  What resources and technologies are strategic? This question is often the
focus of policy and theoretical debates, where the label "strategic" designates
those assets that warrant the attention of the highest levels of the state. But
these conversations are plagued by analytical confusion, flawed heuristics, and
the rhetorical use of "strategic" to advance particular agendas. We aim to
improve these conversations through conceptual clarification, introducing a
theory based on important rivalrous externalities for which socially optimal
behavior will not be produced alone by markets or individual national security
entities. We distill and theorize the most important three forms of these
externalities, which involve cumulative-, infrastructure-, and
dependency-strategic logics. We then employ these logics to clarify three
important cases: the Avon 2 engine in the 1950s, the U.S.-Japan technology
rivalry in the late 1980s, and contemporary conversations about artificial
intelligence.
