Dr. Vivek Lall, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the chief executive of General Atomics Global Corp. He participates in Hoover’s Huntington Program on Strengthening US-India Relations. Dr. Haibo Huang is the director of the Center of Excellence in Advanced Diagnostics at General Atomics. The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics celebrated the discovery that engineerable electric circuits could possess quantum-mechanical properties similar to those of single particles of matter or light. This breakthrough from the mid-1980s launched today’s intense worldwide race for “quantum advantage”: the ability to perform tasks with capabilities leapfrogging current technology. Yet amid the fervor surrounding quantum computing, with its promise of revolutionary code-breaking and drug discovery capabilities, America risks overlooking a more immediate opportunity: quantum sensing. While quantum computers remain years or decades from practical deployment, quantum sensors are ready today. The nation that leads in this technology will gain decisive advantages in navigation, communications, resource exploration, and national defense. The power of “noise” The physics underpinning quantum sensing poses an irony. To achieve quantum computing, researchers must overcome environmental “noise”: tiny perturbations that destroy quantum states. Practical quantum computers need to cope with these errors— they need to increase in scale and complexity that exceed today’s capabilities. Quantum sensors turn this challenge on its head. The same environmental sensitivity that plagues quantum computers becomes the quantum sensors’ greatest strength. These devices exploit quantum mechanics to detect infinitesimally small variations in magnetic fields, gravitational forces, electromagnetic waves, and other signals. A single quantum sensor can outperform its classical counterpart. No error correction is required and no increase in complexity is called for. This fundamental difference in technological maturity should reshape our national quantum strategy. But recent analysis shows that less than 10 percent of private investment in quantum technology flows into quantum sensing,