Technological Primacy / Innovation Frontier

technological-primacy measures structural power as being the source of the leading-edge technology others must adopt — who originates the frontier, who converts military innovation into commercial dominance, and who gatekeeps the current frontier (compute and frontier AI models). The structural question is: who sits at the leading edge that others draw from, and on whose terms do they access it? — not who manufactures the most or holds the most patents. AI is the current expression of this lever, alongside the prior frontiers (internet, satellites, fiber, semiconductors, computer languages).

Strange names this directly as the modern axis of structural competition, and ties it to the military-to-commercial link explicitly:

• "the competition is for a place at the 'leading edge' (as the jargon has it) of advanced technology. This is the means both to military superiority and to economic prosperity, invulnerability and dominance." (Strange 1994, p.136)
• The historical progression of what structural competition is for: "The competition used to be for territory… Then… for the industrial 'sinews of war'… Today, the competition is for a place at the 'leading edge'" (Strange 1994, p.136) — primacy is a structural lever, not a sector roster.
• Technology reinforces every other structure: "the knowledge most sought after… to reinforce other kinds of structural power (i.e. in security matters, in production and in finance) is technology" (Strange 1994, p.31).
• The gatekeeping/denial mechanism: "whoever is able to develop or acquire and to deny the access of others to a kind of knowledge respected and sought by others… will exercise a very special kind of structural power" (Strange 1994, p.30).
• The framing that makes this the contemporary structural axis: "the competition between states is becoming a competition for leadership in the knowledge structure" (Strange 1994, p.136) — primacy at the leading edge is how that competition is won.