Technological innovation can tilt the global balance of power. Developing and incorporating innovative technologies grow economies, bolster militaries, and increase countries’ reputation and influence. Consequently, countries that quickly employed new technology have historically gained power; those that lagged did not. To maintain global leadership through the 2020s, the U.S. must be a technology leader.

The first nations to enable, develop, deploy, adopt, and employ fifth-generation mobile network technology (5G) will significantly enhance their economies, militaries, and societies relative to other countries. 5G is part of a constellation of associated technologies that promise to empower commercial industries of the future, and transform defense, intelligence, and civilian government agencies. It will also connect physical and digital infrastructures at an unprecedented scale. In doing so, 5G will give countries new ways to project power through governance and diplomacy, foreign aid and trade, and security and law enforcement. At the same time, slow or poorly managed rollouts of these novel technologies can introduce new vulnerabilities to national and homeland security, constrain economic growth, and limit international influence.

Booz Allen created the 5G Power Framework to help national policymakers think holistically about how to securely harness this critical emerging technology. The framework evaluates coutnries’ abilities to reap the maximum benefits of the 5G era.

It uses publicly available qualitative and quantitative evidence to explore the extent to which countries have 14 key capabilities needed to enable, develop, deploy, adopt, and employ 5G. This evidence supports numeric scores, allowing us to precisely compare each country’s ability to use 5G to boost its national power.

We applied this framework to 10 diverse countries to see where the race to 5G stands and identify best practices, benchmarks, and lessons learned to fuel American power and competitiveness.

Presently, China and the United States (U.S.) are clear leaders in the race to 5G maturity, owing to their strengths in different areas. Our research indicates that the U.S. or China (but probably not any other countries) can still win this race.