Sessions

Advanced Technology Career Fair

Open to Stanford students. Free to attend. One form covers registration and your resume, which we share with attending companies.

Registration opens

Check in and pick up your badge. Coffee is served.

Breakfast

Welcome and opening remarks

Opening Keynote: President Tsai Ing Wen

Opening speech, then a fireside chat moderated by Gordon Kim.

Defending Taiwan's Democracy: Sovereignty, Emerging Technology, and the U.S.–Taiwan Partnership

Frontline perspectives on deterrence, emerging tech, and the U.S.–Taiwan partnership in an era of great power competition.

Investing for Strategic Advantage: Venture Capital in Defense

Where private capital can create U.S. advantage by backing emerging technologies, rebuilding critical capabilities, and finding the white spaces still underserved by the defense market.

Defense Industrialization

Can America build fast enough to deter a competitor with a manufacturing base it cannot match? This panel puts manufacturers working at the frontier, additive metals, advanced composites, precision machining, submarine components, alongside the capital meant to finance them, and tests their competing theories of what is actually holding American production back.

Effectiveness Under Fire: Command and Control, Communications, Maneuver, and Power for Contested Logistics in the Pacific

Where the distributed force stays connected, mobile, powered, and resupplied when the enemy contests every link in the chain.

Networking break

The New Front Door: Reform, Capital, and the Race to Rebuild the Base

Acquisition reform, industrial-base programs, and private capital are widening the door to the defense industrial base. The sharper question is whether this is a lasting rewiring of how the Pentagon buys, or a faster on-ramp that funnels new entrants into the same old bottlenecks.

The Autonomous Force: Strategy and Command in Multi-Domain Warfare

How the U.S. military must adapt strategy, command, force design, and industrial capacity to field autonomous forces that can fight, survive, and deter across every domain.

The Call to Service

Different paths. One purpose. A fireside conversation on serving the country in uniform and in the civil service.

Lunch and networking

Midday Keynote: Gen. Dan Caine

Fireside chat moderated by Collen Larson.

Beyond the Valley: How the Government and Private Capital Are Underwriting National Security

Washington wants to supercharge the industrial base and crowd in private capital. Four practitioners from different points in the capital stack will discuss what that takes and what each layer costs.

What Ukraine Taught Us: Building Weapons in Weeks, Not Years

Ukraine now iterates drones, electronic warfare, and battlefield software on a cycle measured in weeks, with frontline units feeding requirements straight back to the people building them. Ukrainian practitioners and a Stanford security expert walk through how that loop works in practice and what the United States would have to change to match it.

Energy and National Security

Advanced power generation in the age of AI, and what it means for our military, our nation, and our allies.

The Commercial Intelligence Advantage

Government leaders, operators, and investors on how commercial technology is reshaping intelligence collection, and what it takes for the agencies at the center of the mission to turn that capability into a real advantage.

Networking break

Maritime Warfare: Lessons from the Hidden War

The autonomous fleet is arriving faster than the industrial base that has to build it. This panel brings together the people fielding unmanned surface and undersea vessels and the shipbuilders trying to close the capacity gap, to test whether autonomy actually changes the deterrence math, or is outrunning America's ability to produce a fleet at scale.

Mass, Autonomy, and Attrition: Building and Buying Unmanned Systems at Scale

A peer fight will burn through unmanned systems faster than today's industrial base can replace them. Builders of autonomous aircraft and vessels join a Taiwan-based drone policy analyst to examine what it takes to design, buy, and produce attritable systems in real volume, and whether allied supply chains can sustain that mass once the shooting starts.

The New Space Race

Commercialization and Great Power competition on the high frontier.

Closing Keynote: Director Owen West

Closing fireside chat.

Cocktails and networking