technological supremacy is a 70-year-old woman from Taiwan, Heidi Shyu.

Heidi Shyu is the undersecretary of US defence. Additionally, she serves as the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, where she oversees all critical research and engineering efforts essential to national security.

But what elevates her status in the American defence apparatus is her leadership of the Rapid Defence Experimentation Reserve— one of the military’s most secretive and important initiatives.

Established in 2021, the Rapid Defence Experimentation Reserve or the RDER is designed to help the US maintain its technological might over China.

This initiative is Shyu’s brainchild, and is aimed at accelerating defence innovation.

This programme has funded low-profile but high-value niche technologies.

These include ultra-high-altitude surveillance and communication balloons, solar-powered ultra-high-altitude and ultra-long-endurance drones for the navy, and a project to integrate multiple sensors in one operating system for the marines.

An engineer and mathematician by training, Shyu has reached these heights while maintaining a low public profile.

But when she recently went public to defend the RDER programme, all attention shifted onto a woman whose family story began on the other side of the Pacific.

Her family hails from Zhejiang province in China. After the Kuomintang government lost the Chinese civil war to the Communists in 1949, her grandparents and father moved to Taiwan, and then eventually settled in US.

She has bachelors and masters degrees in mathematics from the University of New Brunswick and gained engineering degrees at UCLA.

Shyu started at Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, which later merged with defence giant Raytheon.

At Raytheon, she led a number of US Air Force research projects, including the development of the radar for the F-35 stealth fighter.

Prior to her present appointment, Shyu served under the Obama administration as assistant secretary of the US Army for acquisition, logistics and technology from 2012 to 2016.

According to Shyu, her job, as she told a defence industry conference last year, was being “laser focused on critical technologies to deter and counter China”.

Shyu said she wanted to ensure that Washington’s commanding lead in technology could offset Beijing’s industrial abilities in mass production and scale.

“Just because you’ve got 1,000 missiles, that doesn’t mean I have to have 1,001,” she said. “I look at the whole situation and landscape very differently.”

Heidi Shyu represents those American politicians and officials from the Chinese diaspora in Washington who carry the legacy of the last Cold War across the Taiwan Strait.

As the US and China engage in a strategic competition in this new Cold War era, second- and third-generation Taiwanese immigrants like Shyu are increasingly taking on prominent roles in the political landscape of Washington.