The origin of Strategic Computing is often associated with the technological competition brewing between the U.S. and Japan in the early 1980s. The Japanese wanted to build a new generation of supercomputers as a foundation for artificial intelligence capabilities. Pairing the economic might of the Japanese government with Japan's burgeoning microelectronics and computer industry, they embarked on their Fifth Generation Computer System to achieve it.
The goal was to create unbelievably fast computers that would allow Japan to leapfrog other countries (most importantly the United States and its emerging "Silicon Valley") in the race for technological dominance. They gave themselves a decade to accomplish this task. But much like the United States, no matter how much faster they made their machines, they couldn't seem to make them "smarter" with strong AI.
Japan's ambition terrified many people in the U.S. who worried that America was losing its technological edge. This fear was stoked in no small part by a 1983 book called The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan's Computer Challenge to the World by Edward A. Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck, which was seen as a must-read on Capitol Hill.
As a way to sell the SCI to the American people—and to private interests—DARPA insisted that its goal was explicitly for the nation's economic interests from the get-go. Spin-offs of the technology being developed were sure to stimulate America's economy, according to the DARPA planning document:
"The consumer electronics industry will integrate new-generation computing technology and create a home market for applications of machine intelligence."
Reaching out to the private sector and the university system would also ensure that the best and brightest were contributing to DARPA's mission for the program:
Equally important is technology transfer to industry, both to build up a base of engineers and system builders familiar with computer science and machine intelligence technology now resident in leading university laboratories, and to facilitate incorporation of the new technology into corporate product lines. To this end we will make full use of regulations of Government procurement involving protection of proprietary information and trade secrets, patent rights, and licensing and royalty arrangements.
The long and short of it? The government gave assurances to private industry that the technology developed wouldn't be handed off to competing companies.
But economic competition with the Japanese, while very much a motivator, was almost a sideline concern for many policymakers embroiled in Cold War politics. Military build-up was the prime concern for the more hawkish members of the Republican party. The military threat from the Soviet Union was seen by many of them as the larger issue. And SCI was designed to address that threat head-on.
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