The U.S. military needed a small vessel that could transport troops and equipment from large oceangoing ships onto the beach. It was the late 1930s and Andrew Jackson Higgins, a small-boat builder in New Orleans, thought an adapted design of one of his oil-prospecting boats would do the trick. He won the contract, patented his design, and expanded his Higgins Industries workforce from 75 in 1938 to more than 20,000 in 1943. The “Higgins boat” allowed Allied forces to reach the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called Higgins the “man who won the war for us.”

Higgins’s story was one of American ingenuity. But it was also a story about the importance of the American patent system and the security of U.S. intellectual property. What would have happened if the Japanese had stolen Higgins’s boat designs before he could get his product into the hands of the U.S. military? What would have happened if, when he applied for his patent, Japanese government-affiliated entities beat him to the punch by filing for a patent using stolen designs?

Or, what if, during an earlier period of relative peace in Europe, Higgins had decided to sell into the European market but was forced to form a joint venture with German firms, thereby transferring critical technology to a government the U.S. would soon face as a foe?

Eight decades later, intellectual-property theft is happening at a pace that threatens American security and prosperity. State actors, and the companies they own, control or influence, have launched a campaign to siphon critical and emerging American technology. The People’s Republic of China annually steals between $225 billion and $600 billion of U.S. intellectual property.

In 2017 Chinese citizen Kevin Dong Liuwas arrested for attempting to steal trade secrets and computer information from Massachusetts-based Medrobotics. The company’s robotics technology, which hadn’t been patented at the time of the theft, may one day become critical for battlefield medicine.