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2 Recent Studies Inch Toward Quantum Computer, Says NSA Research Director

Gil Herrera, the National Security Agency’s research director, has spoken publicly in multiple places about how, if a true, fully powerful quantum computer were built, it could have the potential to both drastically cut worldwide energy consumption but also, if in the wrong hands, handily dismantle the world’s economy. He revisited those thoughts at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2025 Defense R&D Summit on Thursday while sharing some enlightening details about the progress and impediments to reaching the scientific community’s quantum goals.

“[Quantum technologies] present a tremendous opportunity in many applications…but they also present a tremendous threat to information security. People in academia, business, the investment community, media and government are all tremendously optimistic about what can be achieved when the technology’s available and useful, which it is not now, because realizing these technologies is tremendously difficult,” Herrera said.

Potomac Officers Club events are ideal places for the public and private sectors to break down complex technologies together. Expect no less at the 2025 5G Summit on Feb. 27, where leading Department of Defense and civilian telecommunications experts will present and engage with GovCons. Register today!

A Grim Outlook for Quantum?

Another of Herrera’s common talking points is that he participated in a series of meetings at Los Alamos National Laboratory two decades ago that resulted in a roadmap spanning hundreds of pages with many goals on the way to hopefully creating a quantum computer capable of decryption and other numerically herculean feats. Most of these goals were not achieved, despite the engineers who met there being some of the best in the field and not for lack of trying.

“There’s a fair amount of enthusiasm, but in quantum computing, you often run into the cold, hard realities of engineering,” he told the audience of government contractors at the POC event.

Due to this and to the frequency of people overshooting in their ambitions for quantum, Herrera has even given public quotes where he casts doubt on how soon a quantum computer will actually be built and functional. But at the Defense R&D Summit, he sang a bit of a different tune. Or at least, he called it an “inevitability” that NSA and the Department of Defense broadly must prepare for because of the inherent risks a quantum computer could pose to global society. (“Not too long after we started funding quantum computing research, we started doing research in post-quantum cryptography,” he noted.)

Research at Tech Corporations Ignites Hope

Something changed in summer 2024, though. Two separate but equally significant studies emerged from top technology companies that moved the needle for quantum computing—if only a little bit.

Google

At Google, Herrera explained, a team was able to demonstrate a “better than break-even logical qubit.”

“The error rate of the best qubits today are somewhere between 10 to the -2 and 10 to the -3. So you have this massive 28-order magnitude difference in error rates. So a logical cubit is, how do you take a large number of individual cubits and use error correction so you can actually realize a real qubit?” he laid out. Google was apparently able to improve this error rate from around 0.995 to 0.993, which is commendable, but it was only on a “memory operation” rather than on “logical gates.”

Microsoft

Concurrently, a group of experimenters at Microsoft performed tests with logical gates—as many as 12 gate operations—using an “IR track-based machine.” The Seattle giant conducted their experimentation in conjunction with the company Corinium. 

However, unlike Google’s paper, they weren’t better than break even. “In other words, the error rate of the logical machine they assembled with these logical qubits was higher than the error rates of the original qubits,” Herrera stated.

A Way Forward

These “two big advances” resulted in a “20-fold increase in some of the private quantum computing stocks…in the last six months,” the NSA official said (while noting that there has been a potential 50 percent retrench in the months since).

One way NSA is balancing the “threats” and “opportunities” presented by quantum are broad agency announcements, a.k.a. BAAs, that pour funding into both academia and the industrial base, and he encouraged the audience to seek those out.

“We can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to find a way to continue research and not kill global scientific exploration and also encourage the U.S. quantum industry to thrive,” Herrera issued. 

Speakers at the 2025 5G Summit will be bringing similar assets, offerings and insights to the table. Don’t miss this rich day of dialogues about advanced telecommunications networks and their role in the government and military. Register for the Tysons Corner, Virginia-hosted Feb. 27 event now!

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